No Country for Old Men

Generations of critics have argued that one of the things that makes American cinema such a powerful reflection of, and enticing advertisement for, that country's popular culture and self-proclaimed identity is the belief it so often articulates in the power of individuals to shape their own destinies. Force of will, personal enterprise and a willingness to travel with hope in your heart are all you need. No Country for Old Men critiques that preferred self-image and cinematic approach on at least two levels. The most immediately obvious is filmic and generic: No Country revisits and revisions the genre largely responsible for creating the myth of America in the first instance. It is a modern-day Western in which the New Frontier has become old; where the civilising tide of law has rolled back to leave a desert of unrestrained violence and avarice; in which crossing the border into Mexico no longer carries with it the hope of release, be it actual or symbolic.
Of yet more fundamental import, however, is the distinctive and remarkably insistent nature of the philosophical perspective driving such generic experimentation in the first place. In a work so utterly in thrall to the idea of fate, anywhere—even the land of opportunity—is transformed into that of destiny. You never have to visit Texas or stumble across an ill-gotten two million to be faced with your own mundane version of what confronts protagonists here. By dint of superb characterisation and performance Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh will probably become one of cinema's most vividly remembered killing machines. A mark of No Country for Old Mens coherence and consistency as philosophical statement is the thing the film presents as the most telling symptom of the character's madness. In two remarkable scenes he compels an innocent to call the toss of coin; their lives depend on the success of their guess. What's portrayed as most inexplicable here is not Chigurh's soulless disregard for human life (nor his truly terrifying haircut, though it's a close-run thing). Rather, it's his misguided belief in chance and choice as factors that really can shape individual destiny, even if only in the most rudimentary form possible: the turn of a coin, Heads or Tails, A or B, this or that, live or die. By contrast, Sheriff Bell's moving account of an elliptical dream which suggests to him that his way has already been prepared (though he has no concrete idea of what it might ultimately be) is the supreme mark given of his sanity and hard-won self-awareness. In proposing a truly uncompromising view of life as a coin with but one side, and having the intellectual and emotional rigour to apply it consistently and implacably across its narrative, No Country for Old Men stops us all from running just long enough to ask ourselves from what, and why.