No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Joel Coen Ethan Coen
Screenplay by	Joel Coen Ethan Coen
Produced by	Joel Coen Ethan Coen Scott Rudin
Starring	Tommy Lee Jones Javier Bardem Josh Brolin
Cinematography	Roger Deakins
Edited by	Roderick Jaynes
Music by	Carter Burwell
Distributed by	Miramax Films Paramount Vantage
Release date	November 9, 2007 (2007-11-09)
Running time	122 minutes
Country	Template:Film US
Language	English
Budget	$25 million
Box office	$171,627,166

No Country for Old Men is a 2007 American crime thriller written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, and is based on the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name. The film stars Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin, and tells the story of an ordinary man to whom chance delivers a fortune that is not his, and the ensuing cat-and-mouse drama, as three men crisscross each other's paths in the desert landscape of 1980 West Texas. Themes of fate, conscience and circumstance re-emerge that the Coen brothers have previously explored in Blood Simple and Fargo.

Among its four Oscars at the 2008 Academy Awards were awards for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay, allowing the Coen brothers to join the five previous directors honored three times for the same film. In addition, the film won three British Academy Film Awards (BAFTA) including Best Director, and two Golden Globes. The American Film Institute listed it as an AFI Movie of the Year, and the National Board of Review selected the film as the best of 2007.

Production was scheduled for May 2006, and the film was shot primarily in New Mexico and Las Vegas, and other scenes were filmed around Marfa and Sanderson in West Texas. The film premiered in competition at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival on May 19, and commercially opened in limited release in 28 theaters in the United States on November 9, 2007, grossing $1,226,333 over the opening weekend, and opened in the United Kingdom (limited release) and Ireland on January 18, 2008. It became the biggest box-office hit for the Coen brothers to date, grossing more than 170 million dollars worldwide, until it was surpassed by True Grit in 2010.

No Country for Old Men appeared on more critics' top ten lists (354) than any other film of 2007, and was the most selected as the best film of the year. It is regarded by many critics as the Coen brothers' finest film. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times called it "as good a film as the Coen brothers...have ever made," The Guardian journalist John Patterson said the film proved "that the Coens' technical abilities, and their feel for a landscape-based Western classicism reminiscent of Anthony Mann and Sam Peckinpah, are matched by few living directors," and Peter Travers of the Rolling Stone said that it is "a new career peak for the Coen brothers" and is "as entertaining as hell."

Plot

West Texas in June 1980 is desolate, wide open country, and Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) laments the increasing violence in a region where he, like his father and grandfather before him, has risen to the office of sheriff.

Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), hunting pronghorn, comes across the aftermath of a drug deal gone awry: several dead men and dogs, a wounded Mexican begging for water, and two million dollars in a satchel that he takes to his trailer home. Late that night, he returns with water for the dying man, but is chased away by two men in a truck and loses his vehicle. When he gets back home he grabs the cash, sends his wife Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald) to her mother's, and makes his way to a motel in the next countywhere he hides the satchel in the air vent of his room.

Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) is a hitman who has been hired to recover the money. He has already strangled a sheriff's deputy to escape custody and stolen a car by using a captive bolt pistol to kill the driver. Now he carries a receiver that traces the money via a tracking device concealed inside the satchel. Bursting into Moss' hideout at night, Chigurh surprises a group of Mexicans set to ambush Moss, and murders them all. Moss, who has rented the connecting room on the other side, is one step ahead. By the time Chigurh removes the vent cover with a dime, Moss is already back on the road with the cash.

In a border town hotel, Moss finally finds the electronic bug, but not before Chigurh is upon him. A firefight between them spills onto the streets, leaving both men wounded. Moss flees across the border, collapsing from his injuries before he is taken to a Mexican hospital. There, Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson), another hired operative, offers protection in return for the money.

After Chigurh cleans and stitches his own wounds with stolen supplies, he gets the drop on Wells back at his hotel and kills him just as Moss calls the room. Picking up the call and casually raising his feet to avoid the spreading blood, Chigurh promises Moss that Carla Jean will go untouched if he gives up the money. Moss remains defiant.

Moss arranges to rendezvous with his wife at a motel in El Paso to give her the money and send her out of harm's way. She reluctantly accepts Bell's offer to save her husband, but he arrives only in time to see a pickup carrying several men speeding away from the motel and Moss lying dead in his room. That night, Bell returns to the crime scene and finds the lock blown out in his suspect's familiar style. Chigurh hides behind the door of a motel room, observing the shifting light through an empty lock hole. His gun drawn, Bell enters Moss' room and notices that the vent cover has been removed with a dime and the vent is empty.

Bell visits his Uncle Ellis (Barry Corbin), an ex-lawman. Bell plans to retire because he feels "overmatched," but Ellis points out that the region has always been violent. For Ellis, thinking it is "all waiting on you, that's vanity."

Carla Jean returns from her mother's funeral to find Chigurh waiting in the bedroom. When she tells him she does not have the money, he recalls the pledge he made to her husband that could have spared her. The best he will offer is a coin toss for her life, but she says that the choice is his. Chigurh leaves the house alone and carefully checks the soles of his boots. As he drives away, he is injured in a car accident and abandons the damaged vehicle.

Now retired, Bell shares two dreams with his wife (Tess Harper), both involving his deceased father. In the first dream he lost "some money" that his father had given him; in the second, he and his father were riding horses through a snowy mountain pass. His father, who was carrying fire in a horn, quietly passed by with his head down, "going on ahead, and fixin' to make a fire" in the surrounding dark and cold. Bell knew that when he got there his father would be waiting.

Cast

• Tommy Lee Jones as Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, a laconic, soon-to-retire county sheriff on the trail of Chigurh and Moss.
• Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh, a hitman hired to recover the missing money. The character was a recurrence of the "Unstoppable Evil" archetype found in the Coen brothers' work, though the brothers wanted to avoid one-dimensionality, particularly a comparison to The Terminator. The Coen brothers sought to cast someone "who could have come from Mars" to avoid a sense of identification. The brothers introduced the character in the beginning of the film in a manner similar to the opening of the 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth. Chigurh has been perceived as a "modern equivalent of Death from Ingmar Bergman's 1957 film The Seventh Seal." Chigurh's distinctive look was derived from a 1979 photo from a book supplied by Jones which featured photos of brothel patrons on the Texas-Mexico border. After seeing himself with the new hairdo for the first time, Bardem reportedly said, "I'm not going to be laid for three months." Bardem signed on because he had been a Coens' fan ever since he saw their debut, Blood Simple.
• Josh Brolin as Llewelyn Moss, a welder and Vietnam veteran who flees with two million dollars in drug money that he finds in an open field in Texas.
• Kelly Macdonald as Carla Jean Moss, Llewelyn Moss' wife. Despite having severe misgivings about her husband's plans to keep the money, she still supports him. Macdonald said that what attracted her to the character of Moss was that she "wasn't obvious. She wasn't your typical trailer trash kind of character. At first you think she's one thing and by the end of the film, you realize that she's not quite as naïve as she might come across."
• Woody Harrelson as Carson Wells, a cocky bounty hunter and acquaintance of Chigurh hired to recover the drug money.
• Garret Dillahunt as Deputy Wendell, Bell's inexperienced deputy sheriff assisting in the investigation and providing comic relief.
• Tess Harper as Loretta Bell, the sheriff's wife, who provides reassurance in his darker moods.
• Barry Corbin as Ellis, a retired deputy shot in the line of duty and now wheelchair-bound. He acts as a straight-talking sounding board to his nephew, Bell.
• Beth Grant as Agnes, Carla Jean's mother and the mother-in-law of Moss. She provides comic relief despite the fact that she is dying from "the cancer."
• Stephen Root as the man who hires Chigurh, Wells (only mentioned in passing as a possible party to the original drug deal), and the Mexicans.
• Gene Jones as Thomas Thayer, an elderly rural gas station clerk with good fortune, as his call on Anton's coin flip saves his life.
• Brandon Smith as a stern INS official wearing sunglasses as he guards the U.S.-Mexican border. He lets Moss cross once he learns he was in the Vietnam War.

Production

Producer Scott Rudin bought the book rights to McCarthy's novel and suggested a film adaptation to the Coen brothers, who at the time were attempting to adapt the novel To the White Sea by James Dickey. By August 2005, the Coen brothers agreed to write and direct a film adaptation of No Country for Old Men, having identified with how the novel provided a sense of place and also how it played with genre conventions. Joel Coen said of the unconventional approach, "That was familiar, congenial to us; we're naturally attracted to subverting genre. We liked the fact that the bad guys never really meet the good guys, that McCarthy did not follow through on formula expectations." The Coens also identified the appeal of the novel to be its "pitiless quality." Ethan Coen explained, "That's a hallmark of the book, which has an unforgiving landscape and characters but is also about finding some kind of beauty without being sentimental." The adaptation was to be the second of McCarthy's work, following the 2000 film All the Pretty Horses.

Writing

"One of us types into the computer while the other holds the spine of the book open flat."

–Co-Director Ethan Coen on writing the script from the Cormac McCarthy novel.

The Coens' script was unusually faithful to their source material. In fact, Ethan said, "One of us types into the computer while the other holds the spine of the book open flat." Still, they pruned where necessary. A teenage runaway who appeared late in the book and some backstory related to Bell were both removed. Also changed from the original was Carla Jean Moss' reaction when finally faced with the imposing figure of Chigurh. As Kelly MacDonald explained to CanMag: "The ending of the book is different. She reacts more in the way I react. She kind of falls apart. In the film she's been through so much and she can't lose any more. It's just she's got this quiet acceptance of it."

Richard Corliss of Time magazine stated that "the Coen brothers have adapted literary works before. Miller's Crossing was a sly, unacknowledged blend of two Dashiell Hammett's tales, Red Harvest and The Glass Key; and O Brother Where Art Thou? transferred The Odyssey [of Homer] to the American south in the 1930s. But No Country for Old Men is their first film taken, pretty straightforwardly, from a [contemporary] prime American novel." (Their 2004 film The Ladykillers is based on a 1955 British black comedy film of the same name).

The writing is also notable for its minimal use of dialogue. Josh Brolin discussed his initial nervousness with having so little dialogue to work with:

I mean it was a fear, for sure, because dialogue that's what you kind of rest upon as an actor, you know? [...] Drama and all the stuff is all dialogue motivated. You have to figure out different ways to convey ideas. You don't want to over-compensate because the fear is that you're going to be boring if nothing's going on. You start doing this and this and taking off your hat and putting it on again or some bullshit that doesn't need to be there. So yeah, I was a little afraid of that in the beginning.

Peter Travers of the Rolling Stone praised the novel adaptation. "Not since Robert Altman merged with the short stories of Raymond Carver in Short Cuts have filmmakers and author fused with such devastating impact as the Coens and McCarthy. Good and evil are tackled with a rigorous fix on the complexity involved."

Director Joel Coen justified his interest in the McCarthy novel. "There's something about it –there were echoes of it in No Country for Old Men that were quite interesting for us", he said, "because it was the idea of the physical work that somebody does that helps reveal who they are and is part of the fiber of the story. Because you only saw this person in this movie making things and doing things in order to survive and to make this journey, and the fact that you were thrown back on that, as opposed to any dialogue, was interesting to us."

Co-Director Joel Coen stated that this is the brothers’ “first adaptation”. He further explained why they chose the Cormac McCarthy’s novel: “Why not start with Cormac? Why not start with the best?” Coen further described this McCarthy novel in particular as “unlike his other novels … it is much pulpier.” Coen stated that they haven’t changed much in the adaptation. “It really is just compression,” he said. “We didn’t create new situations.” He further assured that the he and his brother Ethan had never met Cormac when they were writing the script, but first met him during the shooting of the film. He believed that McCarthy liked the film, while his brother Ethan said, “he didn’t yell at us. We were actually sitting in a movie theater/screening room with him when he saw it … and I heard him chuckle a couple of times, so I took that as a seal of approval, I don’t know, maybe presumptuously.”

Title

The title is taken from the opening line of 20th-century Irish poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats' poem "Sailing to Byzantium.":

”THAT is no country for old men. The young

In one another's arms, birds in the trees
– Those dying generations – at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect”

Richard Gilmore relates the Yeats’ poem to the Coens’ film. “The lament that can be heard in these lines,” he says, “is for no longer belonging to the country of the young. It is also a lament for the way the young neglect the wisdom of the past and, presumably, of the old … Yeats chooses Byzantium because it was a great early Christian city in which Plato’s Academy, for a time, was still allowed to function. The historical period of Byzantium was a time of culmination that was also a time of transition. In his book of mystical writings, A Vision, Yeats says, ‘I think that in early Byzantium, maybe never before or since in recorded history, religious, aesthetic, and practical life were one, that architect and artificers…spoke to the multitude and the few alike.’ The idea of a balance and a coherence in a society’s religious, aesthetic, and practical life is Yeat’s ideal …It is an ideal rarely realized in this world and maybe not even in ancient Byzantium. Certainly within the context of the movie No Country for Old Men, one has the sense, especially from Bell as the chronicler of the times, that things are out of alignment, that balance and harmony are gone from the land and from the people.”

Differences from the novel

Tasha Robinson lists the differences between the Coen brothers award-winning script and the Cormac McCarthy novel:

• “The book is less removed about the end of the interaction between Chigurh (the Javier Bardem character) and Moss' wife …; it spells out the fact that he shoots her. She also doesn't refuse to call heads or tails on his coin: She calls it incorrectly, though they then have pretty much the same conversation they have in the film, about how he, not the coin, is deciding her fate.
  
• The book is also more specific about how Chigurh ended up in the car of the deputy he kills at the beginning of the film; he murdered a man for a snotty remark, then permitted himself to be captured ‘to see if I could extricate myself by an act of will.’ Explaining some aspects of his life to Carson Wells (the Woody Harrelson character) before killing him, Chigurh describes this as a vain, foolish act.
  
• The first hotel confrontation between Moss and Chigurh plays out very differently; rather than punching out the lock and wounding Moss, Chigurh apparently steals a key from the murdered clerk and quietly enters Moss' room, and Moss hides and takes him captive at gunpoint, so they have a chance to see and know each other. Then Moss runs and the chase/shootout begins.
  
• There's a scene where Chigurh delivers the recovered cash to some higher-up whom he's never met before, but whom he's clearly decided is now his employer; he presents the money and they come to terms after a brief ‘How did you find me?’ ‘What difference does it make?’ conversation.
  
• There's also a protracted scene toward the end where Sheriff Bell interviews one of the kids who witnessed Chigurh's car accident, and apparently stole Chigurh's gun out of his car afterward.
  
• The chase scene with the dog that follows Moss downstream until he manages to dry out his gun and shoot it is an invention of the film, and doesn't appear in the book in any way.
  
• Where the film last sees Moss alive heading off to have a beer with a lady who calls to him from poolside at her hotel, the book has a lengthy interlude between him and a young female hitchhiker, whom he gives money and advice ... He actually dies because he puts down his gun when the Mexicans following him take her hostage.”
  Robinson adds that “the list of plot changes above may seem long, but they represent a small percentage of the actual story, which mostly plays out in the film exactly as McCarthy puts it on the page, scene for scene, conversation for conversation. A lot of the speeches and wittiest exchanges are verbatim from the book.”

Other listed differences include:

• "[The film] omits all references to Bell's experience in World War II, which is a key to understanding his character in the novel. In the novel, in the scene with Uncle Ellis, Bell tells a long story about how he received a medal of honor in the war, which he feels he did not deserve because he ran away and left his men. Bell is haunted by his guilt about this incident, which the film completely omits.
  
• The opening [voice-over narration] is composed of lines taken from 3 different passages of first-person narration: (90; 63-4; 3-4). As one can see from the page numbers, the filmmakers took passages out of their contexts and reworked them into one coherent statement.
  
• [In the] shoot out between Chigurh and Moss after Moss escapes from Hotel Eagle: This scene intensifies the dramatic action in which Moss barely escapes in the truck and then waits for Chigurh and wounds him, momentarily turns the tables as Moss hunts Chigurh who escapes. In the novel, Chigurh gets involved with battling the Mexicans and loses track of Moss.”

Craig Kennedy adds that “one key difference is that of focus. The novel belongs to Sheriff Bell. Each chapter begins with Bell’s narration, which dovetails and counterpoints the action of the main story. Though the film opens with Bell speaking, much of what he says in the book is condensed and it turns up in other forms. Also, Bell has an entire backstory in the book that doesn’t make it into the film. The result is a movie that is more simplified thematically, but one that gives more of the characters an opportunity to shine.”

Jay Ellis elaborates on Chigurh’s encounter with the man behind the counter at the gas station. “Where McCarthy gives us Chigurh’s question as, ‘What’s the most you ever saw lost on a coin toss? (55)’, he says, ‘the film elides the word ‘saw’, but the Coens of course tend to the visual. Where the book describes the setting as ‘almost dark’ (52), the film clearly depicts high noon: no shadows are notable in the establishing shot of the gas station, and the sunlight is bright even if behind cloud cover. The light through two windows and a door comes evenly through three walls in the interior shots. But this difference increases our sense of the man’s desperation later, when he claims he needs to close and he closes at ‘near dark’; it is darker, as it were, in the cave of this man’s ignorance than it is outside in the bright light of truth.”

Casting

Javier Bardem told the Coens that he would happily take the part even though he hated violence, had never fired a gun, was uncomfortable speaking English and doesn’t drive a car.

Actors Javier Bardem and Tommy Lee Jones entered talks to join the cast in February 2006. Jones was the first actor to be officially cast in No Country for Old Men. The Coen brothers felt that Jones fit the role since they wanted to avoid sentimentality and not have the audiences perceive the character to be a Charley Weaver type. Praising Jones' credentials, the Coen brothers said, "He's from San Saba, Texas, not far from where the movie takes place. He's the real thing regarding that region." Joel Coen further outlined the directors' reasons for hiring Tommy Lee Jones in interview with Emanuel Levy:

There are just very, very few people who can carry a role like this one [...] Sheriff Bell is the soul of the movie and also, in a fundamental way, the region is so much a part of Sheriff Bell, so we needed someone who understood it [...] It's a role that also requires a kind of subtlety that only a really, really great actor can bring to it. Again, the list of these is pretty short, so when you put those two criteria together, you come up with Tommy Lee Jones. Being a Texan, the region is a part of his core.

Javier Bardem stated that the Coen brothers are his favorite directors of all time. “The complexity of Chigurh was a kind of dream,” he added. “… I saw him as a man with a mission that was beyond his control. Someone chose his fate for him. I thought of him as a man who never had sex. He doesn’t like human fluids, even his own … It was important to think about how he relates to other people, even sexually.” Bardem told the Coens that he would happily take the part even though he hated violence, had never fired a gun, was uncomfortable speaking English and doesn’t drive a car. “They weren’t concerned,” he said. “When you act, you learn things. Before ‘No Country,’ I had never held a gun and now I can drive a car. When I was doing Chigurh, my English became so good that I was dreaming in English.” He further added that his haircut was the idea of the Coen brothers. Joel Coen stated that “the idea for the hair, for Javier’s character, was the result of a photograph that we saw of a man […] sitting at a bar in a bordertown whorehouse in 1979. He had that haircut, and very similar clothes to what Javier wore in the movie. It was sort of patterned on that guy.”

Josh Brolin joined the cast shortly after in April, prior to the start of production. Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino filmed Brolin's first audition for the movie on a Panavision Genesis camera during lunch while filming Grindhouse. However, Brolin was initially overlooked for the role of Llewelyn. Other actors had been offered the role, including Heath Ledger, who turned down the offer to take time off from acting. According to Brolin, the Coens' only response to the audition tape was, "Who lit it?" Brolin said it was only due to his agents' persistence that he eventually got a callback:

What I found out now was their last casting session, they were focused on a couple of actors. They called me the night before and they said, basically, no harm, no foul. 'Leave us alone, have him come down.' I studied a few scenes and I came down and I met them, and there was really no reaction in the meeting. I walked out thinking, 'It was great meeting the Coens. I'm a big fan. That's cool.' And by the time I got home I found out they wanted me to do it.

