No Country for Old Men (2007)
Decided to rewatch this. I've first seen it what must have been near 15 years ago and only remembered parts of it. No Country for Old Men is a movie about a Vietnam Vet (Josh Brolin) attempting to secure a suitcase full of money he found at the scene of a shootout from a relentless killer (Javier Bardem) , who is in turn pursued, if not very effectively, by the local sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones).
Adapted by the Coen Brothers from a Cormac McCarthy novel (an author, I'll admit, I haven't read a single thing from) it's widely regarded as the quintessential modern western and one of the Coens most acclaimed movies. Rewatching it after all this time was an interesting experience. Seeing it as a teenager, closer to when it came out, I very much bought into Javier Bardem's assassin Anton Chigurh as this nearly mythical figure, this embodiment of an unstoppable force no mere mortal could ever touch. Watching it now, No Country feels much more like a story about the inability of an entire society to deal with a single man.
Chigurh is a badass, make no mistake, but there were multiple times he could have been taken out. His introductory scene sees him escape arrest because he was poorly handcuffed while the deputy had his back turned to him. Much later in the movie Brolin's Llewellyn had a chance to shoot him point blank served to him on a silver platter, but he hesitated to pull the trigger. All of which makes No Country feel much less like a movie about some inevitable and insurmountable evil that haunts the American frontier as it does like a cautionary tale about underestimating or being too afraid to confront it.
Thinking back to the scene just before the movies ending, the car crash that ends up crippling Chigurh, I found it difficult to see the point in it. But in retrospect it appears to have been the movies way to emphasize that this larger than life killer who decides over life and death via coin flip like some sort of Batman villain, isn't some invincible demon, but a man who bleeds like everyone else. All of which appears to make No Country an example of the old truism that all that's necessary for evil to succeed is for good to do nothing.
Good, as far as the movie is concerned, is too afraid, too complacent, too old and too naive to rise to the challenge. Chigurh turning the rugged, ruthless individualism that conquered the old west back against the civilised society that grew on top of it and has long forgotten how to deal with it. The violence never went away, it never even changed all that much, it just became easier and more convenient to ignore. Jones's Sheriff Bell retiring at the end after failing to restore anything resembling justice is difficult to read as anything other than an admission of defeat. If there is such a thing as justice, it's not going to be "old men" like him that are going to bring it to the people.
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