No Country for Old Men: A Review

It’s taken me awhile to write about No Country for Old Men, the latest film from the Coen brothers. I saw it over a month ago, and it still is sticking with me. Yet, the darkness of the film is just so deep, it eludes comment. Maybe that darkness can best be described by the words of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, the hero played by Tommy Lee Jones. As he looks out over a vast Texas landscape, he mumbles the words, “I always figured when I got older, God would sorta come into my life somehow. And he didn't. I don't blame him. If I was him I would have the same opinion of me that he does.” And so there isn’t much reason to feel hope.

The film starts as a slow-moving chase. It begins with Llewelyn Moss, a ordinary guy in West Texas that happens to be out hunting one day when he comes across the leftovers of what appears to be a drug deal gone bad. Out in the middle of nowhere, he finds several vehicles, a few dead bodies, one guy who is clearly on the verge of dying, and a briefcase full of cash. Without too much hesitation, Moss ignores the dying man’s request for water and takes the briefcase and leaves. He heads home to his trailer, hides the briefcase underneath the building, and spends the evening with his wife.

It would be a clean getaway until, appropriately enough, his conscience gets the better of him. Lying awake in the middle of the night, he decides that he needs to give that man some water, and so he heads back out to the site. While there, his truck is discovered by men who are trying to retrieve the case, and so the chase is on.

We then wind up witnessing the story through three views. Moss is on the run, trying to stay ahead of the men who are hunting him down. Despite moments of cleverness and his best efforts to conceal, we quickly get the sense that he is simply over his head, and barring intervention, the end game for him will not be a positive one. He has several men after him, but none more ominous than Anton Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem. Chigurh is a Frankenstein-like monster who seems indifferent to life itself. He kills casually wherever he goes, and seems undeterred in his intent to hunt down Moss and kill him.

The third view is the Sheriff. He is the wise man of the film, trying to train a young deputy in the details of criminal investigation, while he seems to be growing increasingly concerned about the nature of this search. Throughout, it is Bell who seems to understand where this is heading, and supported by Jones’ typically excellent understated delivery, helps us feel his own sense of helplessness.

In one of the most powerful scenes in the film, he visits his dad, himself a retired sheriff. Ed Tom Bell’s conversation with his dad has the makings of a pretty typical conversation between old men (remember the title), as he pontificates about how much worse things seem to be getting. His dad provides the tough response that shapes a lot of this film, by essentially telling him that things really aren’t getting worse, they’re just as bad as they’ve always been.

His dad gives Ed Tom Bell a tough call for any that want to fight for good things in the world, but it’s a realistic call. Those that are called to work for good must deal with the reality that their work will often appear vain, as if they are merely providing the thumb in the dike when the flood is coming. It’s a call to work without any sense of immediate reward, and I expect it’s the experience of many who work for good in our world.

I tend to find myself drawn to the Coen brothers’ comedic fare, like O Brother, Where Art Thou? and The Big Lebowski. But there seems to be a connection between these films. In all of them, there is a searching for grace in the world that struggles to offer it. In No Country, they seem to propose an answer that in God’s silence, there simply is going to be no answer found.

It’s pretty bleak, but it has forced me to reflect on the rich tradition of lament within the Biblical corpus. It an important tradition that comprises much of the voice of the Psalms. But it’s also a voice that we don’t use much within the church today. No Country is a challenging reminder that we lose something when we lose that voice.

No Country deals with God’s silence and seems to conclude that no answer is coming because there is no one to offer an answer. The lament tradition within Scripture offers us a reminder that believers will in fact experience seasons where we feel God’s silence as vividly as this film. But it offers a language to pour that aching over God’s seeming absence back to God Himself, converting what would be a kind of rejection into a form of worship. The wisdom of the lament tradition is that in can offer us a path that can take us from the darkest places to the true source of comfort.

As I said, I struggled with what to say about No Country for Old Men. When one encounters such a pervasive picture of depravity and emptiness, my own gut reaction is simply to remain silent. Scripture’s lament tradition offers a different voice, modeling for us a way to speak to the Silence, longing for the day when the Voice will be heard again.