No country for old men

Surprisingly enough, this isn’t going to be a movie analysis about a sadistic hitman; as one might expect when it comes to the movie mentioned, and the author’s expertise in the depth of the human soul. My interpretation takes another turn.

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Labelled as a contemporary western, the movie really embraces many of the motives of the genre but also takes them further. The lonely cowboy, a man of honor and few words, faces a powerful and evil enemy. Only at the end of the day, we find ourselves wondering who that “man-of-the-code” might be among the characters, and who is the enemy?

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The outer layer of the movie tells three simultaneous stories. One of them about a war veteran, stubborn as a mule, who stumbles upon once-in-a-lifetime opportunity – a criminal deal gone wrong, a suitcase with 2 million dollars, and no witnesses. The second one starts somewhat ‘in the middle’, and as we follow the dead bodies, left by a mysterious killer, we experience a story with few clues as to where it started, and why. The viewers try to connect the dots through the ongoing police investigation – a third line of narrative – lead by a retiring policeman, who expresses his bedazzlement by how imposing the law had changed over the years.

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‘Some old town Sheriffs never even wore a gun…’ – Sheriff Bell claims in the prologue, calling men like his grandfather and father ‘old-timers’, and measuring his professional path with theirs, wondering how they would have handled what he deals with. As in the case where he had to arrest and testify against a 14-year-old boy, who claimed that he’d been planning to kill someone for a very long time; and do it not out of passion.

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‘I don’t know what to make of that’ – the Sheriff confesses.

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In the next scene we witness the escape of a strange-looking, quiet, but dangerous man, from a police station. At some point his intentions are clear – seize the guy, who put his hands on the drug money. A hitman hired to do his job. But there’s more to it. What makes Anton somewhat different than the other hitmen we encounter in the movie is the fact that he follows rules imposed on him…by himself. Leaded by his own code, at times random, he makes his way in the country as a man, whose desires have little to do with passion. He makes no excuses, and takes his responsibility to a level where social and professional hierarchy mean nothing. The only thing that matters is getting the job done. Besides being an outlaw, he represents a human being far beyond the laws of humans themselves.

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A perfect villain, I would say, that no one dares to challenge. Except Llewellyn Moss.

In the center of events (at first glance) is the cat-and-mouse hunt between Moss and the cold-blooded Anton. The pacing is slow, but tense, jumping from one scene to another, challenging the viewers to follow the lead of the story while gathering - all by themselves - the scattered pieces of evidence. Nothing is given on a silver platter, and probably this is one of the ways that the story absorbs you till the last moment. You have to build it up for yourself, you need to fill in the gaps, which brings both challenge to the table, but also frustration.

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Tension builds until the last part of the movie, where you find yourself wondering; ‘Is this Moss lying dead on the ground? How come he’s dead? Because…you know…he was right there a moment ago, alive and well, outsmarting his cunning and skillful hunter, on the verge of winning the grand prize and taking it home to his loved one…’.

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In this beautifully presented plot twist, Anton isn’t the one to take credit for the finished job. And the tense game between the two men has ended so abruptly, that it takes a while to assimilate what really happened, and was there some hint in the chain of events that you missed, but it pointed to how things will turn out. Something similar to how people try to find the logic behind a sudden event after it happened, how they tend to bargain their way out of it.

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The discrepancy between the characters in the movie and what western characters often represent is quite visible at the end. The lonely cowboy is not fighting for justice, revenge or love, but for money. And he ends up dead. The villain is the one who follows a code, a principle of sorts. Resourceful as he is, he fails in his main task. But he kills an innocent woman because of that same twisted code (because he said he would do it, what a promise!), and walks away with the money – so no justice there, too. No law is imposed, as the police once again loses track of the ‘bad guy’. Viewers’ expectations crumble to the ground, as there’s not a hint of what we call ‘moral of the story’.

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Sheriff Bill is nothing but a lonely spectator of this fuss. A witness, trying to make sense of it all, and as such he seems to be rather estranged from this mad race. Outliving his father, he probably sees himself as the old-timer now. And indeed - when you encounter something you don’t understand, how do you make sense of the world? The struggles, action, tension and all the drama in between Bill’s two short monologues at the beginning and the end of the movie, feel like a distraction, a whirlpool of events that makes you forget for a while that life is short, unpredictable and sometimes doesn’t make any sense. But still, as all living beings, we tend to clutch to this whirlpool, and hardly want to let go - neither Moss, nor Anton let go. We get sucked in our everyday struggles, in what life brings – as surprising or horrifying as it might be. And as the two men focus on each other with a persistence and stubbornness that swipe away everything else, a sudden, unexpected event cuts through their cat and mouse game, and takes one of them down; not in the slightest as initially predicted. As in life.

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As I said in the beginning – contrary to expectations – this isn’t a movie about a sadistic serial killer. Nor it’s a movie about a drug deal gone wrong. It’s a subtle reminder, almost unnoticeable in both ends of the story, of how fragile life is, and how lost one can become in its havoc.

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Was the world really a place of order, as the Sheriff described it in the beginning, or was this just a fantasy of his youth? The older he gets, the more this fantasy collapses under the pressure of chaos. Senselessness and lack of order didn’t take place suddenly, they were always there, undercover. And as age progresses, this lonely road starts to take its toll; human behavior, motivation and desires, stop making sense. Not because the world changed for the worse, but because there’s something deeply chaotic and illogical at the core of each human.

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Getting old is a lonely road. The dream of the Sheriff, met with silence by his wife, tells a story about a journey towards the dark and cold with his deceased father. Except there is no parent – dead or alive – that can help you out this maze. What do you say in the eyes of the fear from this inhuman enemy?

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The director’s cut right there leaves us with nothing more than silence.