Brolin broke his collarbone in a motorcycle accident a few days before filming was due to begin, but he and his doctor lied about the extent of his injury to the Coens and they let him continue in the role.

The Coens later wrote a short tongue-in-cheek piece for Esquire magazine called "Josh Brolin, the Casting Mistake of the Year," in which they claimed to have believed that they had cast James Brolin in the role of the aging Vietnam vet, and upon realizing their mistake were forced to reset the movie in the year 1980.

Kelly Macdonald's agent originally wasn't sure she was right for the part of Moss' wife, and Macdonald is reported as having to "fight for the role." She was ultimately nominated for a BAFTA for best supporting actress. Macdonald explained how she mastered the Texas accent even though she is from Glasgow, Scotland. “I’ve got a very good friend who’s a dialect coach,” she said, “and when I first went in to meet [casting director] Ellen Chenoweth I was in New York, and I spoke to my good friend for a half hour or so in the hotel bathroom, and I went in to see her and it kind of just clicked, and I don’t know why. I could just hear a voice when I read it.”

Filming

The project was a co-production between Miramax Films and Paramount's classics-based division in a 50/50 partnership, and production was scheduled for May 2006 in New Mexico and Texas. With a total budget of $25 million, production was slated to take place in the cities of Las Vegas, Albuquerque and Santa Fe, New Mexico, as well as in the state of Texas. Filmmakers estimated spending between $12 and $17 million of the budget in New Mexico. A movie set of a border checkpoint was built at the intersection of Interstate 25 and New Mexico State Highway 65. The bulk of the film was shot in New Mexico, and primarily there in Las Vegas, which doubled as the border towns of Eagle Pass and Del Rio, Texas. The U.S.-Mexico border crossing bridge was actually a freeway overpass in Las Vegas. Other scenes were filmed around Marfa and Sanderson in West Texas, and the scene in the town square was filmed in Piedras Negras, Coahuila in Mexico.

The Coens expressed how the scene where a dog swims after actor Josh Brolin was filmed. "It was basically trained to kill people," they said. "The trainer had this little neon-orange toy that he would show to the dog, and the dog would start slavering and get unbelievably agitated and would do anything to get the toy. So the dog would be restrained, and Josh, before each take, would show the dog that he had the toy, he'd put it in his pants and jump into the river ... without having any idea of how fast this dog could swim. So the dog was then coming after him ... so Josh came out of the river sopping wet and pulled the thing out of his crotch and –he was talking to himself– he said, 'What do you do? ... Oh, I'm an actor.'"

Joel Coen also elaborated on the difficulties of shooting in the desert country. “One challenge,” he said, “was that we had a lot of extras who had to lie around in baking sun covered in blood on the desert floor for hours at a time. I found out from the makeup department that there was this thing like the Pentagon charging $3,000 for a hammer: The makeup department was buying this special blood that was made in England, makeup blood that was like $800 a gallon. I wanted to know why they were doing that rather than mixing food coloring with Karo syrup as they usually do and I was told that this blood had no sugar in it, as the mixtures usually do. It was rather important, given the fact that they would be lying there for hours and didn’t want to be attacked by all kinds of creepy bugs and animals that might be attracted to the sugar.”

Cinematographer Roger Deakins, collaborating with the Coen brothers for the ninth time, spoke of his approach to the film's look: "The big challenge on No Country for Old Men is making it very realistic, to match the story. It's early days, but I'm imagining doing it very edgy and dark, and quite sparse. Not so stylized." In an interview with Lynnea Chapman King, Deakins commented on the violent scenes he filmed for the Coens. “There is an awkward dilemma attached to the work that needs to be considered”, he says. “No Country certainly contains scenes of some very realistically staged fictional violence, but I wouldn’t say it was in any way gratuitous or voyeuristic. Without this violent depiction of evil there would not be the emotional “pay off” at the end of the film when Ed Tom bemoans the fact that God has not entered his life.”

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, cinematographer Deakins described how “everything's worked out” when working with the Coens. “Everything's storyboarded before we start shooting,” Deakins said. “In No Country, there's maybe only a dozen shots [that were storyboarded and photographed] that are not in the final film. It's that order of planning. And we only shot 250,000 feet, whereas most productions of that size might shoot 700,000 or a million feet of film. It's quite precise, the way they approach everything.”

Deakins further elaborated that in the scene where Chigurh makes a gas-station clerk toss a coin the camera is physically moving forward so slowly that the audience isn't even aware of the move. “We never use a zoom,” he said. “I don't even carry a zoom lens with me, unless it's for something very specific … When the camera itself moves forward, the audience is moving, too. You're actually getting closer to somebody or something. It has, to me, a much more powerful effect, because it's a three-dimensional move. A zoom is more like a focusing of attention. You're just standing in the same place and concentrating on one smaller element in the frame. Emotionally, that's a very different effect.”

Mick Hubris-Cherrier stresses that “latent violence is [the undercurrent in a scene where] the psychopathic killer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), who has already left behind a collection of corpses in his search for pilfered money, has arrived at the hideout of Carla Jean, the wife of the man who took the money. We already know that Chigurh can kill easily, or he can just as easily let people go. But we don’t know which Chigurh is in the room with Carla Jean as she tries to reason with him to spare her life. The Coens (and [Director of Photography] D.P. Roger Deakins) chose to place Chigurh in the shadows in a corner of the room. The decision to expose for the bright areas of the room (… his hands in the sun) and allow Chigurh’s face to fall several stops into underexposure heightens the tension of the scene because it keeps his features difficult to make out and his intensions inscrutable.”

Directing

The Coen brothers acknowledge the influence of Sam Peckinpah's work on their own. In an interview for The Guardian, they said, "Hard men in the south-west shooting each other – that's definitely Sam Peckinpah's thing. We were aware of those similarities, certainly." They discuss choreographing and directing the film's violent scenes in the Sydney Morning Herald: "'That stuff is such fun to do', the brothers chime in at the mention of their penchant for blood-letting. 'Even Javier would come in by the end of the movie, rub his hands together and say, 'OK, who am I killing today?' adds Joel. 'It's fun to figure out', says Ethan. 'It's fun working out how to choreograph it, how to shoot it, how to engage audiences watching it.'"

Director Joel Coen described the process of film making: “I can almost set my watch by how I'm going to feel at different stages of the process. It's always identical, whether the movie ends up working or not. I think when you watch the dailies, the film that you shoot every day, you're very excited by it and very optimistic about how it's going to work. And when you see it the first time you put the film together, the roughest cut, is when you want to go home and open up your veins and get in a warm tub and just go away. And then it gradually, maybe, works its way back, somewhere toward that spot you were at before.”

David Denby of The New Yorker criticized the way the Coens “disposed of” Llewelyn Moss. “The Coens, however faithful to the book”, he said, “cannot be forgiven for disposing of Llewelyn so casually. After watching this foolhardy but physically gifted and decent guy escape so many traps, we have a great deal invested in him emotionally, and yet he’s eliminated, off-camera, by some unknown Mexicans. He doesn’t get the dignity of a death scene. The Coens have suppressed their natural jauntiness. They have become orderly, disciplined masters of chaos, but one still has the feeling that, out there on the road from nowhere to nowhere, they are rooting for it rather than against it.”

Josh Brolin discussed the Coens’ directing style in an interview, saying that the brothers "only really say what needs to be said. They don't sit there as directors and manipulate you and go into page after page to try to get you to a certain place. They may come in and say one word or two words, so that was nice to be around in order to feed the other thing. What should I do right now? I'll just watch Ethan go humming to himself and pacing. Maybe that's what I should do, too.'"

In an interview with Logan Hill of New York Magazine, Brolin expressed that he had “a load of fun” while working with the Coens. “We had a load of fun making it,” he said. “Maybe it was because we both [Brolin and Javier Bardem ] thought we’d be fired. With the Coens, there’s zero compliments, really zero anything. No ‘nice work.’ Nothing. And then—I’m doing this scene with Woody Harrelson. Woody can’t remember his lines, he stumbles his way through it, and then both Coens are like, ‘Oh my God! Fantastic!’”

David Gritten of The Daily Telegraph wonders: "Are the Coens finally growing up?" He adds: "If [the film] feels pessimistic, Joel insists that's not the Coens' responsibility: 'I don't think the movie is more or less so than the novel. We tried to give it the same feeling.' The brothers do concede, however, that it's a dark piece of storytelling. 'It's refreshing for us to do different kinds of things,' says Ethan, 'and we'd just done a couple of comedies.'"

Musical score and sound

"What you hear mostly is a suffocating silence" ... Skip Lievsay, the film’s sound editor said: "I think [removing the score] makes the movie much more suspenseful. You’re not guided by the score and so you lose that comfort zone."

The Coens minimized the score used in the film, leaving large sections devoid of music. The concept was Ethan's, who persuaded a skeptical Joel to go with the idea. There is some music in the movie, scored by the Coens' longtime composer, Carter Burwell, but after finding that "most musical instruments didn't fit with the minimalist sound sculpture he had in mind [...] he used singing bowls, standing metal bells traditionally employed in Buddhist meditation practice that produce a sustained tone when rubbed." The movie contains a "mere" 16 minutes of music, with several of those in the end credits. The music in the trailer was called "Diabolic Clockwork" by Two Steps From Hell. Sound editing and effects were provided by another longtime Coens collaborator, Skip Lievsay, who used a mixture of emphatic sounds (gun shots) and ambient noise (engine noise, prairie winds) in the mix. The Foley for the captive bolt pistol used by Chigurh was created using a pneumatic nail gun.

Anthony Lane of The New Yorker states that “there is barely any music, sensual or otherwise, and Carter Burwell’s score is little more than a fitful murmur.”, and Douglas McFarland states that “perhaps [the film’s] salient formal characteristic is the absence, with one telling exception, of a musical soundtrack, creating a mood conducive to thoughtful and unornamented speculation in what is otherwise a fierce and destructive landscape.”

Jay Ellis, however, disagrees. “[McFarland] missed the extremely quiet but audible fade in a few tones from a keyboard beginning when Chigurh flips the coin for the gas station man”, he said. “This ambient music (by long-time Coens collaborator Carter Burwell) grows imperceptibly in volume so that it is easily missed as an element of the mis-en-scene. But it is there, telling our unconscious that something different is occurring with the toss; this becomes certain when it ends as Chigurh uncovers the coin on the counter. The deepest danger has passed as soon as Chigurh finds (and Javier Bardem’s acting confirms this) and reveals to the man that he has won.” In order to achieve such sound effect, Burwell "tuned the music’s swelling hum to the 60-hertz frequency of a refrigerator."

Dennis Lim of The New York Times stressed that “there is virtually no music on the soundtrack of this tense, methodical thriller. Long passages are entirely wordless. In some of the most gripping sequences what you hear mostly is a suffocating silence." Skip Lievsay, the film’s sound editor called this approach “quite a remarkable experiment,” and added that “suspense thrillers in Hollywood are traditionally done almost entirely with music. The idea here was to remove the safety net that lets the audience feel like they know what’s going to happen. I think it makes the movie much more suspenseful. You’re not guided by the score and so you lose that comfort zone.”

James Roman observes the effect of sound in the scene where Chigurh pulls in for gas at the Texaco rest stop. “[The] scene evokes an eerie portrayal of innocence confronting evil,” he says, “with the subtle images richly nuanced by sound. As the scene opens in a long shot, the screen is filled with the remote location of the rest stop with the sound of the Texaco sign mildly squeaking in a light breeze. The sound and image of a crinkled candy wrapper tossed on the counter adds to the tension as the paper twists and turns. The intimacy and potential horror that it suggests is never elevated to a level of kitschy drama as the tension rises from the mere sense of quiet and doom that prevails.”

Jeffrey Overstreet adds that “the scenes in which Chigurh stalks Moss are as suspenseful as anything the Coens have ever staged. And that has as much to do with what we hear as what we see. No Country for Old Men lacks a traditional soundtrack, but don't say it doesn't have music. The blip-blip-blip of a transponder becomes as frightening as the famous theme from Jaws. The sound of footsteps on the hardwood floors of a hotel hallway are as ominous as the drums of war. When the leather of a briefcase squeaks against the metal of a ventilation shaft, you'll cringe, and the distant echo of a telephone ringing in a hotel lobby will jangle your nerves."

Style

While No Country for Old Men is a "doggedly faithful" adaptation of McCarthy's 2005 novel and its themes, the film also revisits themes which the Coens had explored in their earlier movies Blood Simple and Fargo. The three films share common themes, such as pessimism and nihilism. The novel's motifs of chance, free-will, and predestination are familiar territory for the Coen brothers, who presented similar threads and tapestries of "fate [and] circumstance" in earlier works including Raising Arizona, which featured another hitman, albeit less serious in tone. Numerous critics cited the importance of chance to both the novel and the film, focusing on Chigurh's fate-deciding coin flipping, but noted that the nature of the film medium made it difficult to include the "self-reflective qualities of McCarthy's novel."

Still, the Coens open the film with a voice-over narration by Tommy Lee Jones (who plays Sheriff Ed Tom Bell) set against the barren Texas country landscape where he makes his home. His ruminations on a teenager he sent to the chair explain that, although the newspapers described the boy's murder of his 14-year-old girlfriend as a crime of passion, "he tolt me there weren't nothin' passionate about it. Said he'd been fixin' to kill someone for as long as he could remember. Said if I let him out of there, he'd kill somebody again. Said he was goin' to hell. Reckoned he'd be there in about 15 minutes." Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert praised the narration. “These words sounded verbatim to me from No Country for Old Men, the novel by Cormac McCarthy”, he said. “But I find they are not quite. And their impact has been improved upon in the delivery. When I get the DVD of this film, I will listen to that stretch of narration several times; Jones delivers it with a vocal precision and contained emotion that is extraordinary, and it sets up the entire film."

In The Village Voice, Scott Foundas writes that "Like McCarthy, the Coens are markedly less interested in who (if anyone) gets away with the loot than in the primal forces that urge the characters forward... In the end, everyone in No Country for Old Men is both hunter and hunted, members of some endangered species trying to forestall their extinction." Roger Ebert writes that "the movie demonstrates how pitiful ordinary human feelings are in the face of implacable injustice."

New York Times critic A. O. Scott observes that Chigurh, Moss, and Bell each "occupy the screen one at a time, almost never appearing in the frame together, even as their fates become ever more intimately entwined."

Variety critic Todd McCarthy describes Chigurh's modus operandi: “Death walks hand in hand with Chigurh wherever he goes, unless he decides otherwise .... [I]f everything you've done in your life has led you to him, he may explain to his about-to-be victims, your time might just have come. 'You don't have to do this,' the innocent invariably insist to a man whose murderous code dictates otherwise. Occasionally, however, he will allow someone to decide his own fate by coin toss, notably in a tense early scene in an old filling station marbled with nervous humor”.

Jim Emerson describes how the Coens introduced Chigurh in one of the first scenes when he strangles the deputy who arrested him: “A killer rises: Our first blurred sight of Chigurh's face … As he moves forward, into focus, to make his first kill, we still don't get a good look at him because his head rises above the top of the frame. His victim, the deputy, never sees what's coming, and Chigurh, chillingly, doesn't even bother to look at his face while he garrotes him.”

Critic Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian stated that "the savoury, serio-comic tang of the Coens' film-making style is recognisably present, as is their predilection for the weirdness of hotels and motels". But he added that they "have found something that has heightened and deepened their identity as film-makers: a real sense of seriousness, a sense that their offbeat Americana and gruesome and surreal comic contortions can really be more than the sum of their parts".

Geoff Andrew of Time Out London said that the Coens “find a cinematic equivalent to McCarthy’s language: his narrative ellipses, play with point of view, and structural concerns such as the exploration of the similarities and differences between Moss, Chigurh and Bell. Certain virtuoso sequences feel near-abstract in their focus on objects, sounds, light, colour or camera angle rather than on human presence ... Notwithstanding much marvellous deadpan humour, this is one of their darkest efforts”.

Arne De Boever believes that there is a “close affinity, and intimacy even, between the sheriff and Chigurh in No Country for Old Men [which is developed] in a number of scenes. There is, to begin with, the sheriff’s voice at the beginning of the film, which accompanies the images of Chigurh’s arrest. This initial weaving together of the figures of Chigurh and the sheriff is further developed later on in the film, when the sheriff visits Llewelyn Moss’ trailer home in search for Moss and his wife, Carla Jean. Chigurh has visited the trailer only minutes before, and the Coen brothers have the sheriff sit down in the same exact spot where Chigurh had been sitting (which is almost the exact same spot where, the evening before, Moss joined his wife on the couch). Like Chigurh, the sheriff sees himself reflected in the dark glass of Moss’ television, their mirror images perfectly overlapping if one were to superimpose these two shots. When the sheriff pours himself a glass of milk from the bottle that stands sweating on the living room table—a sign that the sheriff and his colleague, deputy Wendell (Garret Dillahunt), only just missed their man—this mirroring of images goes beyond the level of reflection, and Chigurh enters into the sheriff’s constitution, thus further undermining any easy opposition of Chigurh and the sheriff, and instead exposing a certain affinity, intimacy, or similarity even between both.”

Depicted violence

In an interview with Charlie Rose, Co-Director Joel Coen acknowledged that “there’s a lot of violence in the book,” and considered the violence depicted in the film as ”very important to the story”. He further added that “we couldn’t conceive it, sort of soft pedaling that in the movie, and really doing a thing resembling the book … it’s about a character confronting a very arbitrary violent brutal world, and you have to see that.”

Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan commented on the violence depicted in the film: “The Coen brothers dropped the mask. They've put violence on screen before, lots of it, but not like this. Not anything like this. No Country for Old Men doesn't celebrate or smile at violence; it despairs of it.” However, Turan explained that “no one should see No Country for Old Men underestimating the intensity of its violence. But it's also clear that the Coen brothers and McCarthy are not interested in violence for its own sake, but for what it says about the world we live in … As the film begins, a confident deputy says I got it under control, and in moments he is dead. He didn't have anywhere near the mastery he imagined. And in this despairing vision, neither does anyone else.”

NPR critic Bob Mondello adds that “despite working with a plot about implacable malice, the Coen Brothers don't ever overdo. You could even say they know the value of understatement: At one point they garner chills simply by having a character check the soles of his boots as he steps from a doorway into the sunlight. By that time, blood has pooled often enough in No Country for Old Men that they don't have to show you what he's checking for.”

Critic Stephanie Zacharek of Salon states that “this adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel touches on brutal themes, but never really gets its hands dirty. The movie’s violence isn’t pulpy and visceral, the kind of thing that hits like a fist; it’s brutal, and rather relentless, but there are still several layers of comfortable distance between it and us. At one point a character lifts his cowboy boot, daintily, so it won’t be mussed by the pool of blood gathering at his feet … The Coens have often used cruel violence to make their points — that’s nothing new — but putting that violence to work in the service of allegedly deep themes isn’t the same as actually getting your hands dirty. No Country for Old Men feels less like a breathing, thinking movie than an exercise. That may be partly because it’s an adaptation of a book by a contemporary author who’s usually spoken of in hushed, respectful, hat-in-hand tones, as if he were a schoolmarm who’d finally brought some sense and order to a lawless town.”

Ryan P. Doom explains how the violence devolves as the film progresses. “The savagery of American violence,” he says, “begins with Chigurh’s introduction: a quick one-two punch of strangulation and a bloody cattle gun. The strangulation in particular demonstrates the level of the Coens’ capability to create realistic carnage-to allow the audience to understand the horror that violence delivers.

Over the duration of No country for Old Men, Chigurh kills a total of 12 (possibly more) people, and, curiously enough, the violence devolves as the film progresses. During the first half of the film, the Coens never shy from unleashing Chigurh … The devolution of violence starts with Chigurh’s shootout with Moss in the hotel. Aside from the truck owner who is shot in the head after Moss flags him down, both the hotel clerk and Well’s death occur offscrean. Well’s death in particular demonstrates that murder means nothing. Calm beyond comfort, the camera pans away when Chigurh shoots Wells with a silenced shotgun as the phone rings. He answers. It’s Moss, and while they talk, blood oozes across the room toward Chigurh’s feet. Not moving, he places his feet up on the bed and continues the conversation as the blood continues to spread across the floor. By the time he keeps his promise of visiting Carla Jean, the resolution and the violence appear incomplete. Though we’re not shown Carla Jean’s death, when Chigurh exits and checks the bottom of his socks [boots] for blood, it’s a clear indication that his brand of violence has struck again.”

