No Country for Old Men: Fate and Circumstance in a Desert Land

This review was published originally in cinekklesia on March 22, 2008.

...even in the contest between man and steer the issue is not certain.

- Tommy Lee Jones as Ed Tom Bell

One of the most common reasons cited for stress is perceived lack of control. When a person senses that events "out there" are affecting his/her life directly and that he/she has no ability to stop said events, then anxiety sets it. Bad things are coming, and there is nothing to do but wait for the inevitable loss of employment, loss of health — whatever is defined as bad. Perceived control helps to provide structure and even meaning to our lives. If I commute to the office the same way, at the same time, every workday—and if that pattern holds true day in and day out—then I have a predictable structure that gives me a sense of control and even purpose. Anything that disrupts my commuting intentions adds some stress to my life, forcing me to recalibrate my plans and to re-establish the control that I so desire.

Yet, if we are honest with ourselves, we should acknowledge that the amount of control we have is very little (if we have any at all). Consistent patterns, while perhaps reassuring, by no means guarantee any particular outcome. Today may be the day in which the regular pattern of one's life is disrupted, whether through tragedy or mere inconvenience. To acknowledge our impotent stance before powers external to us is perhaps a hallmark of humility and wisdom, developed over years of hard experience.

This question of fate stands steadfastly in the center of the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men (2007), a serious, yet darkly humorous, crime thriller which recently won the Academy Award for Best Picture. We begin our tale with Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a Vietnam Vet living in Texas in 1980. While hunting solo in the desert, he makes an unusual find: several abandoned vehicles, a bunch of dead people, one (barely) live person, and a very large amount of cash. Clearly, Llewelyn has stumbled upon the results of a drug deal gone sour, and he has a classic moral choice to make: call the cops or take the money and run. (Viewers may remember a similar plot structure in Sam Raimi's A Simple Plan [1998].) Of course, Llewelyn chooses the latter (if he didn't, we wouldn't have much of a plot, would we?).

At first blush, it seems that Llewelyn has stumbled upon a gold mine: assuming the lone survivor doesn't live much longer in the desert heat, then there are no witnesses to his theft. However, he subsequently makes a choice that is arguably both moral and stupid, a choice which exposes his tracks to other parties interested in the loot. Enter Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), an expert tracker and killer who learns of Llewelyn's absconding with the cash. Anton is not a man with whom to mess around. Besides a large shotgun, his preferred weapon is a high-pressured oxygen tank that he is unafraid to use against door locks, people, and others who get in his way. Much of No Country for Old Men consists of a cat-and-mouse chase between Llewelyn and Anton through the seedy underside of the U.S.-Mexico border.

When he's not killing people and hunting Llewelyn, Anton seems to be honing a fatalistic philosophy that explains his actions. Despite the fear that his mere presence induces in those who know him, he implicitly sees himself as simply one part of a larger drama beyond anyone's control. He is destined to be wherever he ends up and to do whatever he ends up doing; in short, he is destined to kill.

One of his favorite instruments is the simple coin toss, which he invokes twice in the film to determine whether to kill a potential victim. While we commonly regard a coin toss as an instrument of chance, one also can see within it a fatalistic quality. Anton uses it to determine whether he is destined to kill somebody: the coin becomes for him a metaphysical lens by which he interprets reality and his function within it. When Llewellyn's wife, Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald), protests that "The coin don't have no say. It's just you," he responds, "Well, I got here the same way the coin did."

At this point, it might seem that such talk of fatalism is simply an excuse. Of course, Anton does have a choice; there is nobody putting a gun to his head and forcing him to rack up victims. Llewelyn, too, had a choice: if he had not taken the money, then the probability of his becoming Anton's prey would have been low (though, given Anton's propensity for killing seemingly random people, it would not have been zero). Yet, at some practical level, this talk of choice becomes moot. Llewelyn did take the money and now has to deal with the consequences; he has new choices to make, but no amount of "what if" thought experiments will change the underlying reality of his situation. In regards to Anton: his philosophical framework is firmly in place, so no amount of lecturing about "choices" will change the fact that if he feels destined to kill a certain person in a certain place at a certain time, then so be it.

The inevitability of such violence and injustice does, of course, wear down those who actively seek a different path. The local sheriff, Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), seeks to find Llewellyn before Anton gets to him; however, this case, like so many others, doesn't give him reason to rejoice in the human condition. Year in and year out, he sees people at their worst, and the futility of his career becomes unmistakable. If Llewelyn can't change the fact that he's running for his life because he took drug money, and if Anton's mind is fixed on his "destiny" as a purveyor of death, then why should Ed see his lot—his inevitable impotence in the face of injustice—any differently?

All of this talk about fatalism and futility is perhaps depressing. However, the recognition that we are participants in a reality much bigger than we is perhaps the first step in recalibrating our overly inflated images of ourselves. We are special insofar as God loves each one of us, but we are not special in relation to broader events that swirl all around us. We are not the center of our universe, and we cannot mitigate all of the unforeseen circumstances that press upon us. In his own (albeit immoral) way, Anton reminds us that life occasionally comes down to something as simple, fleeting, and unpredictable as a coin toss — a coin toss that has been years in the making.