It's easy to state the plot of this film but oh, so difficult to understand it. Llewelyn, a pseudo white trailer trash vet in Texas stumbles onto a dope deal gone bad and absconds with the money. Both sides come after him. The syndicate psychopathic enforcer Chigurh is a little too heavy handed for his bosses, so they put out a contract on him. The sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) is distressed as the body count keeps mounting, and the vet has to placate his family. Simple enough. A lot of bloodshed especially from the psychopathic enforcer Chigurh which is what stands out about the movie. Otherwise the plot is rather pedestrian in my opinion. It's a bunch of greedy people doing what greedy people do, and the local law is overwhelmed. A friend of mine was thinking of seeing it and when I told him it was the bloody aftermath of a dope deal gone bad, he said, "Is there any such thing as a good dope deal?" He showed more imagination in that statement than does the whole movie, so if I leave this to my reader's imagination, the workings of the plot, I'm not keeping anything from you. There is the one exception, Chigurh, who in a way is like Blanche in Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire in that he is a central and complex character around whom all the energy revolves. After his tour de force performance, he ends the same way Blanche did, walking away with dignity leaning his arm on helpful strangers. The movie as a whole can only be understood by understanding this character, and he is not easy to understand.

The second enforcer, sent to get him, is a cowboy in a white hat, and for a while at least it seems like he is going to save the day. What he does give us is at least a partial explanation of the psychopath Chigurh. Chigurh, he tells us, is not a man without principles. He has his own principles which he strictly adheres to. But the movie doesn't tell us in so many words what they are. We are left to our own devices to figure it out. I can tell you what, and then you'll understand the movie, but I don't know who else will explain it to you. Let's figure it out together.

What's that French saying? Cherchez la femme. In a cast of evil characters, look for the woman. Let's start with the vet's mother-in-law who appears in but one scene, a taxi ride to the station. They are on their way to a secret rendezvous with the man who took the money. She never did like him, she tells her daughter. Even before they were married she knew he was no good for her. Well, thanks for your opinion of a man who served his country and from all we see treats his wife decent enough though he has a stubborn streak.

When the taxi pulls into the station, a smartly dressed and polite Mexican hombre holds the door for her and offers to help her with her bags. She's thankful for the assist. She says she's never had a Mexican offer to help her like that before. Well, duh. But she trusts this stranger right away. He is very solicitous, asking where she is going and where she is staying.

I covered something similar in my review of American Beauty. In that movie there were also occurrences of people being helpful but with ulterior motives, which was pegged by Solomon in the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes: "the place of righteousness, that iniquity was there" (ch. 3:16).

Solomon, now who was he? Well, he was once a king of Israel famous for his wisdom. He was wiser, we are told, than all the kings of the East. He wrote the words—3000 years ago—to a contemporary popular song. The Byrds' Turn, Turn, Turn. Straight from the first half of the third chapter of Ecclesiastes. The second half of that chapter was the root material for American Beauty, as I showed in my review. That movie won some Academy Awards, and so did No Country For Old Men. If it worked once, maybe it will work again, making a movie based on some of wise Solomon's material. Looks to me like that's exactly what happened.

Now, who's going to explain this to you? The Jews, I'm sure, know their scriptures, but perhaps they are profiting somehow from it and want to keep a trade secret. The Christians for their part tend to favor certain books of the Bible over others, and Ecclesiastes doesn't fare too well in the shuffle, being regarded as dark and earthly. How about somebody who just reads the Bible as literature? Maybe you'd have as good of luck from him as from anyone. What about me?

There's a story of the Queen of Sheba paying Solomon a visit to put him in his place, but he ended up flabbergasting her with his court life, his riches, and his wisdom. I once tried dating a girl from Yemen—the erstwhile territory of Sheba—, and rather than me impressing her any, she ended up putting me in my place. After that fiasco my estimation of Solomon went up considerably. If there is something Solomon wrote and it gets made into a movie, or ends up there, I'm right on it. Here it's just two verses but they enable us to understand Chigurh and the whole movie.