Similarities to earlier Coen brothers' films

Richard Gillmore states that “the previous Coen brothers’ movie that has the most in common with No Country for Old Men is, in fact, Fargo (1996). In Fargo there is an older, wiser police chief, Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) just as there is in No Country for Old Men. In both movies, a local police officer is confronted with some grisly murders committed by men who are not from his or her town. In both movies, greed lies behind the plots. Both movies feature as a central character a cold-blooded killer who does not seem quite human and whom the police officer seeks to apprehend.”

Joel Coen seems to agree. In an interview with David Gritten of The Daily Telegraph, Gritten states that "overall [the film] seems to belong in a rarefied category of Coen films occupied only by Fargo (1996), which ... is also a crime story with a decent small-town sheriff as its central character. Joel sighs. 'I know. There are parallels.' He shakes his head. 'These things really should seem obvious to us.'" In addition, Ethan Coen states that “we’re not conscious of it, [and] to the extent that we are, we try to avoid it. The similarity to Fargo did occur to us, not that it was a good or a bad thing. That’s the only thing that comes to mind as being reminiscent of our own movies, [and] it is by accident.”

Richard Corliss of Time magazine adds that "there’s also Tommy Lee Jones playing a cop as righteous as Marge in Fargo.", while Paul Arendt of the BBC stated that the film transplants the "despairing nihilism and tar-black humour of Fargo to the arid plains of Blood Simple."

Genre

"Crime western noir horror comedy"

–Critic Rob Mackie of The Guardian on the many genres he believes are reflected in the film.

In an interview with The New York Times, the Coens "do not agree that [the film] is a western. 'When we think about westerns,' Joel explained, 'we think about horses and six-guns, saloons and hitching posts.' Ethan, who was sitting next to his older brother on the couch in their cluttered college-dorm-like production office in downtown Manhattan, continued the thought. ' No Country for Old Men is sort of a western,' he said, 'and sort of not.'" Joel Coen later stated that “it’s as close as we’ll come to doing an action movie. It’s a chase story–with Chigurh chasing Moss and the Sheriff bringing up the tail. It’s a lot of physical activity to achieve a purpose. It’s interesting in a genre way; but it was also interesting to us because it subverts the genre expectations.”

For Richard Gillmore, “No Country for Old Men is, and is not, a western. It takes place in the West and its main protagonists are what you might call westerners. On the other hand, the plot revolves around a drug deal that has gone bad; it involves four-wheel-drive vehicles, semiautomatic weapons, and executives in high-rise buildings, none of which would seem to belong in a western.”

William J. Devlin categorizes the film as a “neo-western,” distinguishing it from the classic western by the way it “demonstrates a decline, or decay, of the traditional western ideal... The moral framework of the West – or the country, or the world – is changing. The traditional western framework that contained innocent and wholesome westerners striving to live out the American Dream, typical villains driven by greed and power, and the heroes who fought for what is right, is fading. The villains, or the criminals, act in such a way that the traditional hero cannot make sense of their criminal behavior. While the traditional villains, such as Ryker and Wilson [in the traditional western film Shane], are immoral and clearly 'bad guys', we can understand them because their actions are rational. We can see their actions are based on moral egoism, measured by their own self interests. But in the world of No Country for Old Men, the 'bad guys' act irrationally. They don’t even act with criminal passion. As such, Bell cannot comprehend the enemies he should be confronting as the hero of today—for him, 'it’s hard to even take measure.'"

Devlin adds that "the stability of the western film collapses in the sense that we lose the order of the western narrative that provides us with the happy ending in which good triumphs over evil. In No Country for Old Men, without the final showdown between the hero and the villain, good cannot triumph. And so we see that the good either is killed (Llewelyn) or runs away (Bell). But does this mean that evil triumphs over good? Not necessarily. Bad guys, such as Wells and Chigurh’s boss are killed, but it takes an even worse person to do it."

Gillmore, though, finds "a mixing of the two great American movie genres, the western and film noir," which "reflect the two sides of the American psyche. On the one hand, there is a western in which the westerner is faced with overwhelming odds, but between his perseverance and his skill, he overcomes the odds and triumphs. This allegorizes the optimism of the American psyche. In film noir, on the other hand, the hero is smart (more or less) and wily and there are many obstacles to overcome, the odds are against him, and, in fact, he fails to overcome them. He is overwhelmed by the juggernaut of other people’s evil or by the way the world just happens to go. This genre reflects the pessimism and fatalism of the American psyche. With No Country for Old Men, the Coens combine these two genres into one movie. It is a western with a tragic, existential, film noir ending. The western speaks to our youth (and nostalgically to us in our old age); film noir speaks to the sadder wisdom of age. No Country for Old Men speaks of both.”

Deborah Biancott debates that the film is a “western gothic”. “Cormac McCarthy becomes a kind of genre thief,” she says, “taking tropes from the thriller, the road movie, the western, and –most notably– Gothic literature to build a tale that feels both modern and timeless. He uses Gothic structure in particular to examine modern anxieties: loss of faith, anonymous violence, angst, madness, and moral decline. For No Country for Old Men is a Gothic story, a struggle for and with God, an examination of a humanity haunted by its past and condemned to the horrors of its future. It’s an examination of class and inheritance, with the good ol’ boys of Texas up against anonymous drug barons in high (and high-security) glass towers. It’s a story about the mess and unholiness of modern human existence. And it’s a tale of unrepentant evil, the frightening but compelling bad guy who lives by a moral code that is unrecognizable and alien. The wanderer, the psychopath, Anton Chigurh, is a man who’s supernaturally invincible. He’s a man with no particular class loyalties, no particular background, no particular –and this is important– community.”

Still, Paul Arendt of the BBC states that "No Country can be enjoyed as a straightforward genre thriller (and there are suspense sequences here that rival the best of Hitchcock)", while Rob Mackie of The Guardian observes that many genres such as "crime western noir horror comedy" are reflected in the film.

Themes and analysis

Principle, higher laws and fate

Gillmore states that “I read the sudden and violent crash that occurs right after Chigurh leaves the house where Carla Jean was staying as a sign that there are higher laws yet in the universe than Chigurh’s principle. As Chigurh is to Carla Jean, so are the higher laws to Chigurh. What the nature of those higher laws is I am not sure, but Chigurh’s principle is no defense against them. Since these laws are higher and counter to Chigurh’s principles, there is some reason to hope that they are also more sympathetic to human wishes and desires than Chigurh is, but is a small hope indeed.”

Enda McCaffrey focuses on the theme of ‘fate’. “The absence of an authentic value system in Chigurh is further intimated in the riposte ‘You don’t have to do this’, first used by Carson Wells in his exchange with Chigurh and repeated in the scene between Carla [Jean] and Chigurh at the end of the film,” he said. “Both scenes highlight Chigurh’s ethical wasteland. In both exchanges, Chigurh does not respond to the moral reproaches inferred by the riposte; to do so would be a tacit acknowledgment of the secular morality he opposes … In requesting Carson and Carla to choose life or death on the toss of a coin, Chigurh is not just deferring choice to the realms of gratuity but he is also handing responsibility over to ‘fate' in an act of bad faith that prevents him from taking responsibility for his own ethical choices.”

Richard Gillmore states that “each of [the main characters in the film] is expressing a twofold understanding about the world. On the one hand, there is an inevitability, a sense that the world goes on it its way and that it does not have much to do with our human desires and concerns. On the other hand there is a sense that we contribute to our own inevitable futures with every decision we make, with every act we commit, that what is perhaps hardest to live with is not the inevitability that is associated with future we are looking at that is the result of what we have done in the past. In biblical language, we reap what we sow.”

Religious values and theological beliefs

McCaffrey explains that “Moss lives and experiences his alienation in his action, choices and decisions. We are first introduced to him as a nomad in the desert, an eponymous drifter who lives off the land and his own self-acquired skill in shooting pronghorn; his Vietnam blues and trailer lifestyle, coupled with his new found ‘profession’ as welder, bear witness to a washed-up life on the fringe. Moss and his actions embody acausality; an ‘unsuccessful’ rifle shot leads illogically and ironically to blood to reveal the presence of [a limping dog], which in turn leads Moss to a drug bust and the fated loot. Ironically, it is his return to the scene of the drug bust the next day (a move mirrored later in the film in the sheriff’s fated return to the scene of the crime – both further demonstrations of the triumph of inconsequentiality over sense and reason) that proves significant in the film’s acausal trajectory, in Moss’ ‘ethical’ profile and in his existentialist self-projection." [Author Douglas] McFarland … explains Moss’ return to help the lone survivor as a moral choice, motivated by (religious) compassion and an obligation to pre-established values.”

Alan Noble finds in Sheriff Bell’s dream at the end of the film “a hope for redemption outside of mankind”. “By the film’s end,” he says, “Bell seems to come to the conclusion that the evil that he has witness[ed] is unstoppable, and so he retires from his job as sheriff. This hopelessness concerning man’s ability to confront evil leads Bell to comment to his uncle, ‘I always thought when I got older that God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didn’t.’ Quotes like these have caused some critics to mistakenly label the film as nihilistic. The strikingly bleak cinematography, the lack of any music, the unrelenting violence, the absence of a show-down/confrontation between good and evil, and the sheriff’s retirement all lead the viewer to conclude that humans are ultimately and unchangeably evil. But the Coens (like McCarthy) leave us with a glimmer of hope in the form of a dream Bell relates to his wife. Going beyond nihilism, No Country‘s final scene (if properly understood) gives viewers a hope for redemption outside of mankind. While I would not recommend this film to everyone, for those who are not uncomfortable with violence and profanity, No Country compellingly exposes mankind’s profound need for salvation outside of itself.”

Jeffrey Overstreet adds that “we've never seen the Coens descend so far into the abyss of human depravity. Their primary endeavor—from Blood Simple to Miller's Crossing, from O Brother Where Art Thou? to The Big Lebowski—has always been to ask if the human heart might discover grace in a world spoiled by greed, murder, and folly. Mining the brittle stone of McCarthy's nihilistic narrative, the Coens can't find any trace of hope … ‘You can't stop what's coming,’ a prophetic old man tells Sheriff Bell. And Bell, so proud of his heritage of lawmen, is miserable at his insufficiency. ‘It ain't all waitin' on you,’ the old man cautions him. ‘That's vanity.’ And we're left facing questions that haunt so many great works of art: Who is the world waiting on? If God exists, why doesn't he intervene to prevent such apocalyptic violence? Whatever the answers might be, No Country for Old Men suggests that truth, justice, and the American way are not enough to save us from the dark and deadly winds of change.”

Tim Cawkwell highlights certain events depicted in the film and more predominantly in the novel that reflect attachment of characters to religious values. “This story set in the southern USA might have been about religious nuttery (end times, rapture and all),” he says, “but it is as much about the absence of religion. Towards the end, Bell muses that he had hoped to find God as he got older but hadn’t. Very close to the end (p. 304), his wife Loretta, his moral center and comfort (and who is largely marginalized in the film), is reading the Book of Revelation. ‘Any time I got to talking about how things are,’ says Bell, ‘she’ll find something in the bible.’ Bell says something quizzical about Revelation (the nuttiest book in the [ New Testament ]), and Loretta parries it without McCarthy allowing us to mock her. It is as if he is nostalgic for the possibilities of religious belief, and for the common values religion creates, as for a country before it was occupied by alien forces. All of value that remains is a sense of marital fidelity (Moss declining to go to the brothel because he’s married – p.85), of decency (Bell’s campaigning for the position of sheriff was ‘hard’ because he had to be, but he ‘tried to be fair’ – p.90), of manners (Bell removes his hat on his visit to Carla Jean in Odessa – p.125; he opens the car door for his wife – p.68), and of respect for religion (‘no cussing’ – p.67; no ‘making light of the dead’ – p.44).”

William Deresiewicz of The Nation elaborates on the religious upbringing and practices of author Cormac McCarthy. “Whether McCarthy remains a practicing Catholic is not known, he says, “(he is famously jealous of biographical detail), but he had a Catholic upbringing, and his work is driven by a Catholic sense of sin and evil. This is not to say that his novels articulate an identifiable theology. While they are obsessed with good and evil, sin and suffering, fate and death, their imaginative power and philosophical depth are founded on the agonized perplexity with which they approach such questions. Call it Catholicism minus revelation. McCarthy has a hundred ways of describing a sunset, but this signature image isn't deployed for mere decoration. Darkness is his master metaphor, the nightly reminder of our indefeasible ignorance. Daylight, knowledge and life are alike the briefest of intrusions on an eternal abyss. So while his work is saturated with religious emotion, it asserts no belief in God, redemption, heaven or hell, only in what the world of experience, he suggests, incessantly demonstrates: the wickedness of human nature and the overwhelming power of evil. Goodness exists in McCarthy's world, and it is beautiful, but it is also innocent, fragile and weak. Goodness exists, but only where evil has yet to hunt it out … [McCarthy’s style is] supremely audacious, biblical not only in its rhythms but in the right it claims to speak of the highest things in the highest language. No one since Faulkner has attempted this kind of thing, but McCarthy's daring surpasses even his master's, for his authorial voice seems designed to fill the place of an absent God.”

Crime of theft and variant ethical perceptions

Alison Young states that “in terms of plot, No Country for Old Men centers on one man’s theft of two million dollars from a drug deal, and the pursuit that follows on from his theft (and which results in his death). The film is a chase movie, but it is also, unusually, both a crime movie and a detective story. Although ostensibly a criminal, Llewelyn Moss is the film’s hero, an Everyman figure who commits a crime in unusual circumstances, and the spectator is thus able to view his theft as understandable rather than reprehensible.”

Stacey Peebles adds that “… later that night [after the theft occurred], he makes the decision to return to the circle of cars to give water to the wounded man who had begged him for it. He admits to Carla Jean that he’s about to do something ‘dumber’n hell’, but that he has to do it anyway. Moss has demonstrated his opportunism as well as his caution, and here he shows himself to be principled, even though putting those principles into action conflicts with his highly developed pragmatism.”

Roger D. Hodge of Harper’s Magazine believes that leaving the money behind “would be unthinkable.” He adds that “it is not only the old people in this novel who have lost their way. Moss takes the money he finds in the desert with the full knowledge that in doing so he will forfeit all that he loves. And yet he cannot leave it. Leaving it would be unthinkable; the world in which he finds himself has foreclosed that possibility. That world, of course, is precisely the world of the thriller, and it could very well be that the impoverished world of the thriller is the one in which we find ourselves as well.”

Degenerate times, evolving evil, and ageing anxieties

“[Sheriff Bell] feels that the evil surrounding him has metastasized beyond his comprehension and that he can no longer even pretend that he can deal productively with it."

–William Luhr in Film Noir

William J. Devlin analyzes the opening narrative of “the traditional western hero portrayed by Sheriff Ed Tom Bell. Bell relates the following about himself and his life in the West: ‘I was sheriff of this county when I was twenty five [years old]. Hard to believe. Grandfather was a lawman. Father too … You can’t help but compare yourself against the old-timers. Can’t help but wonder how they would’ve operated these times.’ Here, Bell acknowledges that he is part of a tradition – and not simply that of generations of lawmen in his family … But it is now 1980, and times have changed in at least three significant ways. First, the western frontier is no longer characterized as the ‘Wild West,’ where the land is unpopulated and unsettled, power-hungry tycoons dominate the innocent, and legal order is yet to be established. Second, though the ‘Wild West’ has been ‘tamed’ in one respect, the modern West has a new breed of lawlessness, [where] Bell explains in his opening narrative ‘… The crime you see now, it’s hard to even take its measure.’ … Third, the hero of the West has grown old. Bell is no longer a young, twenty-five-years-old sheriff, ready and willing to act accordingly to his moral duties … Instead, he is now weary and cautious: ‘… But I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard.’ … Though the western frontier has been tamed so that towns have been settled and cities have developed, a new kind of wildness has now spread and ravaged the world. Bell, part of the tradition of the ‘old-timers’ … is confused as to how to handle this new immoral wildfire.”

William Luhr focuses on the experiences of the retiring lawman played by Tommy Lee Jones at the beginning of the film. “[He] feels that the evil surrounding him has metastasized beyond his comprehension and that he can no longer even pretend that he can deal productively with it," he said. "On one level, such comments reflect anxieties shared by many older people who feel that their world is passing them by, that the securities upon which they have built their lives are becoming ignored or invalidated. But [ David Fincher’s 1995 film ] Seven, No Country for Old Men and other recent neo-noirs indicate that more is involved, that a new era of evil is emerging. Such films partake of a millennial sensibility, a sense that the world is entering a phase so degenerate that traditional agents of law, stability, and continuity can no longer cope with, or even understand, it. Such films offer no hope for a viable future, only the remote possibility of individual detachment from it all.”

Greek tragedy

Richard Gilmore explains that the “evil man is of little interest to either Cormac McCarthy, the author of the novel, No Country for Old Men, or to Joel and Ethan Coen, the makers of the movie. What is of interest to McCarthy and the Coens is rather what happens when a good, but flawed, man encounters this force of nature in human guise. In this sense, No Country for Old Men recapitulates the patters of ancient Greek tragedy. As in ancient Greek tragedy, a good but flawed man will become enmeshed in events that will prove to be his ruin. It will be what is good in him as much as what is flawed that will engage him in these events, and his ruin will be complete. Oedipus is a kind of paradigm of the way the ancient tragedies begin and end. It is because Oedipus is so smart, self-confident, competent, and passionate that he ascends to the throne of Thebes and rules as a good and noble king. It is also because Oedipus is so smart, self-confident, competent, and passionate that he is able to complete the mysterious task sent [to] him by the Oracle of Delphi and to find the murderer of the previous King of Thebes, King Laius. Unfortunately, as it will turn out, it is Oedipus himself who killed the previous king, as predicted by the same Oracle of Delphi long ago … Llewelyn Moss is similarly smart, self-confident, competent, and passionate. His intelligence and competence lead him to the ‘last man standing’ (as Moss puts it to the man he finds dying in a truck, saying, ‘there must’ve been one’) and to the money. His compassion compels him to return to the site of the drug deal gone bad to bring water to the dying man who asked for it. It is not clear whether or not Chigurh or the Mexicans would have ever picked up the transponder signals if he had not gone back, but it is certainly clear that once they have found Moss and his truck at the scene, they will be on his trail wherever he goes. A fate similar to Oedipus’ disastrous ruin awaits Llewelyn Moss: both he and his young wife will be brutally murdered; all that he has will be lost … the ancient Greek tragedies were meant to serve [the] same function, that is, warning about especially human temptations that would lead to disaster.

Gilmore adds that “a key element of the Greek tragedy is the idea of the protagonist’s hamartia, the fatal flaw. Hamartia is a term derived from archery and literally means ‘off the mark’, signifying that one’s aim has been slightly off. The protagonist of a classic Greek tragedy must be essentially a good person, a person whose intentions are good but who does not really or fully know himself or herself. And this lack of self-knowledge is mixed with a bit of hubris, which puts off one’s aim. This is quite literally suggested of Llewelyn at the beginning of the movie when he is hunting for antelope and ends up shooting one in the hindquarters. In a sense, the entire movie is prefigures in this scene. It is a scene that shows Llewelyn to be highly competent, an expert in hunting … but the scene also shows his ultimate hubris, literally and figuratively. Instead of killing the antelope, he only wounds it, the worst possible outcome for a responsible hunter … His experience is a Greek tragedy in miniature.

