What makes No Country For Old Men a great film?

There’s been much talk and debate ever since this film was released and won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, about its artistic and narrative merit.  Comments from naysayers vary from “It’s a pointless, plotless affair in pretentious filmmaking” to “dafuq did I just watch?”, while accolades from yay-sayers range between carried-away OMFGs and “the Coen brothers have weaved pure cinematic gold...instant classic.” I, under the pretense of having something new to add, will make a vain attempt here to justify why No Country For Old Men is the rightful recepient of the title of not only the best film of the year 2007 but also the best film of the decade 2000s and, at the end of the century, the heir to the title The Godfather held in the 20^th century: the best film of the century.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

I usually am not one to analyze and dissect films or other forms of stories, and in fact that is the least of my intentions here. After all, movies I firmly believe should be open to subjective interpretation, not to objective analysis, and each person should be entitled to conceive it in any way they choose. But there is a good deal of backstory and context within which the film makes sense and sheds more light on the characters, their beliefs and motivations, and all the underlying richness of the film. This context is what I wish to explore, not just partially as I will do here but in greater depth in future through other novels of Cormac McCarthy (especially The Sunset Limited, which I need to re-watch).

So, first things first: the protagonist of the film. Most people believe that since the antagonist is Anton Chigurh, the protagonist must be the guy he is chasing, the hunter Llewelyn Moss. He’s not. As uncoventional as it may seem, the protagonist is actually the sheriff Ed Tom Bell, the narrator of the film. Despite him not being physically present in most of the events, the entire film is actually told from his perspective. There is no rule written anywhere that the lead character of a story must be present for a precise number of onscreen minutes, nor that the story must physically revolve around him. What determines whether he is the lead or not, however, is the perspective: is the moral compass of the movie, for the most part anyway, inclined relative to the character in question? It could be very subtle, but perspectives, like assholes, are always present. That’s what makes a film work, even if you can’t verbalize or analyze it.

Secondly, the era. The film is not set in modern-day Texas but in 1980. This is easily deductible through the general setting of the film, including cars, and through Chigurh’s words exchanged with a shop owner he intends to kill:  “You know what date is on this coin? 1958. It's been traveling 22 years to get here. And now it’s here.” 1958 + 22 = 1980. The reason I mention this is because era is one of the most important aspects of the context of this film, the hint to which is in the very title of the movie. As a matter of fact, era is important to the context of any film, even if its moralities are timeless and omnipresent, but I must resist digressing towards unnecessary generalities.

Now, the key to understanding this film lies in the opening monologue by the narrator, Sheriff Bell. I’ll reproduce it here only in its relevance:

I was sheriff of this county when I was 25 years old. Hard to believe. My grandfather was a lawman. Father too. Me and him was sheriffs at the same time, him up in Plano and me out here. ... Some of the old-time sheriffs never even wore a gun. A lot of folks find that hard to believe. Jim Scarborough never carried one. ... Gaston Boykins wouldn’t wear one up in Comanche County. I always liked to hear about the old-timers. Never missed a chance to do so. You can’t help but compare yourself against the old-timers. Can’t help but wonder how they’d have operated these times. There’s this boy I sent to the electric chair at Huntsville here a while back. ... He killed a 14-year-old girl. Paper said it was a crime of passion, but he told me there wasn’t any passion to it. Told me he’d been planning to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember. Said if they turned him out, he’d do it again. Said he knew he was going to hell. Be there in about 15 minutes. I don’t know what to make of that. I surely don’t. The crime you see now, it’s hard to even take its measure. It’s not that I’m afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job. But I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He'd have to say, "O.K., I'll be part of this world."

(Ah, the calm, comforting resignation with which Tommy Lee Jones utters these words is just priceless!)

As I mentioned above, it’s 1980. Richard Nixon had declared War on Drugs in 1971, and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was established in 1973 for this purpose. DEA took its job seriously, as it does to this day, and busted pretty much every single “lab” (the jargon for places, including shady basements, where drugs like cocaine, heroine, etc. are manufactured or “cooked”) and incarcerated most drug dealers, distributors, and users. DEA was only getting stronger and more well-established, and the future for those who depended on home-grown illegal drugs didn’t look very promising. By 1980, the organization had become strong enough that if you cooked within the US, DEA would hunt you down. That was the trend. In such difficult times, the demand for imported illegal drugs rose exponentially. Afterall, DEA couldn’t bust labs situated in countries outside their jurisdiction. Their neighboring country, Mexico, where drug laws hardly existed and crime was a way of life, was the perfect haven to cook and import drugs from. And since Mexico shares her border with Texas, Texas acted as the gateway for illegal drugs into the US, importing not only drugs but also the perils and heinous crimes that go with it – thus breeding the infamous “Mexican drug cartel.” A new wave of crime was beginning to spread through the country – mindless, passionless, cold, brutal, unmotivated, unforgiving – in other words, the embodiment that is Anton Chigurh.

Chigurh is the physical manifestation of a characteristic drug trafficking trade gone wrong and its ensuing chaos – beginning with a killing spree at the location of the exchange and followed by money missing and the pursuit of it involving a range of insensible, incomprehensible murders. The events leading up to the initial massacre are kept as vague as possible to give it the look and feel of generality; to imply that it’s not important specifically what caused the massacre because although causative reasons might vary with each such massacre, the factor they all have in common is deception and betrayal centered around money. That’s how it begins – without a specific beginning. And if you watch the film closely enough, when Moss is killed at the end of the hunt, you are shown neither the act of killing itself, nor the killers and nor the bodies clearly enough, just the sheriff’s perspective from his car as he witnesses things from a distance and approaches the scene of crime to find two floating bodies in the pool. The end of the hunt is also kept as vague as possible, to give it the same feel of generality as the ordeal’s beginning. It’s a film without a beginning or an end.

As the end approaches, it becomes increasingly clear that Chigurh isn’t even pursuing Moss for the money. It appears so initially when he tracks Moss through a tracker hidden inside the case, but even after Moss gets rid of the money, Chigurh continues pursuing him anyway. He was never after the money, only the sadistic thrill of the kill. (In fact, Chigurh kills Moss' wife because "I gave him my word.") The Cartel doesn’t kill Moss for the money either, only to send out the message not to fuck with them, to not put your nose where it doesn’t belong even by chance. And when the sheriff comes face-to-face with the aftermath of all these atrocities he is struggling to comprehend, he is all but nostalgic about a time gone by when crime used to be much simpler to understand, when murder came with motive, when no one killed without reason, when criminals were easier to deal with – the tone with which he utters the opening monologue which if you go back up and read will tell you why he believes he is no longer lives in a country for old men like him but is instead trying to find his place in such a world. His nostalgia isn’t reflected just in the opening voice-over monologue alone but also in the ending monologue where he tells his wife the dream he had the other night about his father.

But the most pivotal and perhaps the best part of the film is the penultimate scene where the sheriff visits his elder wheelchair-bound brother who tell hims the story of how their uncle was killed in 1909, trying to convince him that he isn’t dealing with anything new, that this country has always been hard on people, and that he “can’t stop what’s comin’.”

No Country For Old Men is a film where everything came together to make the perfect symphony.
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Favorite dialogue from the movie:
Moss: "Is he dangerous?"
Carson Wells: "Compared to what? The Bubonic plague?"

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