"No Country For Old Men" digs deep into this parched soil and tries for deeper meaning, a result which is both good and bad for the audience. The Coens have always shown a fascination with Hollywood genres as vehicles for reworking American myth making.
They’ve explored, needled and skewered classic filmmakers like Capra ("The Hudsucker Proxy"), Sturges ("Intolerable Cruelty" and "O’ Brother, Where Art Thou") Huston / Hawks ("Miller’s Crossing" and "The Big Lebowski") and Wilder ("The Man Who Wasn’t There").
Now it seems they felt the need to take on the Western. "No Country" explodes any of the myths of the West left to us after such anti-Western Westerns as "The Unforgiven," in episodes so violent that even when only the aftermath is shown, we cringe.
In the classic Western, a hero faced down the hired gunslinger, no matter how cruel, evil, or tyrannical he seemed to be. "Shane" took down "Jack Wilson" (Jack Palance), Will Kane (Gary Cooper) killed Frank Miller (Ian McDonald) at "High Noon."
The Coens take for granted that the implacable hitman, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), the modern gunslinger, wins every showdown. The Coens don’t even bother to show us the final bloodbath when we expect that the apparent "hero," Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin), will face down the evil.
In fact, as in the first scene of destruction, we are shown only the aftermath, and its depiction is so quick and spare that we can’t piece it together, as if we are teased — that our fascination with violence will not be sated this time. The truth is greater than those details and the truth lies not in who killed who and why.
The traditional Western hero of this yarn is Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), whose weathered face and voice express his sadness of inevitable loss of all that he thought noble about the American West. He knows that all of his wisdom and calm courage means nothing in an age when chance, greed, and cruel savagery take every trick.
There is no place for heroes in this world. Winners are those who survive, not necessarily by being the cleverest, or fastest on the draw, but by predatory instinct, callousness, and sheer luck.
The post modern paradigm in control here is the coin toss. Like the noir heroes of an earlier film epoch, the hitman has a "code" that guides his actions. Just as Sam Spade’s code, which forced the denial of sentimentality to do his job, Anton Chigurh must pursue his victims by his own inexorable compass reading, deviating only to amuse himself occasionally by permitting chance to decide the fate of a tangential annoyance. Like a predatory cat, he can release a morsel or remorselessly squash it.
Against such power, the old hero knows he is "overmatched" as Sheriff Bell admits.
The Coens cannot escape their awareness of film history in setting scenes and action, quoting diverse sources as "Touch Of Evil," "North By Northwest" and even "The Terminator."
There is a conscious borrow from "High Noon" when Sheriff Bell bemoans his disillusionment with Ellis (Barry Corbin), a wheelchair bound former deputy, as Will Kane did with Martin (Lon Chaney, Jr.), the former sheriff.
It is the gift of the Coens (somewhat akin to Tarentino) to entertain us with these images and stories despite our revulsion, forcing us to laugh at the dark comedy about psychopaths and greedy, grimy, foolish people, maybe sensing that our lives could be touched at any time in similar insane ways if the coin flips the wrong way.