Gilmore additionally explains that “there really are no easterners in No Country for Old Men. They are all, basically, westerners: tough, stoical, doers instead of talkers. There is one overarching wisdom that seems to be shared by Llewelyn, the old man Ellis (Barry Corbin), Bell, and even Anton Chigurh [Gilmore describes him “as a kind of avatar of death, a remnant of the ancient Greek gods, and his function is to undo or to make irrelevant everyone’s rules.”] It has to do with a sort of fatalism, which is very characteristic, I might add, of Greek tragedy. This fatalism is not quite a mechanistic inevitability, but it is definitely based on the idea that you are what you do and that what you have done cannot be undone, what decisions you have made cannot be unmade, and, finally, that what you do, what you have decided, will have its natural consequences in the world, and there is no avoiding or evading those consequences.”

Philip C. DiMare explains that “in the stories of ancient Greeks, tragedy was marked by the unfolding of fate, brought down on the protagonist because of one tragic flaw, the moral weakness within the hero that allowed the gods to have their way with him. Sometimes the gods acted directly. At other times the Furies would be unleashed to wreak their terrible and implacable vengeance. Set against a hardscrabble landscape, and richly cruel in its depiction of fate, the harsh tragedy of the 2007 film, No Country for Old Men, is like one of those ancient tales brought to life in the American Southwest. As in ancient tragedy, the hero brings his fate on himself, in this case by performing an act of mercy, and as in Greek tragedy his fate is personified by a frighteningly unstoppable personal Fury,” while Lewis Beale states that “on one level, No Country for Old Men, although set in the present day, plays like a classic western, one filled with quirky characters (a Coen trademark) and numerous shootouts. But it’s also a Greek tragedy of sorts, dealing with issues like greed and the increasing brutalization of social interaction. Thanks to Roger Deakins’ fine photography, it’s also a portrait of an out-of-the-way corner of the U.S. (southwestern Texas, along the Mexican border) invaded by outside forces it cannot possibly control.”

Relating the character of Sheriff Bell to the literature of Greek tragedies, Greg Grooms observes that “the old man of the title is Sherriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), who tries in vain to protect Moss and arrest Chigurh, but in the end serves only as a sort of Greek chorus, observing the tragedy as it unfolds and commenting on it. It's tempting to see Sheriff Bell as nothing more than an angry old man unhappy with the world and his place in it,” while Gary Carden adds that “Sheriff Bell doesn’t have a major role … He seems to be a mere bystander — a law officer who makes a belated appearance at the crime scene, picks up a few spent shells and makes occasional observations like the Chorus in a Greek tragedy.”

Nihilism and philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche

"Whether it is the attendant who lives by correctly calling the coin flip, Carla Jean who dies, Bell who ends up not confronting Chigurh, or Chigurh getting into a car accident–all of these events occurred by some degree of chance. This suggests that the question of good versus bad is no longer a significant question since these values can no longer be applied to individuals … This leads to nihilism in the western frontier."

–William J. Devlin in The Philosophy of the Western

Claude Mangion believes that “the character of Llewelyn Moss reminds us of the frailty and futility of the human will as it struggles to overcome meaninglessness. It was Nietzsche who pointed out, in [On] the Genealogy of Morals … that it is not suffering per se that bothers humans, but pointless suffering. Humans are ready to die – as testified by the Christian martyrs – if they believe there is a point to their death, if their death can be re-configured within a larger framework of meaning, a metanarrative. It seems that a necessary feature of the human condition is that the world within which persons live is meaningful, that there is a metanarrative to give coherence the seemingly random sequence of events. But what if this assumption is mistaken? What if, rather than meaning, order and reason, we find the forces of chaos, meaningless-ness and irrationality at work? Llewelyn Moss is confronted with this situation in the form of the capriciousness and ruthlessness of Chigurh.”

William J. Devlin notices that “in No Country for Old Men, without the final showdown between the hero and the villain, good cannot triumph. And so we see that the good either is killed (Llewelyn) or runs away (Bell). But does this mean that evil triumphs over good? Not necessarily. Bad guys, such as Wells and Chigurh’s boss, are killed, but it takes an even worse person to do it. Though that may seem to suggest that in the end evil wins, the film ultimately suggests something even worse: what is good and what is bad is all a matter of chance. Whether it is the attendant who lives by correctly calling the coin flip, Carla Jean who dies, Bell who ends up not confronting Chigurh, or Chigurh getting into a car accident–all of these events occurred by some degree of chance. This suggests that the question of good versus bad is no longer a significant question since these values can no longer be applied to individuals … This leads to nihilism in the western frontier. As Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) explains, nihilism occurs when one infers ‘that there is no meaning at all’; ‘everything lacks meaning.’ According to nihilism, life and the world are meaningless because there are no inherent structure, stability, order, or framework to them. As such, all the values that were once held to be significant are now seen as empty. Or as Nietzsche puts it, ‘the biggest values devalue themselves.’

We can see the sense of nihilism opening up toward the end of No Country for Old Men … Ellis, an old man in a wheelchair (which we can infer was caused by a criminal who shot him as deputy), learns that his shooter died in prison. When Bell asks him, hypothetically, what he would have done if the criminal had been released, Ellis cynically responds, ‘Nothin’. Wouldn’t be no point to it.’ He explains to Bell, ‘All the time you spend tryin’ to get back what’s been took from you, there’s more goin’ out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it.’ That is, Ellis suggests that there is no meaning, no value, to our actions in life. Acting according to moral justifications of justice, duty, courage, and so on is pointless. Further, as Bell explains his feelings of being ‘overmatched,’ he is disturbed by the thought that God hasn’t helped him: ‘I always thought when I got older God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didn’t.’ For Bell, God’s presence in his life would help him to see his life as meaningful; without God, Bells falls into nihilism and is discouraged. Finally, Ellis summarizes the situation to Bell: ‘What you got ain’t nothing new. This country is hard on people … You can’t stop what’s comin’.’ … As such, the West is now a world where there is no rhyme or reason, and those within it are never held accountable. It has become a country without meaning and without any inherent value. The country, in short, has collapsed into nihilism.”

Cinematic influences

Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980)

In his review of the film, Critic Tony Macklin advised that “when you see No Country for Old Men, leave your preconceptions at home. But bring your Alfred Hitchcock lenses. They're useful. Most of No Country for Old Men is fraught with haphazard violence and tension. Some of the suspenseful sequences are excruciating. The master Hitchcock would be proud. I very much admire Alfred Hitchcock, who was able to get audiences to participate, and then he would manipulate them, mislead them, fool them.

No Country for Old Men is like the Coens taking Hitch out into the west. Their film is full of Hitchcockian touches and themes. Major scenes occur in a motel reminiscent of the Bates Motel. There are scenes in a hotel on the stairs and in a room that whisper Hitch. A character looks on the soles of his shoes for traces of blood. Llewelyn Moss -- shades of Marion Crane. Is the money a red herring? Birds seem symbolic in both movies."

Dennis Lim of The New York Times states that “there is at least one sequence in No Country for Old Men that could be termed Hitchcockian in its virtuosic deployment of sound. Holed up in a hotel room, Mr. Brolin’s character awaits the arrival of his pursuer, Chigurh. He hears a distant noise. He calls the lobby. The rings are audible through the handset and, faintly, from downstairs. No one answers. Footsteps pad down the hall. The beeps of Chigurh’s tracking device increase in frequency. Then there is a series of soft squeaks — only when the sliver of light under the door vanishes is it clear that a light bulb has been carefully unscrewed.”

Critic James Berardinelli stated that “the Coens know how a thing or two about pacing, and it's relentless here. The story is full of unexpected twists and switchbacks, and opportunities for the audience to gear down and take a breath are few and far between. Like Alfred Hitchcock with Psycho, the filmmakers don’t want viewers to become too comfortable with any of the characters - they might not be around for long.”

Karel Segers complained that “when the Coen brothers allowed the tragic climax of No Country for Old Men to unfold offscreen, a large part of the audience hated them for it. I was among them. Not only did I feel robbed of a character we had come to love over the course of the movie, I also felt robbed of what could have been a powerful dramatic scene. In Frenzy, Alfred Hitchcock uses a similar technique – but it works a treat. We see the killer and his next victim enter a house, climb the stairs to an apartment on the second floor. Once at the top, instead of staying with them, the camera retreats down the stairs and back onto the street. For a moment, nothing happens and we are left with the merchants and trades people outside. Only later in the film do we get to see the aftermath of the murder.”

MacGuffin

Website TopTenz.net elaborated that the MacGuffin was “originally popularized by Alfred Hitchcock, [and] refers to the object in a movie that drives the action. In most cases, what the MacGuffin actually is irrelevant. It exists solely to get the characters moving and drive the plot forward. The only real requirement is that it must be something people are willing to cheat, lie, steal, kill, or be killed for. As long as it sounds plausible, it’ll work. Still, despite the very loose qualifications for a MacGuffin, great films have used some pretty memorable ones.” The website ranked "The $2 Million" in No Country for Old Men at No. 5 of the Top 10 McGuffins, just behind the ‘military secrets’ in Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, where the list was topped with ’Rosebud’ from the film Citizen Kane. “You can’t have a list of MacGuffins without at least one example from the master, Alfred Hitchcock. Almost all of his films have a MacGuffin of some sort at their core,” the Website added. “It’s the $2 million MacGuffin that keeps them coming. Suddenly rich and just smart enough to realize how much trouble he’s in, Moss flees with the money even though he knows that whoever left it won’t give it up that easily. Unfortunately for him, the men who lost the cash hire Anton Chigurh, the most psychotic man to ever get a bad haircut. The money drives Moss to more and more desperate acts, just as it drives Chigurh to kill and creep his way closer and closer. In the end, the movie becomes about how far ahead of Chigurh Moss can stay and the real prize isn’t the money, it’s the chance to breathe another day. Classic Coen Brothers and classic MacGuffin.”

Angelo Restivo believes that “the MacGuffin … is the object in the Hitchcock universe that has the status of object-a: it is that ‘nothing’, which could be any object whatever, around which the narrative is constructed and which mobilizes the desires and actions of all the characters (the uranium-filled wine bottles of Notorious, for example). A second type of object – epitomized by the ring in Shadow of a Doubt and the cigarette lighter in Strangers on a Train (1951) – functions differently and with more complexity. It is an object of exchange that binds the characters together into a Symbolic contract.”

Ryan P. Doom explains that ‘MacGuffins’ were previously employed by the Coens in other films. “After all,” he says, “the disc [CD containing ‘intelligence’ found on the gym floor in the Coens’ film Burn After Reading (2008)], ‘the raw intelligence’, echoes the money in both Fargo and No Country for Old Men–the disc is nothing more than a MacGuffin.”

Strangers on a Train (1951)

Alan Linic perceives that “the use of the quintessential ‘creep character’ is the major similarity between both Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train and the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men. In both films, the antagonist is abnormal and bloodthirsty. Strangers on a Train features a psychopathic stalker by the name of Bruno Anthony. His obsession with the tennis-playing protagonist Guy Haines results in a delusion that the two of them are going to commit murders for each other, which is the subject of the movie’s conflict. As time goes on, Bruno reaches the conclusion that Guy is going to need a little bit of persuasion to get the job done, so he starts following him while threatening to ruin Guy, (something he eventually almost accomplishes). When he gets his hands around someone’s neck, he goes into an almost trancelike state, and the focus of the movie, as portrayed by Hitchcock is concentrated in his eyes (Chandler & Ormonde).

The ghostlike murderer of No Country for Old Men, Anton Chigurh, is an equally (perhaps even more) disturbing character. His goal of obtaining the money from a drug deal gone wrong becomes quickly obscured by his obsession with finding Llewelyn Moss. During a scene where Chigurh strangles a policeman, the focus shifts exclusively to Chigurh’s eyes, as he seems to be in some kind of euphoric trance. Another thing to consider is that both characters have a peculiar twisted idea of morality, which allows them to commit the crimes they do. Anton Chigurh kills because of a sense of entitlement, and excuse his actions on chance. Bruno Anthony, only does people wrong when he thinks they need to be ‘disposed of,’ or when they’ve ‘crossed’ him.

Another parallel is the female character removed from the story due to her knowledge of what’s going on. In Strangers, that character is Barbara Morton, a close friend of Guy Haines who resembles his murdered wife. In No Country for Old Men, Carla [Jean] Moss, Llewelyn’s wife, plays the role of a character who understands that the situation her husband is in is worse that he imagines. Both women are smarter than the men around them give them credit for, and are not the subject of sexual desire within the timeline of their respective films. Barbara’s sister is the more attractive of the siblings and she is pursued by men in Strangers; Moss, in spite of loving his wife, appears to show more interest in a woman tanning by a hotel swimming pool than does for his wife at any point in the film.

Another element in common both films have is the characterization of both Sheriff Bell in No Country and Captain Turly of Strangers. Both lawmen follow the protagonists as they dig their way into deeper and deeper dangers; and despite the fact that they are suspicious of the actions of their respective wards, they try to protect them from situations they openly admit to not fully understanding. Interestingly, both men have jumpy assistants, and neither one feels adequate as a policeman by the end of their films. Even though both make it to the scene of the showdown between the protagonist and the antagonist, neither are capable of taking sufficient action to save the protagonist.

Finally, the protagonists of the two films also bear a bit of a resemblance in terms of character background and development. They both make interestingly similar, somewhat self-destructive choices; Moss’s decision to continue his fight and flee tactics with Chigurh (despite several close calls), his refusal to accept help until it’s too late, and his motivation to reap the benefits of his accident while avoiding the consequences are very similar to the lengths Guy Haines goes to in order to try to shake both the police and Bruno off of him.

Both films make excellent use of inanimate plot drivers such as: the lighter and the glasses in Strangers and the suitcase [satchel] and the pneumatic piston-gun of No Country. These props make them just as central to the action as many of the other characters in the movies, turning into ‘inanimate characters’ so to speak. The glasses and suitcase are central to the plot and work like ‘motivators’; they drive the antagonists of either movie to do criminal things. The lighter, represents Bruno’s delusional perception of his relationship with Guy. Anton’s unusual weapon of choice appears as an omen of bad tidings, presaging the violence which abounds in the movie. By incorporating these props to the most intense moments of the films, both Hitchcock and the Coen brothers make the film as ‘about the [objects] as they are about two men’.

Basically, the two films rely on archetypal characters of the same caste to tell their stories, although the circumstances surrounding the characters are different, so that these common archetypal characters are forced to react to their situations in different ways. Despite appearing to be two different types of film, (a western/crime and a thriller/crime) the parallels between the main characters and the antagonists characters are so evident one would conclude Hitchcock and [the Coens] grew their main characters in the same type of garden.”

Psycho (1960)

Critic Tony Macklin argues that “the ending of No Country for Old Men may remind one of the end of Psycho, where after the frenzy of violence, we had a sheriff ruminating. That originally was disconcerting to audiences in 1960. Calm after the storm. We want the storm. No Country for Old Men withholds the rain. But there is plenty of disturbing thunder and dangerous lightning.”

Website MoviesPlanet.com observes similarities such as “Llewelyn Moss on the lam with stolen money hides in an out of the way motel. Anton Chigurh murders a hotel guest through a shower curtain. The framing of Carson Wells climbing the hotel staircase echoes the shot of Detective Milton Arbogast climbing the stairs of the Bates home just before he is murdered.”

Author Alec Nevala-Lee finds similarities between the two films. “Psycho is full of unforgettable images,” he says, “but two of the greatest are often overlooked. The first is that oddly melancholy moment when, from over Janet Leigh’s shoulder, we see the bathroom door open through the translucent shower curtain, the camera silently holding for a few seconds on the silhouette of the figure beyond, before the curtain is drawn aside and all hell breaks loose. The second, from the great staircase scene, is the shot of the door opening at the top of the steps, also in silence, shortly before Martin Balsam’s detective meets his startling end. Neither shot draws attention to itself, but both are utterly essential: for a few agonizing seconds, we know exactly what’s going to happen next, and that sense of dread heightens our terror and horror at what immediately follows.

At their most effective, the tools of dread seem so simple that it’s easy to underestimate the craft required. In Danse Macabre, Stephen King observes that the scariest image in the world is that of a closed door. Very true—but only if the pieces of the story have been properly assembled in advance, so that we’re afraid to find out what might be on the other side. I’ve rarely had as hair-raising an experience at the movies as the first time I saw No Country For Old Men, but its greatest image, like those in Psycho, is one of the simplest: a closed hotel room door, seen from inside, with light visible underneath, which is suddenly blocked off by the shadow of a man in the hallway. Nothing could be simpler—except that film has already established the characters of the men both inside and outside the room, and without that essential groundwork, the tension wouldn’t be nearly as unbearable.”

Sam Peckinpah (1925-1984)

John Patterson of The Guardian states that “No Country for Old Men proves that the Coens' technical abilities, and their feel for a landscape-based western classicism reminiscent of Anthony Mann and Sam Peckinpah, are matched by few living directors. Peckinpah is the director whose themes and concerns - masculinity and self-preservation among them - sit foremost in the mind when reading the McCarthy novel and when seeing the movie, which is a faithful, almost verbatim adaptation.

The brothers are amenable to the comparison. Ethan: ‘We were aware of the basic link just by virtue of the setting, the south-west, and this very male aspect of the story. Hard men in the south-west shooting each other - that's definitely Sam Peckinpah's thing. We were aware of those similarities, certainly.’ Joel: ‘Especially in the section of the movie where Woody Harrelson makes an appearance. He reminded us of a Peckinpah character in a certain way.’ Ethan: ‘Yeah, you show a hard-on guy in a western-cut suit and it already looks like a Peckinpah movie. Same kind of shorthand.’”

Michael Sragow of The Baltimore Sun states that “the keenest observation about the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men came from its ace cinematographer, Roger Deakins. He said from the moment he read the script he saw it as a Sam Peckinpah movie. Today's over-hyped cinematic breakthroughs have become impersonal, like the digitized universe of [the film] Beowulf. But No Country for Old Men renews the legacy of [novelist Norman] Mailer and Peckinpah, who extended the reach and freedom and redefined the positive and negative limits of the male character in American literature and movies.”

In the introduction to their book The Philosophy of the Western, editors Jennifer L. McMahon and B. Steve Csaki refer to an essay by William J. Devlin. “As Devlin notes,” they state, “whereas classic westerns tend to have easily recognizable heroes and villains, the moral situation depicted in contemporary westerns is rarely so clear. Influenced by figures like Peckinpah, Devlin argues, contemporary westerns not only incorporate moral ambiguity, they are also considerably more cynical than their classic predecessors. Devlin argues that this is nowhere more evident than in No Country for Old Men, a dystopic western that not only offers contemporary audiences a new sort of villain, but utterly confounds audience expectations by failing to have the hero rescue the community from the risk personified by the villain.“

Asbjorn Gronstad argues that “some of the pundits who voice the most incendiary opposition tend to use Peckinpah’s treatment of violence as an analytical benchmark for an appraisal of the cinema of Tarantino and his contemporaries like Coen, Stone, Roger Avery, and Tony Scott, ‘One great difference between [Peckinpah] and his imitators,’ [author Paul] Seydor holds, ‘lies in how deeply and passionately felt his violence is, and how securely it is tied to character, to milieu, to story – in a word to meaning.’” (Seydor, Paul: ‘Sam Peckinpah’, Sight and Sound, 1995, p. 20)

Peter Hanson highlighted the Coens' affiliation with Peckinpah’s work. “Some would argue Peckinpah's Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973) is a minor masterpiece of closely observed cowboy morality,” he said, “and the picture benefits from interesting performances by Kris Kristofferson (as Billy the Kid) and James Coburn (as his friend-turned-assassin, Pat Garrett). The movie also inspired Bob Dylan's powerful song Knockin' on Heaven's Door, which was created for the soundtrack. However, Pat Garrett went through several editing iterations, to the point that it's murky which currently available version comes closest to Peckinpah's intentions. Why not use his flawed movie as a rough draft for something great? Just think what the Coen brothers could do with this one."

