NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN s WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY ETHAN AND JOEL COEN WITH TOMMY LEE JONES, JAVIER BARDEM, JOSH BROLIN, WOODY HARRELSON, KELLY MACDONALD, GARRET DILLAHUNT, AND TESS HARPER
I was especially bemused by the ready acceptance of Hannibal Lecter’s supernatural powers—his ability to convince a hostile prisoner in an adjoining cell to swallow his own tongue, for instance, or to know precisely when and where to reach Clarice, the movie’s heroine, on the phone. Anthony Hopkins’s Oscar-winning performance may be stark and commanding, but it wouldn’t have counted for beans if the audience hadn’t already been predisposed to accept this murderer as some sort of divine presence.
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The picture of human nature in No Country for Old Men is by contrast so bleak I wonder if it must provide for some a reassuring explanation for our defeatism and apathy in the face of atrocity. I admire the creativity and storytelling craft of the Coen brothers, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what use they think they’re putting that creativity and craft to. As I left the screening in Toronto, all I could think was, “America sure loves its mass murderers.” That conclusion was ratified by a line in the New York film festival’s blurb for the movie: “Wearing an unforgettably frightening pageboy and toting a cattle stun gun that’ll haunt your nightmares, Javier Bardem is Anton Chigurh, a psychopathic assassin of the highest order whose detachment is as shocking as the carnage photographed so gorgeously by DP Roger Deakins.”
Early in the film (and in the novel), Sheriff Bell recalls arresting a boy who killed a 14-year-old girl. Some people described it as a crime of passion, but Bell says the boy had wanted to kill someone for as long as he could remember, that he knew he was going to hell, and that he would kill again if he could. The story brings to mind the Misfit, a character in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” who randomly wipes out an entire family in a comparable act of nihilistic desperation.