(Eccl. 9:11-12)
"I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. For man also knoweth not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them." There is, to be sure, a lot of sudden death in this movie, the soon-to-be-deceased not in the least expecting it. Solomon likens it to fish suddenly taken in a net or a bird in a snare, so let's start with that analogy.

In the movie there are two scenes where Llewelyn shoots an animal that wasn't expecting to die, so let's start there, as this takes on a whole unexpected importance in understanding the rest. The opening scene is of the hunter sighting in with a scope on a deer below on the plain. He sets the range and then pulls the trigger, and the deer knows nothing until it's hit, then they all stampede. An unexpected hit on the prey down below just as a fish down there in the water gets surprised by the net.

The second is a bit different. He has already taken the money and the pistol that was in there with it, but then the dope dealers find him in the open at night and give chase. He eludes them until he reaches the bank of the river, then tumbles down it and into the water to swim away. They send their attack dog after him. He swims and the dog paddles.

Eventually he washes up on the shore and moves up the bank. He takes out the pistol and some bullets. Very good. He's been practicing firearm safety, not carrying the pistol loaded. What about the dog? Oh, it's coming.

As the dog emerges from the water and comes barreling down the shore, he meticulously checks the pistol's action, loads a bullet into the chamber, and for good measure inserts the clip. He has just enough time to do all that before the dog leaps at him. You didn't expect him to be shooting at the dog, did you? How was he going to hit it? No, the target was too small and moving too fast even for an expert marksman to hit. The only hope of shooting the beast is point blank at the last instant when it's a big target and can't be missed. Sort of like when you swing at a pitched baseball, you have to wait until it's right there to swing, not before or after. Only the baseball isn't going to knock into you anyway even if you hit it. Better not flinch.

We'd already seen him practice firearm safety. Now we get to see him practice gun control. In Texas gun control is a steady hand. I thought this was a well shot scene, and it's our first real inkling that he is a combat veteran, the way he knows his stuff and stays cool in battle.

Those two shots serve as an analogy to the human deaths in the movie. They come in two classes: The innocent farmers and home town people who are just going about their regular business and then are suddenly killed, they are like the grazing deer shot from nowhere. And the aggressors in the drug war who themselves get suddenly taken out, they are like that attack dog who gets it rather than gives it. The dog got taken in flight just like the bird in the snare. See, we're already beginning to understand the movie.

Early in the movie, Chigurh buys a candy bar at a small mom and pop store, but he'd just as soon kill the owner as talk to him, so the guy's friendly attempt at conversation gets taken amiss. Here is where Chigurh waxes loquacious and where we can figure out his principles from the subtext of his conversation. He repeatedly asks the old store owner, how he came to own the store, until he gets the story of where he was from, where he'd moved to, and how he'd inherited the store from his wife's family. A little too much for casual conversation, but that's what he wanted to know.

Secondly, he wanted to know when closing time was. "When it gets dark." If you look for the subtext here of why he was planning to kill the guy, it's because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, which seems to be why he kills everybody else in the movie. But that's why the fishes and the bird get taken (by the net and the snare), for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I don't like his principles, but if we understand them, we understand the movie better.

But Chigurh offers the store owner a chance, to call a flipped coin, heads or tails. Oh yes, there's always a chance the net will break or the snare will fail. It's "time and chance [that] happeneth to them all." If you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and your luck runs out, you die. That's his principles in their entirety.

I know it doesn't make sense, and he gets challenged on it often enough in the movie. "This doesn't have to happen!" Or, "We can work something out." A lot of times people are about to die, or their friends have died, and it doesn't make any sense that it happens(ed). People have been known to rail at the fates, right? Asking why it happened or is going to happen when it doesn't need to. Here in the movie the impersonal fates are a real person, a psychopath who will kill them anyway, which seems to be the response we get from fate. Unless they luck out, that is.

It's not a very pleasant theme, but there it is, and it runs through the whole movie, start to finish. Let's get back to the start.