The Wild Bunch (1969)

John Lingan of Slant Magazine assures that Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian changed the western’s “visual language” and influenced, among other films, the Coens’ No Country for Old Men. “In the late 1960s,” Lingan says, “Polish national and California transplant Czeslaw Milosz wrote an insightful little essay called On the Western, where he argued that the most quintessentially American cinematic genre had yet to truly express the full terror of its subject and setting:

‘Besides the skillful shot, the hand barely leaving the hip, there is also the wound which might fester for weeks on end, the fever, the stink of the sweat-drenched body, the bed of filthy rags, the urine, the excrement, but this the Western never shows. One is not supposed to think past the colorful costumes to tormenting lice itch, feet rubbed bloody, all the misery of men's and women's bodies thrown together, trying to survive when the rules they had learned no longer counted for much.’

On the Western was published in book form the same year that Sam Peckinpah released The Wild Bunch, thus irreversibly changing the visual language with which westerns address the very horrors that Milosz enumerated … By 1985, when the cinematic genre seemed all but spent, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian came along to close the coffin lid. [It] represents a kind of western-to-end-all-westerns … projecting Peckinpah violence on a Biblical scale.

Their influence has been prodigious; nowadays, with few exceptions, the western exists to remind us of the grimness and loss it once ignored. The historical ones (Unforgiven, There Will Be Blood, The Proposition) are awash in blood-matted facial hair and sun-baked sadism, while the contemporary stories (No Country for Old Men, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, the underrated Down in the Valley) show us a landscape of strip malls and fast food restaurants that nevertheless hosts a continuing tradition of lawlessness and existential terror.”

Ken Hada observes that "in so-called postmodern westerns that employ antiheroes or intentionally subvert the notion of honor, films such as The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969), Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992), and No Country for Old Men (Ethan and Joel Coen, 2007), the notion of absolute honor is either parodied or reduced to complete ineffectiveness by certain important characters."

Neutral magazine stated that “at the very outset of No Country for Old Men, western inspired imagery is explicitly foregrounded through use of panoramic wide shots of the distinctive landscape of the Texas/Mexico border, a standard generic setting for countless American westerns in the 1950s/60s. The anxious persona of Sheriff Bell however, played by Tommy Lee Jones, links the film with the darker more cynical revisionist westerns of the kind made infamous by Sam Peckinpah with The Wild Bunch (1969), and later popularised by Clint Eastwood with Unforgiven (1992). Bell is very much presented as a man from a time gone by and displays a number of character traits reminiscent of the quintessential western Sheriff. One scene sees him riding on horseback out into the desert with a deputy in tow, despite the 1980s setting of the film.”

Graham Fuller observes that “in the Westerns Sam Peckinpah directed in the ’60s and ’70s, he colonized the southern border states and Mexico, using them as the barren backdrop for his self-conscious meditations on obsolescent masculine codes, the receding of frontier culture with the spread of capitalism, and the violence of the Western itself. Joel and Ethan Coen moved into that territory with their 1984 debut Blood Simple, a venomous Texan noir in which every two-lane blacktop seemed like a road to perdition.

The Coens return to this unyielding landscape with their adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. A laconic, carnage-filled followup to the author’s Border Trilogy, the novel is so suffused with nostalgic regret for the vanished West—though not John Ford’s sentimentalized version—that Peckinpah himself would have coveted it as a movie property, along with McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.

There’s no retributive justice at all, just the memories and fears of hardworking good old boys, some of whom come up against [Anton] Chigurh—a neighborly storekeeper, a chatty chicken farmer. Bell spends time with a sympathetic fellow sheriff and his Uncle Ellis, a crippled lawman (Barry Corbin) living in squalor, who quietly reminds him that there’s nothing new about the violence that has demoralized Bell, and that the cleaner country he recalls never existed. It’s the same mythic West that Peckinpah began to unpeel in Ride the High Country and obliterated in The Wild Bunch."

Mark Busby relates Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch to the literature of Cormac McCarthy. “The most significant Southwestern film at the end of the 1960s was The Wild Bunch,” he said, “which draws carefully from a specific historical era. Peckinpah worked with the western Genre throughout his tempestuous career. The Wild Bunch foreshadows the novels of Cormac McCarthy by focusing on a specific historical moment along the border between Texas and Mexico. Set in 1913, the film suggests how the older world is about to be irrevocably changed against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution, the legislated morality of Prohibition, the looming Word War I conflict, the disappearance of the older world of horses and outlaws, and concomitant imminent industrial transformation of the Southwest.”

Andrew Horton assures that the Coens and Sam Peckinpah were both influenced at one point by the literature of Homer, where he states that the Coens adapted O Brother, Where Art Thou? from the Odyssey and Peckinpah adapted The Wild Bunch from the Iliad. "Sam Peckinpah claimed that his much-celebrated 1960s revisionist western, The Wild Bunch (1969)," he said, "was based in part on Homer’s The Iliad. At the time almost nobody took him seriously, but the fact is that he was speaking the truth. Although the Coens have more openly acknowledged the ancient poet, Peckinpah’s strongly 'American' tale becomes all the richer in theme, content, and development because of influences that a long-dead Greek has provided an American filmmaker."

In March 2012, Stephen Lambrechts of website IGN.com chose the “cat and mouse gun battle between Llewelyn Moss and Anton Chigurh” in No Country for Old men and the finale of Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch among the “The 20 Greatest Gunfights Ever”. He called the Coens' work “cold, brutal and fantastic,” while he described The Wild Bunch finale as “a large scale bloodbath that just keeps on giving.”

The Getaway (1972)

John Patterson of The Guardian stresses that “the Coen brothers' grim and marvellous No Country for Old Men marries Cormac McCarthy to the pessimistic Peckinpah of The Getaway and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and fills the morally ambiguous Tex-Mex border country with psychopaths, drug money and burnt-out SUVs.”

Moreover, The Guardian's Philip French observes that "the basic plot [of No Country for Old Men] is fairly familiar, having been used in three classic pictures of the Seventies also set in the American south-west - Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway, Don Siegel's Charley Varrick and Karel Reisz's Dog Soldiers - as well as a later one, A Simple Plan, made in Minnesota by an early associate of the Coens, Sam Raimi. This scenario sees a man in sudden, unexpected possession of a case packed with money or drugs that belongs to ruthless gangsters and a lethal cross-country game of cat-and-mouse ensues … From brutal start to ironic finish the movie's tension is constant. The action sequences - chases, shootouts, killings - are handled with great verve and directness. I recall at a 1972 preview of Peckinpah's The Getaway a studio executive talking about 'fun violence'. The violence here, though exciting, isn't fun. The Coens show us the pain of gunshot wounds and reality of death.”

A number of authors have drawn similarities between No Country for Old Men and Peckinpah’s The Getaway (1972). George Hickman suggests that both movies can play as a double-feature, where “you get the contemplative, artistic approach of No Country for Old Men, with the more immediately gratifying pacing and instantly satisfying conclusion of The Getaway.“

“They’re both set in mostly the same region of Texas,” Hickman says, “with one shot towards the beginning of the Seventies, and the other set about eight years later. Aside from a certain amount of similar local color, semi analogous characters and plot developments crop up in each. Both feature a tall, dark, and relentless killer with a history of murdering his colleagues. Both feature a bag full of money that falls into the hands of a bystander. Both also have scenes at a general store with oddly specific purchases, exploding cars used as diversions, and a shootout at an El Paso Motel. Both were also seen as departures for the stylistically distinct filmmakers behind them, though for different reasons.

As an interesting contrast, they were both adapted from books, but the young Walter Hill‘s screenplay for The Getaway was significantly less faithful to Jim Thompson‘s pulp novel than Joel and Ethan Coen‘s screenplay for No Country For Old Men, which plays more like a condensed version of Cormac McCarthy‘s critically acclaimed prose. In a lot of ways, The Getaway is the movie that some people felt No Country for Old Men promised but refused to deliver. Much like the Coen Brother’s underrated Intolerable Cruelty, The Getaway is often viewed as a lesser Peckinpah film, a commercial vehicle made to help bolster his directing career.

McCoy’s (Steve McQueen) first words in the film are delivered to his wife Carol (Ali MacGraw), from behind the prison glass. ‘Get to Benyon. Tell him I’m for sale. His price. Do it now.’ As we see her visit Benyon (Ben Johnson) in a barely buttoned blouse and with the distinct lack of a bra, it’s clear that it won’t just be her husband paying that price. Benyon’s office is occupied by men of ill repute that are all a type of ugly that Hollywood has never been good at capturing. Much like the Coen Brothers, Peckinpah would cast locals and people whose faces were as expressive as their words, giving a certain depth to characters with only seconds of screen time.

The next morning Doc (McQueen) goes to meet Benyon and to find out the nature of his debt. There’s a small town bank that needs robbing. Doc is running the job, but Benyon is running the show, and he insists that Doc take on two people he’s never worked with before. One of them is named Rudy (Al Lettieri), a man with the bad habit of being the only one who makes it out of his jobs alive. Like [Anton] Chigurh, he has dark hair and a physically imposing build. It’s clear immediately that he pushes people’s buttons solely for his own amusement. The only thing creepier than his expressionless glare is his smile.

Equally inspired is a sequence in a train station where a small time con artist charms a locker key out of Carol’s hands. Doc gives chase and follows him onto a train, but loses his trail. Once we see the pure joy expressed by the man as he discovers the contents of the bag, for a moment we’re on his side and we want him to get away with the money, much like with [Llewelyn] Moss in No Country for Old Men. But also like Moss, fate has crueler things in store.”

Anton Chigurh's characterization

"[Anton Chigurh] is the one character in the book that actually departs from a certain sense of realism, he’s both sort of real in the book and an idea."

–Co-Director Joel Coen in an interview with Charlie Rose

In an interview with Charlie Rose, Co-Director Joel Coen believed that Chigurh “is the one character in the book that actually departs from a certain sense of realism, he’s both sort of real in the book and an idea.” Questioned about his character in an interview for the Los Angeles Times,” Javier Bardem said, “He belongs to somewhere else. I’m not saying from outer space, but [he] belongs mentally to someplace else.”

Manuel Broncano describes Chigurh as the ‘Antichrist’. “Of the three major branches of Christian eschatology,” he says, "No Country for Old Men orchestrates an apocalyptic rhetoric by which drug dealing is described as a devastating and biblical-like plague and Anton Chigurh as a true Antichrist. Furthermore … the text identifies him as the human agent of the demon Mammon. All this we learn through Sheriff Bell’s remembrance, in his attempt at making sense of things that go beyond his understanding … The opening monologue provides an interesting clue about the religious architecture of the narrative: the unnamed convict is depicted as a man who ‘knew he was going to hell’, a man who by his own admission has no soul. It is therefore evil at its purest, in close resemblance to Anton Chigurh, ‘the true and living prophet of destruction’, a being that is ‘real’ beyond doubt, for the narrator has been witness to his deeds. The sheriff is an individual who does not want to put ‘his soul to hazard’, a requisite to confront evil.”

Don Graham states that “we are introduced to one of Satan’s chief subalterns, Anton Chigurh, he of the pneumatic device, an otherworldly psychopath possessed of a philosophical bent … Chigurh’s philosophy doesn’t come from Christianity but from a source that’s not identified and is therefore sure to intrigue the intrepid McCarthy exegetes on the Internet … Bell is anti-abortion, anti-drugs, and anti-kids who dye their hair green and put bones in their noses. He thinks the disintegration of civic polity is much advanced. He thinks things begin to fall apart when people stop using ordinary manners … Bell’s forebodings, his absolute certitude that evil, however mysterious, certainly does exist, his very seriousness –all of this deepens and extends the [film] beyond the predictable boundaries of thriller.”

Jim Welsh assures that “there is no ultimate showdown between the professional lawman and the professional assassin, and one wonders if this is by accident or by design … Sheriff Bell is tracking a killer, but there will be no clear, dramatic confrontation, perhaps because Sheriff Bell knows he can’t cheat Death or kill the Devil, that the deck may be stacked against him. If not the Devil, then maybe a ghost, as Bell himself suggests? So who said he was chasing an abstraction? … The killer, the ‘ghost’, Anton Chigurh, seems too spooky, too otherworldly to be ‘real.’ Considering what happens to him in the story, Chigurh ought to be dead, but at the end, after being broadsided by an auto accident, he limps away to continue his never exactly specified mission. The man and his motives are utterly mysterious. Chigurh would seem to be the very personification of the Antichrist.”

While discussing shooting techniques in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Cinematographer Roger Deakins wondered whether Chigurh was present in the motel room (where Moss was murdered) when Sheriff Bell returned at night to the crime scene. “I wanted the motel room to be totally black,” he said, “because [ Javier Bardem's character ] Chigurh is hiding in the corner. Or is he? So you wanted this kind of mystery.”

Actor Josh Brolin described the character of Anton Chigurh as "the Grim Reaper." He added in a press interview released by Miramax: "He's the devil incarnate ... You don't understand [his violence], you can't pigeonhole it. You can't categorize it. He's very malleable, but not malleable on your terms, malleable on his own terms." Javier Bardem said of his character: "That's his power: You cannot really understand him completely. The good thing about Anton Chigurh is that he can't be described. He's not even described in the book by Cormac McCarthy. He doesn't need to be explained. It's a character that comes out of the land and, at the end, comes back to the land, which means everything ... What Anton Chigurh does is a new kind of violence, and I guess one of the issues that the novel, and the script and the movie, is talking about is the way to understand this huge wave of violence that has taken the world. Chigurh more than represents, he symbolizes the violence. [He] shows that violence doesn't really have an explanation sometimes, or any roots. It just happens, and it's unstoppable."

Alison Young states that “when Carla Jean refuses to call the coin toss on the grounds that the decision to kill her is being made by Chigurh rather than by a coin, he dismisses her protest: ‘But I got here the same way the coin did’. It is because of this code that he kills Carla Jean.”

William J. Devlin provides us with “an insight into Chigurh’s twisted moral consistency. First, Chigurh does not appeal to money or power as the greatest end for which one should strive. Second, Chigurh does not appear to be acting purely out of self-interest. By murdering his boss and Carla Jean, he gains nothing for himself. These two points help us to see why the traditional villain couldn’t make sense of Chigurh. His actions are not motivated by what normally drives the bad guy; he is not selfish and egotistical. Third, Chigurh’s own justification of his actions doesn’t appeal to the consequences that are produced; rather like Kant’s deontology, he justifies his actions insofar as they are ‘good’ in themselves. He kills his boss on the principle that his boss made a wrong decision. He did not stick with the one right tool, and so this bad decision entails the act of Chigurh murdering him. Likewise, Chigurh admits that there is nothing he gains from killing Carla Jean. But he must do it because he gave his word.”

Still, and opposite such interpretations of Chigurh’s character, Welsh quotes “[Co-Director] Joel Coen from a bonus DVD feature on the making of the film, ‘It’s about a good guy, a bad guy, and a guy in between. Moss is the guy in between.’ (‘The Making of No Country,' 2008) … This is a very serviceable genre story for the Coen brothers to transform into an Oscar-worthy motion picture, and a playground of archetypes (from the mythical Celtic to the Bible) and stereotypes raised above the level of cliché and taken beyond the realm of allegory.”

The Hunter, the hunted and triplet occurrences

Scott Foundas stresses that “‘Hold still’ –it’s what the hunters say to the hunted in the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men … [when] the out-of-work Vietnam vet Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) whispering optimistically to the antelope he spies through his rifle sight while perched on the crest of a West Texas ridge … [and when] the steely assassin Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) instructing the terrified motorist to whose skull he has just placed the lethal end of a pressurized cattle gun.” Foundas claims that “in the end, everyone in No Country for Old Men is both hunter and hunted, members of some endangered species trying to forestall their extinction. Even Anton Chigurh, it turns out, bleeds when wounded.”

Lydia R. Cooper focuses on the chase of the hunter to the hunted [in the novel] and claims that “events happen three times … [and] No Country for Old Men follows three central characters, Llewelyn Moss, who steals a suitcase full of drug money; Anton Chigurh, who chases Moss to retrieve the money; and Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, who chases Chigurh. The chase is segmented by major plot events that occur in triplet. For example, Moss encounters Chigurh three times. He escapes from Chigurh twice but is killed during the third encounter. First, Moss runs to Del Rio and cleverly outwits Chigurh, barely escaping him … next, Moss goes to Eagle Pass and gets in a shoot-out with Chigurh but manages to escape … and last, Moss takes his wife to El Paso, puts her on a bus, and flees … but when he stops at a hotel there, he is caught and killed in a shootout … Likewise, Chigurh narrowly escapes death three times. He is first caught with a distinctive murder instrument that could be linked to his past crimes and earn him the death penalty, but he escapes by killing the deputy … next, he gets shot in Eagle Pass but lives … and finally, he goes to El Paso to shoot Carla Jean and gets hit by a car but lives… Bell almost encounters –but just misses– Chigurh three times as well, completing the tri-episodic narrative patterns for the three characters. First, arriving at Moss’ Desert Aire trailer after Chigurh has left … second, Bell surveys the wreckage after the shoot-out in Eagle Pass … having missed Chigurh … and last, Bell arrives at the Van Horn motel while Chigurh is (presumably) still in the parking lot, but Chigurh manages to escape.”

The violent act of seeing and politics of visibility

Alison Reed explains that the film is “about seeing and who has the power to see: Chigurh [destroys] everyone who wields the gaze within a country that excludes him on the basis of [the] violent act of seeing …When Llewelyn calls asking for Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson), Chigurh answers the phone and demands: ‘You need to come see me’. Chigurh is obsessed with the sight of his victims. Those who threaten to ‘see’ him (beyond the literal meaning) have little chance of survival. Wells is shocked to hear that Llewelyn has seen Chigurh: ‘You've seen him, and you're not dead?’. At a gas station Chigurh buys a bag of cashews, but this transaction quickly goes awry when the gas station proprietor makes friendly conversation: Gas Station Proprietor: Y'all gettin' any rain up your way? / Chigurh: What way would that be? / Gas Station Proprietor: I seen you was from Dallas. / Chigurh: What business is it of yours where I'm from, friendo? This man's attempt to pin Chigurh down geographically triggers the chance chain of events that wagers his life on a coin toss. Carla Jean Moss (Kelly Macdonald) thus irreversibly seals her fate when she says: ‘I knowed you was crazy when I saw you sitting there. I knowed exactly what was in store for me’ … When the accountant in the businessman’s office asks if Chigurh is going to kill him, Chigurh responds: ‘That depends. Do you see me?’. The accountant’s lack of sight and resulting inability to fix a racialized identity on Chigurh saves his life. Chigurh’s desire to control and redirect the gaze also explains the outcome of Sheriff Bell’s encounter with Chigurh. After Llewelyn’s murder, Bell returns to the crime scene, noting that the door has seemingly been opened using Chigurh’s trademark weapon. Suspecting of Chigurh, Officer Bell draws his gun. Bell and Chigurh see each other’s reflections in the shot-out lock, but Chigurh does not murder Bell because Bell does not acknowledge this moment of seeing. Bell’s pretending to have not seen Chigurh suggests his own resignation to the force of inexplicable, lawless violence in the film: the force that Chigurh wholly embodies. Yet what goes unsaid in this scene, and the politics of visibility therein—explain Chigurh’s motivation for not killing the cowardly, unseeing accountant and for killing Llewelyn’s brave, seeing wife—Chigurh murders those who fix meaning on his appearance.

Chigurh evades the dominant order’s gaze by escaping un-interpellated from white suburbia. In Chigurh’s final scene, he is hit broadside at a suburban intersection. With one of his eyes bulging from his skull and a bone poking out from his elbow, he sits down on the sidewalk. In addition to the noonday sun, this scene has an under-saturated, bleached-out quality, and Chigurh is momentarily paler due to the impact of the crash. Two boys riding bicycles approach him, at which point Chigurh offers one of the boys money for his shirt to fasten a makeshift sling for his arm. The boy tries to decline, but Chigurh replies: ‘Take it. You didn’t see me. I was already gone’ … Chigurh ultimately escapes unseen into white suburbia on the nearly corrupted innocence of a kid, who does not identify him as the other. His inability to “see” Chigurh also saves his life. Chigurh quickly leaves the scene of the car accident, and in so doing, remains outside of the law.”

