You Can't Stop What's Coming: On No Country for Old Men | Far Flungers

Although many of McCarthy’s works are not exactly ideal materials for movie adaptation due to their dense, elegant prose, “No Country for Old Men” is relatively easier to adapt thanks to its pulpier quality, and the Coen brothers were ideal as its adapters from the beginning. After all, they are masterful storytellers with a dark, morbid sense of humor just like McCarthy, and their adaptation is quite faithful to the novel while also successfully presenting what is felt between words and lines in the novel. For instance, look closer at the terse but intense conversation scene between Chigurh and a gas station owner who is gradually forced to bet his whole life on coin toss; each line during this memorable scene is delivered with considerable precision and nuance, and the sense of doom becomes more palpable to us shot by shot. 

Chigurh, who is regarded as a “true and living prophet of destruction” in the novel, is one of the most unforgettable villains in the movie history, and Javier Bardem deservedly won an Oscar for his performance in the film. As Chigurh adamantly and mercilessly pushes his own twisted principles amid chaos, he ironically becomes the most reliable entity in the story, and that makes him strangely funny at times. In the end, it turns out that he is not above everything at all, and we accordingly get a rich irony at the end of his final scene in the movie.

On the opposite, Josh Brolin is solid as a desperate man hopelessly mired in his increasingly precarious situation. Moss is clever and resourceful enough to stay a few steps away from the men chasing after him, but it is clear that there is no way out for him as he is relentlessly pursued by his unstoppable opponent. He is outmatched by not only Chigurh but also the chaotic world they inhabit, and we are shocked but not surprised when another twist of fate comes upon him later in the story. 

In between his two co-performers, Tommy Lee Jones effortlessly holds the center with his nuanced performance which eventually becomes the beating heart of the movie. Like Marge Gunderson in another great Coen brothers’ film “Fargo” (1996), Bell is a shrewd, no-nonsense character with human warmth and decency, and he instantly intuits what is going on as he looks around the aforementioned crime scene, but he knows too well that there are not many things he can do. He tries to do his job as much as he can, but is confirmed again of how the world has become too messy for him, and we subsequently get a thought-provoking moment between him and his older relative. When he expresses his growing weariness, his old relative sharply points out that things were not that peaceful either in the past, and we come to wonder whether our civilization is inherently destined for destruction due to our dark human nature.