Llewelyn in going after the wounded deer perceives something else having happened on the field. A combat veteran knows to be aware of all his surroundings, not just his primary goal. He finds the remains of a recent gun battle at a drug deal gone sour. There are bodies all around, there's the dope in the pickup, but where's the cash? He needs to find the LMS (last man standing). In a heated gun battle, there is always a last man standing. He'll find him in the shade. Alas, but he didn't receive medical attention in time so he died. So we see, "The battle is not to the strong." He relieves him of a case full of money.

Can he keep it away from the bad guys who are sure to come looking for it? He does a good job, I think, of protecting it. He travels armed. He registers anonymously at a motel. He scouts it before returning. He has figured out a way to retrieve it from another room if he can't return to his own room. He changes hotel, bribes the desk clerk to alert him to new guests, and discovers how they were tracking it. He shoots it out, makes his escape, then stashes it at the border. He does all the right things to protect the money, "yet riches are not to men of understanding."

How about just escaping the bad guys? Here let's give him credit for consistently staying one step ahead of them. And he may well make it if not for one thing. You know the song Mother-in-Law:
"If she leave us alone,
We would have a happy home."
Let's write that off to, "the race being not to the swift."

Let's turn our attention to the sheriff. He's an old and experienced lawman. I'm reminded of a study I heard about of how people play chess. They tabulated how many options they went through before making their moves and found that old people checked out fewer options but played every bit as well as the young regardless. It was chalked up to their experience.

The old sheriff is that way. He passes on a lot of the legwork, but seems able to work things out pretty well nevertheless. He tells Llewelyn's wife the story of a wise beefman. He figured out the best way to slaughter them. He drugged them, then raised them chained upside down and shot them in the head with a rod from a hose attached to a pressurized tank. The rod would get sucked all the way into their brains and kill them instantly, and then he could carve up the meat.

One time, though, a big steer awoke while still chained and started thrashing around. He tried to administer the head shot but because it was thrashing, the rod struck a glancing blow and ricocheted around and hit the man in the shoulder and he lost the use of his arm. Yes, it's "neither yet bread to the wise," or as the sheriff put it, "even in a contest between man and steer, the outcome is not certain."

What about Chigurh? Well, he's a man of principle and adheres to his principles even when they are against him. We see him carefully driving through a quiet residential neighborhood to make his escape from a hit, but a person being careful doesn't mean the other guy is going to give him a break, "nor yet favour to men of skill." Rather than railing at fate, he merely takes his chances whether there is anyone nearby to give him the immediate medical aid he needs.

As John W. Whitehead tells us in his work, Grasping for the Wind—the search for meaning in the 20th century—, movies today fulfill the role that paintings once played in another time, to provide a forum for discussing God and religion. No Country For Old Men certainly gives us a lot to think about or discuss—but you might want to wait until after the first date to tackle these subjects. Here is one such conversation, from Michael Grant, Retribution (New York: HarperCollins, 1995) p. 75:
     "No, I don't have any aspirations."
     "Why not?"
     "Because it's all [baloney]," he snapped, surprised at the vehemence in his tone.
     She pulled away to get a better look at him. "Why is it [baloney]?"
     He pointed to the window. "Look out there. Thousands of people chasing their dreams. And for what? Tomorrow they could be the victims of a drive-by shooting; next year they could be dead from cancer."
     "There are no guarantees in life."
     "Right. So why bother knocking yourself out?"
     She looked at him in genuine puzzlement. "You mean you have no goals?"
     He returned her gaze. "None. I take it one day at a time."
He really used a stronger word than baloney which I am not allowed to use in this review. In the Bible, in the book of Ecclesiastes, it's called vanity, which is repeated throughout the book. The wise preacher looks out at this world and sees a lot of vanity everywhere. The baloney-meter reads very high.

Solomon ends (12:1-7, 13-14) with wise admonitions to use this life to prepare for eternity. The sheriff seems to realize he is not at the right place in his dangerous job at this time of life: no country for old men, and he ends with dreams of a better place.


Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age