Ethno-racial perceptions and the US-Mexican border

Alison Reed states that “it seems no coincidence that the Coen brothers’ filmic reproduction of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men erupts in a xenophobic political era obsessed with national boundaries … Between U.S. and Mexico border stations lies the Rio Grande River, which disrupts the fixed line between the Spanish-speaking, dark-skinned other and the Western cowboy. In this fluid, ambiguous space on the bridge between Mexican and American land, Llewelyn first confronts the American subject as racialized other. Suffering potentially fatal wounds from Chigurh’s semiautomatic machine gun and leaking blood from his boots, Llewelyn stumbles past the U.S. border checkpoint. In this in-between space, Llewelyn meets a group of college-aged men returning to the United States … When Llewelyn’s appearance cannot be explained by a car accident, these white men in turn codify him as the Mexican other … As the figure of the abject at the border between Mexico and America, life and death, self and other, he decides to throw the rest of the money over the bridge before entering Mexico. His jacket, concealing his blood-stained shirt, and his beer, excusing his sweaty, dirty, damp and otherwise unkempt appearance, carry him safely into Mexican territory without hassle from the uninterested border patrol guard.

Upon entering Mexico, Llewelyn forfeits his markers of whiteness—the cowboy hat, the crisp white work shirt, the stiff denim—and thus all too easily slides into otherness. After his encounter with the three American men, he wakes up in a Mexican hospital with the bounty hunter Carson Wells at his side. The bouquet of flowers that Wells holds out in front of him starkly contrasts the white walls and sterile furniture of the small hospital room. Llewelyn, stripped of the visual cues that mark his whiteness and instead draped in a nondescript hospital gown, appears Mexican only in relation to his environment: his darkly tanned skin, slick black hair, moustache, and four o’clock shadow juxtaposed against the whiteness of the hospital walls and of Carson Wells. Wells, hovering over him with blond hair, blue eyes, and a cowboy hat, replaces Llewelyn as cowboy: without the visual markers of his Texan identity, Llewelyn no longer clearly reads as white. When Llewelyn walks back into Texas, still wearing his white hospital gown, he must convince the Border Patrol agent to admit him back into the United States. Unconvinced and threatening, the border patrol agent admits Llewelyn only at the moment in which Llewelyn secures his status as a Vietnam War veteran. Unable to be pinned racially, Llewelyn proves his whiteness only by virtue of his military service.

Bringing the ethno-racially ambiguous Llewelyn into relief is the Mexican other—unspoken, unspeakable, dangerous. The Mexican actors in this film, all extras, are the butt of racist jokes. For instance, Bell notes that ‘Supposedly, a coyote won't eat a Mexican’ and Carla Jean’s mother exclaims that ‘It’s not often you see a Mexican in a suit’. The film’s sensationalist depiction of Mexicans as drug trafficking criminals goes unrecognized because they are depoliticized, nameless faces. Llewelyn’s and Chigurh’s visual ambiguity points to the ease with which categories of race and ethnicity slide into indeterminacy.”

The role of women

“A man can either wither away quietly into retirement or fashion himself a sling for his broken body–still disappearing from the scene like a ghost. In either case, No Country for Old Men shows that a ghost is all that is left of masculine or patriarchal systems and codes."

–Erin K. Johns in No Country for Old Men: From Novel to Film

Ryan P. Doom claims that “the women in No Country for Old Men serve no purpose other than to offer support. They do not influence the story in regards to action or the decisions that the men make. It’s as if the setting were indeed in the Old West, as if the women lacked the right to vote. Tough minded and independent they might be, but both Carla Jean [ Kelly Macdonald ] and Loretta Bell (Tess Harper) mainly just complement their husbands and care for them. They exist outside the men’s world and cannot understand the unrelenting violence the men face until faced with it themselves.”

Manohla Dargis of The New York Times believes this issue is observed in many Hollywood pictures. “IRON MAN, Batman, Big Angry Green Man [The Incredible Hulk ] — to judge from the new popcorn season,” she says, “it seems as if Hollywood has realized that the best way to deal with its female troubles is to not have any, women, that is … That’s as true for the dumbest and smartest of comedies as for the most critically revered dramas, from No Country for Old Men (but especially for women) to There Will Be Blood (but no women). Welcome to the new, post-female American cinema.”

Monica Hesse of The Washington Post further complains that “[Awards committees] decide that No Country for Old Men -- dark, stark, violent -- is better than Juno, a comedy about a pregnant teen. They nominate Cate Blanchett for playing a man, but judge her against women. (This was really a mind-trap.)” [Blanchett played Jude Quinn, a portrayal of Bob Dylan in the 1965–1966 era, in the 2007 film I'm Not There].

Erin K. Johns, however, disagrees. “First portrayed as an obedient and subservient wife,” she says, “Carla Jean gains agency as the film progresses; she becomes a woman at odds not only with her husband, Llewelyn, but also with Anton Chigurh, the systematic and cold psychopathic killer who relies on the system of fate … Carla Jean Moss and Loretta Bell, Ed Tom’s wife, recognize and work with and against all of the different and constantly adapting masculine systems. The two major women in the film offer the only places of resistance to the ultimate masculine system: the justified fate that Chigurh inflicts through death.

In the scenes involving Ed Tom and Loretta, Loretta always functions as the voice of reason and common sense; her attitude is one of great confidence and mockery in her position as responsible wife and homemaker. As Ed Tom loads the horse and attempts to placate his wife, Loretta responds by laying out the “law” he should be following at work: [Loretta: ‘Be careful’ / Ed Tom: ‘Always am’ / Loretta: ‘Don’t Get hurt’ / Ed Tom: ‘Never do’ / Loretta: ‘Don’t hurt no one’ / Ed Tom: ‘If you say so’]

Codes, whether original or new, are thus inscribed in the masculine gender throughout No Country for Old Men regardless of whether Chigurh is a psychopath or not. The real psychopathic system is the law, the patriarchal system that demanded subjects, objects, and no resistance–a system that both Loretta and Carla Jean recognize and attempt to resist in different ways.

By refusing to call the coin toss [in the scene with Anton Chigurh], Carla Jean proves that the coin really has no say and that in the end it is just Chigurh; she exposes the insignificance of the code that Chigurh lives by because she realizes that it is yet another masculine code. The coin toss code is the same as Llewelyn’s hunter code and Ed Tom’s law.

Although set in the 1980s, No Country for Old Men exposes the rapidly changing gender structure of the twenty-first century: one where stereotypical and traditional male roles are constantly being resisted and replaced by roles that have traditionally been termed feminine … Perhaps, as the end of the movie suggests, a man can either wither away quietly into retirement or fashion himself a sling for his broken body–still disappearing from the scene like a ghost. In either case, No Country for Old Men shows that a ghost is all that is left of masculine or patriarchal systems and codes.”

West Texas: Landscape, settings and history

"The ranchers who have peopled [McCarthy’s] last four novels are a good deal more likely to vanish without a trace than were the Indians … [or the] Chinese workers who populated railroad camps for a year or two along the Rio Grande in the 1880s … [or the] Mexican goat herders [who] stake kids under rock lean-tos in kidding camps. This landscape, which appears almost empty today, is a palimpsest of cultures. All of them lost, undone.”

–Roger D. Hodge of Harper’s Magazine

In an interview with The Guardian, Joel Coen emphasized the importance of landscape in his films. “There's a very direct relationship of character and story to landscape, or location,” he said. “It's hard for us to come up with a story unless we establish that pretty early. It's hard for us to write a story that can take place just as easily here or there. It has to be specific. The 'here' is where you start.”

Co-Director Ethan Coen explains that “the setting is actually part of the reason that we wanted to do this film. We'd done our first movie (Blood Simple) in Texas, although that was in Austin, but we'd also traveled through West Texas, and were attracted to it even before we read the book. The setting is so integral to the book, to the story — it’s about where it takes place as much as anything else. It is a very beautiful landscape, but in a bleak rather than picturesque way. It's not an easy place to live in, and that's important to what the story is about — the human confrontation with this harsh environment.” Joel Coen concurs that “it’s a place with a history of violence and of being inhospitable in a way. As with all of Cormac McCarthy’s novels, the location is a character itself — and it can't be separated from the story.”

Ryan P. Doom refers to the effect of landscape in the Coens’ films. “In the Coen world, characters and settings always remain fused,” he says. “Both Blood Simple and No Country for Old Men’s Texas landscape evoke clichéd tough-Texas-cowboy characteristics while Fargo and Intolerable Cruelty embody the eccentrics of the North and West.”

Richard A. Blake states that “a Coen film looks ‘real,’ yet the landscape plays an eloquent mythic role in the dramatic action. In their earlier masterpiece, Fargo (1996), the barren North Dakota countryside provided a menacing counterpoint to Marge Gundersen’s (Frances McDormand) hugely pregnant body: cold and warmth, evil and goodness, death and life. In their current film, the Coens lead us through the desert of the Texas border country. This is not the vast ennobling desert of John Ford’s Monument Valley that our heroic ancestors crossed as they built a nation. This is a land of scorpions, rattlers and flies … The skies over the desert press down over the characters as though the vast landscape of Texas can provide no hiding place from the monster that dwells within. Neither the glorious colors of sunset nor the bleaching light of noonday can mask the horror.”

Nathan Kosub calls No Country for Old Men “a great Texas film.” He adds that “it is great unequivocally, but Lone Star pride is a rare opportunity in Hollywood. Texas has always been a popular myth for directors, from the Texas-in-Utah of John Ford’s The Searchers to the Texas-in-Canada of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven. Joel and Ethan Coen made their first film in Austin (Blood Simple) and cast Lubbock musician Jimmie Dale Gilmore as Smokey in The Big Lebowski (‘Mark it eight, Dude’). But No Country for Old Men is a whole other state entirely. In West Texas, there is no purer indication of the landscape’s isolation than the silhouette of a pair of boots on a man sitting alone beneath a single tree. Llewelyn even calls him ‘el último hombre [the last man],’ and waits until he dies to approach him. Here, too, is the horror film’s essential nature: one frame of a truck parked on a ridge at night, followed by a second frame of a second truck parked beside it. When the lights on the second truck go bright, we’re running with Llewelyn towards the river.”

Jim Emerson describes the landscape and settings as reflected in the film’s opening scene. “The land is black, swallowed in the shadows,” he says. “The sky is beginning to glow orange and blue. This is Genesis, the primordial landscape of No Country for Old Men. We may think we’re looking at a sunset at first, but the next few shots show a progression: The sky lightens, the sun rises above the horizon to illuminate a vast Western expanse. No signs of humanity are evident. And then, a distant windmill – a mythic Once Upon a Time in the West kind of windmill. So, mankind figures into the geography after all. A barbed-wire fence cuts through a field. The camera, previously stationary, stirs to life, and pans (ostensibly down the length of the fence) to find a police car pulled over on the shoulder of a highway. There’s law out here, too … The movie intensifies and heightens your senses. Light is tangible, whether it’s sunlight or fluorescent. Blades of grass sing in the wind. Ceiling fans whir (not so literally or symbolically as in Apocalypse Now). Milk bottles sweat in the heat. Ventilation ducts, air conditioners and deadbolt housings rumble, hiss and roar.”

Richard Gaughran states that “we visually encounter the bleak, endlessly flat terrain of west Texas. The published screenplay refers to the landscape as ‘broad, bare, and lifeless’ … In No Country for Old Men (2007) the filmmakers return to west Texas, with much of that film’s action playing out against … a desolate landscape … the setting becomes a character at least as important as any of the human characters … Paul Schrader says of typical noir settings, ‘When the environment is given an equal or greater weight that the actor, it, of course, creates a fatalistic, hopeless mood. There is nothing the protagonists can do; the city will outlast and negate even their best efforts.’”

Alison Young also observes that “a strong sense of place is evoked: In No Country, rural West Texas is made palpable in the characters’ accents, the widescreen shots of the harsh landscape, and the buzzing of flies around the bloated corpses found by Llewelyn Moss as they lie rotting in the desert sun,” while Richard Schickel of Time Magazine adds that “the landscape is as bleak as the moon’s dark side and its relatively few inhabitants lead lives that are scrubbed down to the basics. That is to say, it is pretty much kill or be killed.”

Douglas McFarland quotes Joel Coen on how the character of Anton Chigurh relates to the landscape depicted in the film. “In an interview published in The New York Times upon the release of No Country for Old Men, Joel Coen describes his conception of Chigurh: ‘He’s like the man who fell to earth. … He’s the thing that doesn’t grow out of the landscape.’ This rings true as far as it goes. Chigurh does seem to be some alien menace who operates outside categories of human understanding, certainly ethical categories.”

Roger D. Hodge of Harper’s Magazine presents a brief history of the West Texas region where the events in the novel took place, and describes its effect on McCarthy’s literature. “The stories I have heard of Indians and outlaws and Mexican revolutionaries,” he says, “cattle drives and gunfights, droughts and floods and other frontier hardships, may be the products of a world that in large part is already extinct, but they are not figments of a merely literary imagination. McCarthy's novels are the works of an artist who has excavated the tailings of that dying world.”

Hodge further investigates how the author may have chosen the West Texas region as a setting for his novel. “Why [did McCarthy] not set his novel farther south and west, in the Big Bend,” he wonders, “where volcanism and mountain building produced the most graphically violent landscape in the state? Perhaps because the area near Langtry remained wilder longer than any other part of the state. Because it was, and is, a place of outlaws and smugglers and rustlers. It is also the site of a lost culture whose traces are still visible in the ancient rock shelters along its canyon walls.

In No Country for Old Men, as in every other novel he has written, McCarthy insists on the relics of ancient, vanished peoples in his landscapes. And he makes no secret of his view that those whose lives he describes are no less ephemeral. Indeed, what the landscape of West Texas suggests is that the ranchers who have peopled [his] last four novels [Cities of the Plain, The Crossing , All the Pretty Horses , and Blood Meridian ] are a good deal more likely to vanish without a trace than were the Indians, whose art, exposed to the elements for thousands of years, still bears witness to their lifeways. The metal implements used by the ranchers to make horseshoes and axes and elaborate irrigation systems have rusted and are crumbling into dust, together with concrete water troughs and cedar picket stock pens. Some of these artifacts may survive to be puzzled over by future generations, though perhaps it will be the opium tins and pipes and iron woks of the Chinese workers who populated railroad camps for a year or two along the Rio Grande in the 1880s. Or other nameless implements that were used to chisel passages and tunnels for the railroad. Or the clever wire swivels used by Mexican goat herders to stake kids under rock lean-tos in kidding camps. This landscape, which appears almost empty today, is a palimpsest of cultures. All of them lost, undone.”

Metaphor for entropy of contemporary America

"Recent movies about Iraq have pushed hard to show the growing dehumanization infecting our world. No Country doesn't have to preach or wave a flag — it carries in its bones the virus of what we've become. The Coens squeeze us without mercy in a vise of tension and suspense, but only to force us to look into an abyss of our own making."

–Critic Peter Travers of the Rolling Stone

"Watching this film has something of the elemental thrill of watching a cloud-shadow spread with miraculous speed over a vast, empty landscape: it has a chilly, portentous intuition of what America is."

–Critic Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian

Douglas Kellner states that “often, Oscar-winning films reflect the mood and zeitgeist of an era. As when during the relatively peaceful and prosperous 1990s feel-good years affirmative films like Forest Gump (1994), Titanic (1997), and Shakespeare in Love (1998) won Oscars. By contrast, films like the Academy Award winning productions of the last three years of the Bush-Cheney administration - Crash (2005), The Departed (2006), and No Country for Old Men (2007) – reflect a more anxiety ridden era, when events appear out of control, violence is rampant, and socioeconomic insecurities and crises are intensifying.”

Writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, Jim Emerson focuses on “three of the most admired and fervently debated American films of the year [2007], [which] move inexorably toward a climactic confrontation with a killer -- or someone's conception of a killer. Only Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood actually culminates in an eruption of savagery, while David Fincher's Zodiac and Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men gradually steer their attention away from the assaults and into the psyches of the characters who are haunted by the brutality penetrating their lives.

Much has been written about the violence in these movies, the darkness they find in the American landscape, and what some see as their bleak, fatalistic and/or nihilistic attitude. Does this somehow reflect the country's moral ambivalence about being mired in two bloody, confusing guerrilla wars on the other side of the world? A sense of No Exit hopelessness that the Vietnam nightmare is recurring? Mainstream (or art house) torture porn that allows us to vicariously groove on -- as we are simultaneously appalled by -- the crimes at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo? Dissatisfaction with the materialistic emphasis on the American Dream? A cynical exploitation of artfully staged killings for our (cathartic?) entertainment?”

Joan Mellen compares the film, “set in 1980, in an explicitly post-Vietnam aftermath,” to Paul Haggis’ In the Valley of Elah, which regards the Iraq War and was released in the same year.

“The highly trained soldiers and former soldiers in In the Valley of Elah and No Country for Old Men,” she says, “formidably skilled in violence and tactics for survival under unspeakable conditions, returned home as deformed human beings, tormented by their experience and a danger to others and to themselves. This harrowing conjunction of professionalism at war and personal brutalization may be read as a metaphor for the entropy of contemporary America.

Cormac McCarthy’s uncompromising novel upon which the Coen brothers based their film references Vietnam specifically a number of times. With a nod to the exigencies of commercial cinema, the Coens’ film does so only twice. First, Lieutenant Colonel Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson) asks Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), ‘Were you in Nam?’ / ‘Yeah, I was in Nam,’ Moss says. At this, Wells removes his hat in homage, adding, ‘So was I.’ Later at the Mexican border Moss gains re-entry to the U.S. only after the guard learns, to his satisfaction, that Moss served two tours in Vietnam.

‘Vietnam was the icing on the cake,’ McCarthy writes … The Coens omit this line, along with Deputy Wendell’s remark as he and Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) survey the bloody death scene of Mexicans in their dope-laden trucks: ‘It must of sounded like Vietnam out here.’ / ‘Vietnam,’ Sheriff Bell repeats somberly, as if the word itself expressed the depths of bloody suffering.”

Mellen also compares Anton Chigurh and war veterans in No Country for Old Men and In the Valley of Elah to Special Forces Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, portrayed by Marlon Brando in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) about the Vietnam War and adapted from Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness.

“Chigurh is a direct descendant of Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz,” she says. “Once the emissary of ‘pity, science and progress,’ as Conrad puts it, Kurtz ends up a murderous madman, answerable to no one. He decorated his Congo [in the novella] encampment with the shrunken heads of his victims, and only, at the moment of his death, could he pass judgment on the entire imperialist enterprise, of which he was a part: ‘The horror, the horror.’

These men, having returned from Vietnam and from Iraq, have grown, in varying degrees, into instinctual killers. The soldiers and former soldiers in No Country for Old Men and In the Valley of Elah surpass Kurtz in one respect: they have brought their atrocities home. Both films depict a precipitous decline in the moral tenor of American society where the safety of its citizens has become, as never before, a virtual anachronism.

What defines the ‘new kind,’ the new America, and the evil that Sheriff Bell ‘doesn’t understand,’ are the similarities, not the differences between Moss and Chigurh … Both have absorbed the lessons crucial to their survival. Both reveal a professional knowledge of all types of guns … ‘Hold still please, sir,’ Chigurh urges his second victim. ‘You hold still,’ Moss whispers to a distant antelope as he takes aim. Later Chigurh, out of the same reflexive impulse to kill anything that moves, shoots at a random innocent black bird (he misses). Both veterans have become involved in the drug trade … Shot, they tend to their own wounds, neither expecting help. Both buy clothing from bewildered passers-by using hundred-dollar bills from the drug money.

Vietnam and Iraq have become interchangeable, why No Country and Valley of Elah seems so similar thematically. In No Country for Old Men it is Vietnam that symbolizes the historical crime, so that in McCarthy’s novel, at the moment of his death, Carson Wells remembers suddenly, ‘the body of a child dead in a roadside ravine in another country.’ The Iraq analogue is the photograph [Director] Paul Haggis intercuts several times: the corpse of a child in Iraq, run over by Mike [Specialist Mike ‘Doc’ Deerfield played by Jonathan Tucker ] and his comrades and then left abandoned by the side of a dusty road.

