And I couldn’t wait to see the film.
Hollywood often takes good novels and turns them into bad movies. Last
Sunday the Motion Picture Academy awarded “No Country for Old Men” the
Oscar for Best Film of the year.
Josh Brolin plays Lew Moss, a Viet Nam veteran who while out hunting
stumbles upon a drug deal gone bad. The desert floor is littered with
dead bodies. It is a place good men do not belong. Moss eventually
discovers 2 million dollars in drug money and takes it putting in motion
a chain of violence that is uncontained and unconcerned with whom it
touches.
He is pursued my Mexican mobsters and an assassin named Anton Chigurh,
played with chilling dispassion by Javier Bardem. Chigurh views himself
as the hand of providence, but he is in reality evil personified.
Perhaps he is Satan himself, a disinterested prosecutor “Roaming the
earth and going back and forth in it” visiting destruction on the guilty
and innocent alike. He kills deliberately and without mercy. He is, as
a friend so eloquently put it, “the bringer of the ultimate, unforgiving
pain. Everyone in the film keeps trying to figure him out - to find him,
to thwart him, to survive him. Nobody does.” You can’t outrun the devil.
The entire bloody mess is dumped in the lap of small town Sheriff Ed
Bell played by Tommy Lee Jones. He is wise, patient and brave. At the
end of the day, however, he is simply not up to the task. Battling evil
is a job for younger men so he chooses to hang up his guns, to sit on
the sidelines playing checkers with other old men. It is part of what
is brilliant about the film. We want to root for Bell, but can’t. He is
no hero. He is a cynic. He is everyman. He is each and every one of
us that out of fear, exhaustion or just plain apathy fails to act; fails
to do what we know to be right; leaves the job unfinished for those that
will come after us. Bell complains that times have changed. But we
realize that the bad that is currently walking the earth is the same
evil that has always been and will always be. Chigurh cannot die
because he is eternal.
McCarthy says that our choices reverberate through time – that we are
all pieces of a great cosmic puzzle attached through blood or through
time. Bad decisions put into motion events that ripple outward affecting
not just you, but everyone in your life and even people you don’t know.
Like the coin the killer flips to decide whether or not to kill an old
store owner evil travels sometimes miles at a time before landing in the
hip pocket of some unsuspecting and innocent person. There is no such
thing as fate. We are all simply standing in the pathway of a million
and one bad decisions often made by people we don’t’ even know. Early
in the film Josh Brolin says to his wife, “I’m fixin’ to do somethin’
dummer ‘n’ Hell.” He does. And hell follows.
The Cohen Brothers eschew a neat and tidy “Hollywood” ending. But the
film ultimately offers us hope. For if the former is true then it must
also follow that when we make good decisions we unleash good into the
world. So perhaps the real cynics are those that hold the only way to
battle evil is by lesser evil.
Yes, clearly there may be a dark side to my wife that I have somehow
missed in the 20 years I have known her. That is certainly a
possibility. But she certainly knows a good book when she reads one.
“No country for Old Men” is a great book. It is also a great film.
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