Abrupt endings work best for these historical meditations on a country close to hitting moral bottom … Sheriff Bell, now a broken, idle man, sits at his kitchen table, empty of occupation and usefulness to the community he had served since he was a twenty-five-year-old lawman. Defeated, he recounts his dreams to his wife, ending with the line, ‘And then I woke up,’ which is also Cormac McCarthy’s final sentence. So the Coens, and the novelist, urge us all to do.”

Kyle Smith of Commentary magazine states that “it’s obvious why the story takes place in 1980. The reason is Vietnam. Most of the characters served there; it’s where they learned about the value of human life, or lack thereof … But if you measure McCarthy’s ironic tone in the book, you might come to another conclusion. Possibly McCarthy is taking the extreme, Catholic stance that all killing is wrong, from capital punishment to war to abortion.

The book takes place seven years after Roe v. Wade, five years after the fall of Saigon, four years after the restoration of the death penalty by the Supreme Court. It’s a year when the idea that state could sanction killing has begun to take root. The sheriff, in the book as in the film the voice of wisdom and restraint, expresses a sad resignation toward the death penalty from page one on, and a portion of the book that isn’t referred to in the movie might be the key to understanding McCarthy’s moral.

McCarthy has a vision of an America that fosters what Pope John Paul II called a ‘culture of death;’ these men come back from Vietnam, where they learned to kill, then apply their killing skills on a country that is killing fetuses and condemned prisoners and will soon give the okay to killing old people and the weak. The remorseless assassin Anton Chigurh is the natural consequence of a culture of death: A harbinger of unchecked killing.”

A number of critics and authors have expressed that the film is an “allegory” for “the growing dehumanization infecting our world” and portrays a “dark-soul” America which is “eating its sons like Saturn”. They added:

No Country for Old Men, along with its 2007 Oscar-winning adaptation directed by Ethan and Joel Coen, has been understood as an allegory for the dilemmas recently facing the United States during the Iraq War.
–Susan Kollin in the book Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, The Road

Recent movies about Iraq have pushed hard to show the growing dehumanization infecting our world. No Country doesn't have to preach or wave a flag — it carries in its bones the virus of what we've become. The Coens squeeze us without mercy in a vise of tension and suspense, but only to force us to look into an abyss of our own making.
– Peter Travers of the Rolling Stone

Tommy Lee Jones and the actor Barry Corbin have a wonderfully modulated scene, in which Ed Tom calls on his old Uncle Ellis, another retired police officer, who has seen enough of the unequal struggle against evil to have even fewer illusions than his nephew. But he tells him that America has always been like this, that it is a tough country, cruel and harsh, eating its sons like Saturn. Watching this film has something of the elemental thrill of watching a cloud-shadow spread with miraculous speed over a vast, empty landscape: it has a chilly, portentous intuition of what America is.
– Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian

As [the film] cuts between three main protagonists, it builds a mythic, sometimes operatic, picture of America's dark soul. Always one step behind the action, Bell eventually resigns himself to the inevitable play of fate, violence and death that America was built on. A throwaway story about an Indian raid in [1909] hints at the dark truth of the title: America is no country for old men, pacifists or moralists. It's a land for those immune to the pricks of conscience and willing to be pushed around by the hand of fate.
–Film review by British Film4 channel

On the face of it, No Country for Old Men doesn't need to be set in 1980 … It could be taking place anytime in the past 40 years, really. By locating the action in the year of Ronald Reagan's ascension to the presidency, though, "No Country" stands at the pivot of the Old West and the New Avarice, a point in time when the last vestiges of frontier morality have been washed away by a pitiless modern crime wave fueled by drug profits … In the end, the film's central image is Ed Tom's expression of bottomless sorrow. It's the grief of a man for a land his fathers tamed and in which he now walks as a stranger.
–Ty Burr of The Boston Globe

Coen artistry heightens our level of perception. They reveal the first murder with an astonishing image of shoe sole scuff marks on a jail floor that looks as avant-garde as a Jackson Pollack painting—a harbinger of modern chaos that puts post-9/11 terror in artistic focus. But not sentimentally. When Sheriff Bell expresses existential fatigue, the sorrow he vouchsafes to his [uncle] is actually spoken to himself (thus to us in the audience). And still, the Coens contextualize: Bell is brought to reality when his [uncle] tells him, “What you got ain’t [nothing] new. [You] can’t stop what’s coming. Ain’t all waiting on you. That’s vanity.” The Coens make that wisdom mythical and all encompassing—from Vietnam to 9/11 to Iraq and to the Texas homeland.
–Armond White of the New York Press

The Vatican daily L'Osservatore Romano stated in an opinion column that “the most awarded movies [in 2007] ‘portray the image of a hopeless America.’ The article, written by Gaetano Vallini, says that the awards night was dominated by two visions of evil, two instances of using images to portray evil. ‘On one side, the story of perdition, described by Paul Thomas Anderson in There Will Be Blood, on the other, a contemporary Western, with a modern incarnation of evil, No Country for Old Men, produced by Joel and Ethan Coen,’ each one of them receiving eight nominations.

L'Osservatore says that, aside from the awards given to these two films, Hollywood has been dominated this year ‘by dark films, filled with violence but mainly with hopelessness.’ … Vallini found the Cohen [sic] brothers’ story ‘marked by absurd and mindless acts of violence, a world in which there is no place for old values … [where] moral conscience is lacking.

In this way, L'Osservatore says, ‘the American dream is obliterated, described by the directors in bold strokes, without offering any anchor for hope, no hope for the future;’ unlike the original novel, ‘in which the author leaves some room open for hope … This clearly pessimistic view that the United States offers of itself through the movies seems to be shared by the jury of the Academy Awards, which has awarded a film that leaves no doubts about its goal, which is to show the decline of modern society, the decay of values.’”

Writing in The Huffington Post, actor Alec Baldwin urged viewers to “go see No Country for Old Men. It's a metaphor for Iraq and the post 9/11 world.” He added that “in all of my adult life, I have rarely seen Americans so in need of a vacation, a break, a place to go that is safe and comfortable. I have rarely seen Americans rush toward the Thanksgiving weekend with such need and commitment. This country is coming apart. And people are in a lot of pain about that. Eight years of these lunatics [ The Goerge W. Bush Presidency ] raping everything they see has been exhausting. Americans are exhausted. Our system is breaking down, slowly, and people are, when they get honest about it, frightened about what that means, short and long term. Iraq is a mess and they botched that so badly. Now, some say Iran is next. How can that be? The American military is staffed by brave, highly trained, competent people. But it's run by idiots. Idiots who are going to kill a lot of innocent people and get some of us killed along the way.”

Film ending and final scene

"Aren't you so pleased to see a different take on the same cat and mouse game?"

–Actor Josh Brolin on the film's ending

Co-Director Joel Coen stated that “the ending of the movie is taken verbatim from the end of the novel. That was one of the things that interested us when we first read the novel, just as a story, the way that Cormac set up an expectation of a genre piece in a way, and sort of pulled the rug out from under you as you read it.”

Dana Stevens of Slate criticized the film ending. “Even in their best films”, she said, “the Coens have trouble with endings (witness the mood-destroying Sam Elliot speech that weighs down the final minutes of the otherwise delightful The Big Lebowski). The last scene of No Country for Old Men, in which [Sheriff] Bell recounts his dreams to his wife Loretta (Tess Harper) is a tacked-on chunk of Meaning that seems to bear no relation to the tragically futile bloodbath we've just witnessed.”

Curt Holman of CL Atlanta also argues that “there's something deflating about the film's final scenes. McCarthy raises the ancient problem of human evil: Is it an inherent flaw of human nature, or the net result of random fate? McCarthy seems to conclude that it's a generational thing. ‘Anytime you quit hearing 'Sir' and 'Ma'am’, the end is pretty much in sight,’ says [Sheriff] Bell, and you suspect he's only half-kidding.”

Actor Josh Brolin, however, defended the ending of the film. "I love that people are talking about this movie. I love that people leave the movie saying, 'I hate the ending. I was so pissed.' Good, it was supposed to piss you off," the 39-year-old star told MTV News. "You completely lend yourself to [my] character and then you're completely raped of this character. I don't find it manipulative at all. I find it to be a great homage to that kind of violence." After being chased by Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh the entire movie, Brolin meets his violent end off-screen. Soon after, his wife is brutally murdered off-screen as well. After all that build-up, all that destruction, the film ends, not with an orgasmic culmination of violence, but with a quiet monologue from Sheriff Tom Bell Tommy Lee Jones. "If you were expecting something different, Brolin argues, that "says more about you than the movie. You wanted to see his death, why? Because you're used to it. Aren't you so pleased to see a different take on the same cat and mouse game?" he asked.

Ciro Discepolo emphasizes that “the key to understand the whole film … is the two dreams that Tommy Lee Jones relates to his mate in the final scene,” he said. “In his first dream, the sheriff sees his own father handing over some money that he would lose: old generations handed over to us values we have lost. The other dream shows the sheriff and his father riding a horse. They have to pass through a narrow and dark mountain pass. His father overtakes him and lights a natural torch; he then settles down and lights a fire that gives light and warmth, then he waits for his son. This is the hope that the country – that country and every country – could eventually find out the right way to a place with a warm fire and much more light.”

David Edelstein of New York magazine commended the film’s ending. “You wait to see the sheriff, the venerable rock of decency,” he said, “confront the newfangled evil in a showdown as cathartic as Carl Franklin’s B-movie classic One False Move. But the Coens are true to their source, if not their strengths. I’m told that McCarthy liked the last part of the picture best, and he would.

Something about the ending bodes well, though. In Miller's Crossing, the protagonist has a recurring anxiety dream of a hat blowing away in a forest—an image that puzzled a lot of viewers but struck me as the perfect representation of the character’s fear of losing control. The filmmakers’, too. Film is a medium for control freaks, of whom the Coens are among the control-freakiest. The flat, unironic, nondisjunctive stoicism of the final scenes of No Country for Old Men must have been hard for these jokers. This might be the start of something thrilling: Joel and Ethan Coen learning how to let go.”

Arne De Boever believes that the second dream “featured [Bell’s] father riding ahead of him on a mountain pass into the cold, dark night, shielding a light and fixing a fire up ahead to receive the sheriff whenever he would get there. This light and fire can easily be read as the light and fire of justice: as the dream of final control that is projected up ahead, with the sheriff’s long-dead father protecting it until the sheriff will get there himself, in other words: until the sheriff himself will have died. One does not have to be a psychoanalyst to understand the dream’s significance: only in death will the sheriff’s work of justice be completed. Final justice is not a part of this world.”

Lucia Bozzola explains the meaning of the "dream" in the final scene. "Considering that [Sheriff] Bell opened the film by musing that his law enforcement progenitors wouldn’t know what to make of the violence nowadays", she said, "not to mention all of the references to Chigurh as a ghost, it’s not that tough to figure out why Bell’s dream matters, or why he’s chosen this path. He’s never going to be able to do what his father did as far as law and order because there’s always going to be a specter that’s ahead of him. Or a Terminator. If he’s going to survive in this country, a good man has to give up. I suppose this is how the West was lost."

Release

Theatrical release and box office

No Country for Old Men premiered in Competition at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival on May 19. Stephen Robb of the BBC covered the film opening at Cannes. “With no sign yet of an undisputed classic in competition at this 60th Cannes,” he said, “No Country for Old Men may have emerged as a frontrunner for the trophy Joel and Ethan Coen collected for Barton Fink in 1991. ‘We are very fortunate in that our films have sort of found a home here,’ says Joel. ‘From the point of view of getting the movies out to an audience, this has always been a very congenial platform.’

The reception to the film's first press screening in Cannes was positive. Screen International’s jury of critics, assembled for its daily Cannes publication, all gave the film three or four marks out of four. The magazine’s review said the film fell short of ‘the greatness that sometimes seems within its grasp’. But it added that the film was ‘guaranteed to attract a healthy audience on the basis of the track record of those involved, respect for the novel and critical support.’”

The film commercially opened in limited release in 28 theaters in the United States on November 9, 2007, grossing $1,226,333 over the opening weekend. The film expanded to a wide release in 860 theaters in the United States on November 21, 2007, grossing $7,776,773 over the first weekend. The film subsequently increased the number of theaters to 2,037. It was the 5th highest ranking film at the US box office in the weekend ending December 16, 2007. The film opened in Australia on December 26, 2007, and in the United Kingdom (limited release) and Ireland on January 18, 2008. As of February 13, 2009, the film has grossed $74,283,000 domestically (United States). No Country for Old Men became the biggest box-office hit for the Coens to date, until it was surpassed by True Grit in 2010.

The film was the second top grossing Best Picture nominee for 2007, after Juno, which was distributed by Fox Searchlight and earned over $125 million in revenues. However, as a winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture, No Country for Old Men was ranked as the third lowest-grossing Oscar winner, only surpassed in terms of lower revenues by Crash (2005) and The Hurt Locker (2009). CNBC commented that “neither the Oscar win nor the slow roll-out of the film into wide release could get it past the $100 million mark, or even the $75 million mark [domestically], and No Country for Old Men remains one of the lowest-grossing Best Picture winners of all time.”

Paul Monaco observed that the Studio employed a ‘gradual-release’ strategy. “With No Country for Old Men,” he said, “Miramax had followed its patented gradual-release strategy for the movie’s marketing. Produced for $30 million, it had earned just over $60 million by the time it won the Best Picture Oscar. Industry predictions expected only another $10 million to $20 million in revenues theatrically following the awards. The final balance sheet on No Country for Old Men, indeed, was a $74 million gross [domestically].”

Nick Redfern evaluates the film’s box office performance as an Academy Award for Best Picture winner. “The King's Speech won the Best Picture Oscar on Sunday [the 83rd Academy Awards on February 27, 2011],” he said, “and has so grossed over $245 million worldwide against a budget of $15 million. This film follows in the footsteps of The Hurt Locker, Slumdog Millionaire, and No Country for Old Men in being voted Best Picture despite being anything but the blockbuster-type films that Hollywood is so economically dependent upon.

No Country for Old Men is another film released in November. It is another film that was initially given a limited release to just 28 theatres (grossing $1,226,333) before going wide after two weeks to 860 theatres (grossing $7,776,773) – hence the big jump in grosses around day 15 … It is another film to have benefitted from the nomination and the win, with weekend grosses picking up after each (although the weekday grosses after the nomination do not appear to have changed that much).

Taking these films together – The King's Speech, The Hurt Locker, Slumdog Millionaire, and No Country for Old Men – we can see that the Academy Award for Best Picture over the past four years has gone to films that have had similar release patterns. In fact, we have to go back to The Departed in 2006 to find a Best Picture winner with the time series chart that is typical of Hollywood blockbusters – a big opening weekend followed by a steady decline.”

Home media

Buena Vista Home Entertainment released the movie on DVD and in the high definition Blu-ray format on March 11, 2008 in the US. The only extras are three behind–the–scenes featurettes.The release topped the home video rental charts upon release and remained in the top 10 positions for the first 5 weeks.

Website Blu-ray.com reviewed the Blu-ray edition of the film, and gave the video quality an almost full mark. It stated that “with its AVC MPEG-4 video on BD-50, the picture quality of No Country for Old Men stands on the highest rung of the home video ladder. Color vibrancy, black level, resolution and contrast are reference quality … Every line and wrinkle in Bell's face is resolved and Chigurh sports a pageboy haircut in which every strand of hair appears individually distinguishable. No other film brings its characters to life so vividly solely on the merits of visual technicalities … Watch the nighttime shoot-out between Moss and Chigurh outside the hotel ... As bullets slam through the windshield of Moss' getaway car, watch as every crack and bullet hole in the glass is extraordinarily defined.”

The audio quality earned an almost full mark, where the “24-bit 48 kHz lossless PCM serves voices well, and excels in more treble-prone sounds … Perhaps the most audibly dynamic sequence is the dawn chase scene after Moss returns with water. Close your eyes and listen to Moss' breathing and footsteps as he runs, the truck in pursuit as it labors over rocks and shrubs, the crack of the rifle and hissing of bullets as they rip through the air and hit the ground … the entire sequence and the film overall sounds very convincing”

Kenneth S. Brown of Website High-Def Digest stated that “the Blu-ray edition of the film … is magnificent … and includes all of the 480i/p special features that appear on the standard DVD. However, to my disappointment, the slim supplemental package doesn’t include a much needed directors’ commentary from the Coens. It would have been fascinating to listen to the brothers dissect the differences between the original novel and the Oscar winning film. It may not have a compelling supplemental package, but it does have a striking video transfer and an excellent PCM audio track.”

The Region 2 DVD (courtesy of Paramount) was released on June 2, 2008. The film was released on Blu-ray Disc in the UK on September 8, 2008. A 3-disc Special Edition with Digital Copy was released on DVD and Blu-ray on April 7, 2009. It was presented in 2.35:1 Anamorphic Widescreen and Dolby Digital 5.1 (English, Spanish). This release included over five hours of new bonus features, almost all of which are complete interviews with an assortment of press sources. It lacks deleted scenes and audio commentary. Some of the bonus material/features on the disc include:

• “‘The Making of No Country for Old Men’ (24:28) serves as a general overview of production. Cast and crew members discuss the movie's origins, genres, story and characters, before going into specific topics like the period setting, costuming, and practical special effects.
  
• ‘Working with the Coens’ (8:07) gives us a deeper look at the brothers. The directors' methods are discussed, mostly by crew members who have long collaborated with them.
  
• ‘Diary of a Country Sheriff’ (6:44) further considers the lead characters and the subtext they form.
  
• ‘Behind the Scenes of No Country for Old Men’ (9:18): Brolin (who produced, directed, and edited this featurette), Javier Bardem, and Woody Harrelson give some tongue-in-cheek sound bites on performing for the Coen brothers.
  
• ‘EW.com Just a Minute’ (12:54) has Entertainment Weekly writer Dave Karger interview Javier Bardem about Anton Chigurh and the movie, with several clips sprinkled throughout.
  
• ‘ABC Popcorn with Peter Travers’ (14:50): [Interviews with] Macdonald, Brolin, and Bardem about their characters, the Coens, and challenging scenes. Travers can't help trying to be funny and complimenting Bardem's eyes.
  
• ‘In-Store Appearance’ (40:28): It plays more movie clips and we hear several of the same questions and stories … One subject first tackled here is the state-of-the-art casting video Brolin submitted with help from Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino.
  
• An installment of ‘Charlie Rose’ (22:30), serves up the kind of lofty dialogue the minimalist PBS talk show is known for. Rose is joined by both Coens, Bardem, and Brolin. Much of the episode centers on the filmmakers' processes.
  
• ‘Spike Jonze Q & A’ (1:00:43), in which the Being John Malkovich director emcees a discussion with an assortment of ‘No Country’ filmmakers. Taking turns to join the Coens are cinematographer Roger Deakins, the sound team, and production designer Jess Gonchor. Each lineup naturally goes into detail about the aspect they worked on before answering audience questions.”

Reception

"This is frighteningly intelligent and imaginative."

–Critic Geoff Andrew of Time Out London

"For formalists –those moviegoers sent into raptures by tight editing, nimble camera work and faultless sound design– it’s pure heaven."

–Critic A. O. Scott of The New York Times

As of April 20, 2012, the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reflected that 214 out of 226 critics (95%) gave the film a positive review. Upon release the film was widely discussed as a possible candidate for several Oscars, before going on to receive eight nominations, eventually winning four Academy Awards in 2008. Javier Bardem, in particular, has received considerable praise for his performance in the film.

James Berardinelli gave it three-and-a-half stars, saying:

Expecting normalcy from a Coen Brothers production is a pointless endeavor, but anticipating brilliance isn't outlandish.... The story is full of unexpected twists and switchbacks, and opportunities for the audience to gear down and take a breath are few and far between. Like Alfred Hitchcock with Psycho, the filmmakers don’t want viewers to become too comfortable with any of the characters.... [Chigurh is] probably the most compelling screen villain since Anthony Hopkins brought Hannibal Lecter to life in The Silence of the Lambs.... And, while the ending may be a sore point for some, it will have others chuckling and nodding their heads appreciatively (albeit perhaps after a brief "WTF?" when the end credits begin to roll). That's what good cinema is expected to do.

Roger Ebert went even further, giving it four stars. He said:

Consider another scene in which the dialogue is as good as any you will hear this year. Chigurh enters a rundown gas station in the middle of wilderness and begins to play a word game with the old man (Gene Jones) behind the cash register, who becomes very nervous. It is clear they are talking about whether Chigurh will kill him. Chigurh has by no means made up his mind. Without explaining why, he asks the man to call the flip of a coin. Listen to what they say, how they say it, how they imply the stakes. Listen to their timing. You want to applaud the writing, which comes from the Coen brothers, out of McCarthy.... This movie is a masterful evocation of time, place, character, moral choices, immoral certainties, human nature and fate.

Anthony Lane of The New Yorker was more measured:

The Coens certainly honor the novelist’s abiding preference for the mythical over the modern.... So what do we end up with? Well, as a thriller, No Country for Old Men is tight, pointed, and immune to the temptations of speed. I found myself in the same predicament with the film as with the book—approaching both in a state of rare excitement, yet willing myself, all too soon, to be more engaged than I actually was.... We gradually realize that No Country for Old Men is not telling a tale—the plot remains open-ended—but reinforcing the legend of a place, like a poem adding to an oral tradition. Texas is presented as a state of being, where good and evil circle doggedly around each other, and it just doesn’t occur to Moss that he could take his black bag, catch a flight, and seek a world elsewhere. I was awed by the control of the movie, which seems as pressurized as Chigurh’s murder machine, but after an hour and a quarter I felt that it had made its point and done all the damage it could. In the event, it crawls past the two-hour mark, and you sense that the Coens, like their unkillable villain, are prepared to go on forever.

Stephen Hunter of The Washington Post said:

You can't say it cuts to the chase. There was never anything to cut from to the chase. It's all chase, which means that it offers almost zero in character development. Each of the figures is given, a la standard thriller operating procedure, a single moral or psychological attribute and then acts in accordance to that principle and nothing else, without doubts, contradictions or ambivalence.

Andrew Sarris said:

As for the nihilism on display in No Country for Old Men, the collaboration between the Coen brothers and Cormac McCarthy was a marriage made in heaven or, more likely, hell.... I will not describe the narrative in any great detail both because I would be perceived as spoiling the “fun” of discovering the many surprises for yourself, and because I cannot look at it and write about it in any other way than as an exercise in cosmic futility. Yet, I’m not sorry I saw it over a running time of 122 minutes, just about the length of time I’d like to spend on a quick in-and-out visit to hell.

Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian said of the film:

It's the best of the [Coens'] career so far. The Coens are back with a vengeance, showing their various imitators and detractors what great American film-making looks like. The result is a dark, violent and deeply disquieting drama, leavened with brilliant noirish wisecracks, and boasting three leading male performances with all the spectacular virility of Texan steers. And all of it hard and sharp as a diamond.

Rob Mackie of The Guardian also said:

What makes this such a stand-out is hard to put your finger on - it just feels like an absorbing and tense two hours where everyone is absolutely on top of their job and a comfortable fit in their roles.

Geoff Andrew of Time Out London expressed that:

The film exerts a grip from start to end. A masterly tale of the good, the deranged and the doomed that inflects the raw violence of the west with a wry acknowledgement of the demise of codes of honour, this is frighteningly intelligent and imaginative.

Richard Corliss of Time magazine chose the film as the best of the year, and said:

After two decades of being brilliant on the movie margins, the Coens are ready for their closeup, and maybe their Oscar. By any standards, it’s a super-violent thriller, as scary as the black hole where a madman’s heart should be. Sure to be the brothers’ most honored movie since Fargo, it’s a great showcase for Joel and Ethan’s storytelling finesse and filmmaking power. Just in their 50s now, the Coen brothers should be entertaining and challenging us for decades to come.

Paul Arendt of the BBC gave the film a full mark and said:

[It] doesn't require a defense: it is a magnificent return to form … [It] is both a searing thriller and an elegy for a collapsing society … The Coen brothers have once again placed themselves at the very forefront of American cinema.

A. O. Scott of The New York Times stated that:

For formalists –those moviegoers sent into raptures by tight editing, nimble camera work and faultless sound design– it’s pure heaven ... [it] leaves behind the jangled, stunned sensation of having witnessed a ruthless application of craft.

Reviews

• Allmovie
• Empire
• Filmcritic.com
• Roger Ebert
• Rolling Stone
• Premiere

Top ten lists

The film appeared on more critics' top ten lists (354) than any other film of 2007, and was more critics' #1 film (90) than any other. Some of the notable critics' placement of No Country for Old Men are:

• 1st – Corben Carpenter, CRBN BLOG
• 1st – Richard Corliss, TIME magazine
• 1st – David Germain, Associated Press
• 1st – Peter Hartlaub, San Francisco Chronicle
• 1st – Adam Kempenaar, Filmspotting
• 1st – Liam Lacey and Rick Groen, The Globe and Mail
• 1st – Christy Lemire, Associated Press
• 1st – Jack Mathews, New York Daily News
• 1st – Wesley Morris, The Boston Globe
• 1st – Noel Murray, The A.V. Club
• 1st – Tasha Robinson, The A.V. Club
• 1st – Rene Rodriguez, The Miami Herald
• 1st – Scott Tobias, The A.V. Club
• 1st – Peter Travers, Rolling Stone
• 2nd – James Berardinelli, ReelViews
• 2nd – Ty Burr, The Boston Globe
• 2nd – Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
• 2nd – Glen Kenny, Premiere
• 2nd - Matty Robinson, Filmspotting
• 2nd – Keith Phipps, The A.V. Club
• 2nd – Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun-Times
• 2nd – Marc Savlov, The Austin Chronicle

• 2nd – Richard Schickel, TIME magazine
• 2nd – Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly
• 2nd – Desson Thomson, The Washington Post
• 3rd – Shawn Levy, The Oregonian
• 3rd – Lou Lumenick, New York Post
• 3rd – Philip Martin, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
• 3rd – Mike Russell, The Oregonian
• 3rd – Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter
• 4th – Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle
• 4th – Kevin Crust, Los Angeles Times
• 4th – Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle
• 4th – Nathan Rabin, The A.V. Club
• 5th – David Ansen, Newsweek
• 6th – Scott Foundas, LA Weekly (tied with The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford)
• 6th – Stephen Holden, The New York Times
• 7th – Peter Rainer, The Christian Science Monitor
• 7th – Kyle Smith, New York Post
• 8th – Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times
• 9th – Steven Rea, The Philadelphia Inquirer
• 9th – Michael Sragow, The Baltimore Sun

Accolades

"We're very thankful to all of you out there for continuing to let us play in our corner of the sandbox."

–Co-Director Joel Coen while accepting the award for Best Director at the 80th Academy Awards

See also: List of accolades received by No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won four, including Best Picture. Additionally, Javier Bardem won Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role; the Coen brothers won Achievement in Directing (Best Director) and Best Adapted Screenplay. Other nominations included Best Film Editing (the Coen brothers as Roderick Jaynes), Best Cinematography (Roger Deakins), Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing.

Javier Bardem became the first Spanish actor to win an Oscar. "Thank you to the Coens for being crazy enough to think I could do that and put one of the most horrible hair cuts in history on my head," Bardem said in his acceptance speech at the 80th Academy Awards. He dedicated the award to Spain and to his mother, the Spanish movie and television actress Pilar Bardem, who accompanied him to the ceremony. "Mama, this is for you. This is for your grandparents and your parents, Rafael and Matilde, this is for the comedians of Spain who like you have brought dignity and pride to our profession. This is for Spain and this is for all of you," said Bardem, speaking in rapid Spanish.

While accepting the award for Best Director at the 80th Academy Awards, Joel Coen said that “Ethan and I have been making stories with movie cameras since we were kids”, recalling a Super 8 film they made titled “Henry Kissinger: Man on the Go”. “Honestly”, he said, “what we do now doesn't feel that much different from what we were doing then. We're very thankful to all of you out there for continuing to let us play in our corner of the sandbox." It was only the second time in Oscar history that two individuals shared the directing honor (Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins were the first, winning for 1961’s West Side Story).

The film was nominated for four Golden Globe Awards, winning two at the 65th Golden Globe Awards. Javier Bardem won Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture and the Coen brothers won Best Screenplay – Motion Picture. The film was also nominated for Best Motion Picture – Drama, and Best Director (Ethan Coen and Joel Coen). Earlier in 2007 it was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. The Screen Actors Guild gave a nomination nod to the cast for its "Outstanding Performance." The film won top honors at the Directors Guild of America Awards for Joel and Ethan Coen. The film was nominated for nine BAFTAs in 2008 and won in three categories; Joel and Ethan Coen winning the award for Best Director, Roger Deakins winning for Best Cinematography and Javier Bardem winning for Best Supporting Actor. It has also been awarded the David di Donatello for Best Foreign Film.

Consonant with the positive critical response, No Country for Old Men received widespread formal recognition from numerous North American critics' associations (New York Film Critics Circle, Toronto Film Critics Association, Washington D.C. Area Film Critics Association, National Board of Review, New York Film Critics Online, Chicago Film Critics Association, Boston Society of Film Critics, Austin Film Critics Association, and San Diego Film Critics Society). The American Film Institute listed it as an AFI Movie of the Year for 2007, and the Australian Film Critics Association and Houston Film Critics Society both voted it best film of 2007.

Disputes

In September 2008, Tommy Lee Jones announced that he was going to sue Paramount Pictures for $10 million, which he claims he is owed for his work on the film. Jones claimed he was not paid the correct bonuses and had expenses wrongly deducted.

In April 2010, Paramount, which distributed the 2007 best picture Oscar winner via its Paramount Vantage label, was forced to pay Jones a $15.0 million box office bonus when an arbitrator found the studio's lawyers had made an error in drafting Jones' deal to star in the movie.

In December 2011, Paramount tentatively prevailed in a legal dispute with a Morgan Stanley-backed film finance entity that claims it was cheated out of profits due to the hefty payment made to Jones. Morgan Stanley's Marathon Funding, which had a multipicture financing deal with Paramount, later cried foul, claiming its arrangement entitled it to 25 percent of "net distribution revenue" from the movie. The case went to trial in front of L.A. Superior Court Judge Mark Mooney, who on Dec. 22 issued a tentative ruling siding with the studio. Mooney has found that because Paramount's relationship with Marathon was not a joint venture, the studio did not owe Marathon a fiduciary duty and thus the charge was not inappropriate.

In popular culture

• In October 2010, armed robbers in northeast Dallas tossed a coin in order to decide whether or not to kill a victim. As reported in the British tabloid Daily Mail and The Dallas Morning News, “an armed robbery victim has told how he was spared from being killed after his attackers re-enacted a murder scene from the film No Country for Old Men. Victor Nowzari was cowering on the floor after being kicked and beaten by two men who had forced their way into his home in Texas, where the film was set. As they prepared to leave one of the robbers said he would flip a coin to decide if he should shoot the 22-year-old. Having won the toss, he was locked in a cupboard and told not to come out while the robbers fled. He said they stole a cell phone, $12, a guitar, computer speakers, glasses and an Adidas bag, into which they stuffed the rest of the loot.”

• In February 2008, the New York Observer published a political cartoon by cartoonist R.J. Matson “that borrows heavily from the film’s official poster. The left half of the image features the Republican heavy-weights George Bush senior, John McCain, and John Warner—the three of them grouped together above the film title. The right half of the image is filled by one of the film’s taglines: ‘You Can’t Stop What’s Coming.’ The immediate message of the cartoon is clear: McCain is being told by Bush and Warner that he is too old for the job of president. The cartoon could also be read more broadly, however, as a critique of the policies of George Bush junior, who was president when this cartoon as well as McCarthy’s novel and the Coen brothers’ film first appeared. Indeed, any of the film’s other taglines—‘There Are No Clean Getaways,’ ‘There Are No Laws Left,’ and ‘Nothing You Fear … Can Prepare You For Him’—could serve just as well to sum up the ways in which the Bush government responded to the September 11 terror attacks.”

• The character of Anton Chigurh was featured in Episode 19 of Season 20 of the American animated sitcom The Simpsons, titled Waverly Hills 9-0-2-1-D'oh, which aired on Fox in the United States on May 3, 2009. Chigurh, voiced by Javier Bardem’s soundalike Maurice LaMarche, played a city inspector and used his air gun to either validate Homer Simpson’s parking ticket or to blow a lock cylinder that eventually hits Homer in the head.

• A parody titled There Will Be Milkshakes for Old Men was featured in Episode 5 of Season 33 of NBC’s Saturday Night Live, which aired on February 23, 2008. Fred Armisen makes an appearance as Anton Chigurh, complete with deadly air tank and Javier Bardem pageboy, mimicking his famous “gas stop ‘Call-It’” scene. In addition, Bill Hader does an impression of the Oscar-winning Daniel Day-Lewis (from the film There Will Be Blood) envisioning the classic line “I drink your milkshake” as the basis for a Food Network show that finds Daniel Plainview criss-crossing the country in search of the perfect milkshake. The same Saturday Night Live episode also featured a skit of No Country for Old Men titled Grandkids in the Movies.

• Journalist William Russo commented on the old age of NBA’s Boston Celtics’ players. In an article in March 2011, Russo stated that “Kevin Garnett compared himself and fellow Boston Celtics to characters in the classic caper film Ocean’s 11, [where Garnett] immediately identified himself as the old expert (played by Carl Reiner).” He added, “in fact, there are many old movies [Garnett] might find himself emulating [including] No Country for Old Men: In rural Boston, welder and hunter Llewelyn Moss (Kevin Garnett) discovers the remains of playoff teams who have all killed each other in an exchange gone violently wrong. This puts the psychopathic killer, Anton Chigurh (LeBron James, [of the Miami Heat ]), on his trail. Meanwhile, the laconic Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Ray Allen) and his deputy (Paul Pierce) blithely oversee the investigation even as they struggle to face the sheer enormity of winning a second championship while the clock winds down.” Chris Bernucca adds that “in a league that quickly is becoming no country for old men, they are too something – determined, proud, stubborn, entitled – to simply move aside and let the young whippersnappers blow past them. Instead, they are trying to get everyone else to slow the heck down so they can keep up. You know that old adage about enjoying the journey? That’s not the Celtics, who are just trying to survive the trek in one piece and get to their destination. They don’t give a rat’s asterisk whom they inconvenience, annoy or aggravate along the way.”

• The character of Anton Chigurh was played by Actor Ike Barinholtz in the 2008 film Disaster Movie.

• Spanish Actor Carlos Areces spoofed the Anton Chigurh character in the 2009 film Spanish Movie.

• Spanish television New Year's special Es Bello Vivir (It’s a wonderful life), which premiered on December 31, 2008, contained a sketch mimicking the “gas stop scene” between Anton Chigurh and the proprietor.

• The scene where Anton Chigurh stops at a Texaco gas station, flips a coin and asks the proprietor to ‘call it’ was mimicked in a number of online sketches, including an independently-produced parody titled No Football for Old Men, starring Michael Cornacchia, Kirk Zipfel, and Luiggi Debiasse as Referee Anton Chigurh.

Bibliography

• Alvarez-López, Esther (2007), En/clave De Frontera, Homenaje Al Profesor, Urbano Vinuela Angulo, Oviedo, Spain: Publicaciones de la Universidad De Oviedo, ISBN 978-84-8317-681-8.

• Boule', Jean-Pierre; McCaffrey, Enda (2009), Existentialism and Contemporary Cinema: A Sartrean Perspective, Berghahn Books, ISBN 978-0-85745-320-4.

• Chapman King, Lynnea; Wallach, Rick; Welsh, Jim (2009), No Country for Old Men: From Novel to Film, Lanham: The Scarecrow Press, ISBN 978-0-8108-6729-1.

• Conard, Mark T. (2009), The Philosophy of The Coen Brothers, Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, ISBN 978-0-8131-2526-8.

• Cooper, Lydia R. (2011), No More Heroes: Narrative Perspective and Morality in Cormac McCarthy, Louisiana State University Press, ISBN 978-0-8071-3721-5.

• DiMare, Philip C. (2011), Movies in American History: An Encyclopedia, Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, LLC, ISBN 978-1-59884-296-8.

• Discepolo, Ciro (2011), Neither Our Country is No Country for Old Men, Napoli: Ricerca ’90.

• Doom, Ryan P. (2009), The Brothers Coen: Unique Characters of Violence, Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, LLC, ISBN 978-0-313-35598-1.

• Graham, Don (2011), State of Minds: Texas Culture & Its Discontents, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, ISBN 978-0-292-72361-0.

• Hurbis-Cherrier, Mick (2012), Voice & Vision: A Creative Approach to Narrative Film & DV Production, Second Edition, Burlington, MA: Focal Press/Elsevier, ISBN 978-0-240-81158-1.

• Kellner, Douglas (2010), Cinema Wars: Hollywood Film and Politics in the Bush-Cheney Era, Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, ISBN 978-1-4051-9823-3.

• Leitch, Thomas; Poague, Leland (2011), Wiley-Blackwell Companions to Film Directors: A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock, Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, ISBN 978-1-4051-8538-7.

• Luhr, William (2012), Film Noir, West Sussex, UK: John Wiley and Sons, ISBN 978-1-4051-4594-7.

• McMahon, Jennifer L.; Csaki, Steve (2010), The Philosophy of the Western, Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, ISBN 978-0-8131-2591-6.

• Monaco, Paul (2010), A History of American Movies: A Film-by-Film Look at the Art, Craft, and Business of Cinema, Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, ISBN 978-0-8108-7433-6.

• Olson, Danel (2011), 21st Century Gothic: Great Gothic Novels Since 2000, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, Inc., ISBN 978-0-8108-7728-3.

• Roman, James (2009), Bigger than Blockbusters: Movies that Defined America, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, ISBN 978-0-313-33995-0.

• Spurgeon, Sara L. (2011), Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses/No Country for Old Men/The Road, London: Continuum International Publishing Group, ISBN 978-0-8264-3820-1.

• Young, Alison (2010), The Scene of Violence: Cinema, Crime, Affect, New York, NY: Routledge, ISBN 978-0-415-49071-9.

Further reading

• Script of No Country for Old Men by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, based on the Novel by Cormac McCarthy (Draft), raindance.org
• Dialogue transcript of No Country for Old Men. Screenplay by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, based on the Novel by Cormac McCarthy, script-o-rama.com
• "At the Border: the Limits of Knowledge in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and No Country for Old Men," Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism, No. 1, 2010
• "No Country for Old Men: Out in all that dark, by Jim Emerson, November 27, 2007, “suntimes.com
• "Blood and time: Cormac McCarthy and the twilight of the West”, by Roger D. Hodge, Feb 2006, harpers.org
• "’No Country’ hits home" (a letter to Critic Roger Ebert), rogerebert.suntimes.com
• Killing Joke: The Coen brothers’ twists and turns, by David Denby, February 25, 2008, The New Yorker
• The Politics of Retirement: Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men after September 11, by Arne De Boever, June, 2009, Image & Narrative: Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative
• Rescripting the Western in 'No Country for Old Men', by Sergio Rizzo, January 14, 2011, PopMatters.com–PopMatters Media
• Politics and Film: Spiraling Downward: America in ‘Days Of Heaven,’ ‘In The Valley Of Elah,’ and ‘No Country For Old Men’, by Joan Mellen, November 16, 2005, joanmellen.net-appeared in a slightly different version in “FILM QUARTERLY, Vol. 61, No. 3, Spring 2008, University of California Press
• ‘No Country for old Men’ – Study of Coen’s Masterpiece, July 18, 2010, sachinwalia.net

External links

• Official movie website, “ParamountPictures.co.uk”
• No Country for Old Men at IMDb
• No Country for Old Men at the TCM Movie Database
• No Country for Old Men at AllMovie
• No Country for Old Men at Rotten Tomatoes
• No Country for Old Men at Metacritic
• No Country for Old Men at Box Office Mojo