by J.C. Phillips 

“Honey you should read this book.” My wife passed me her copy of Cormac McCarthy’s “No country for Old Men.” As I turned the pages devouring McCarthy’s prose I thought, “There is clearly a side to my wife that I do not know.” The novel was dark, brooding, and exceptionally violent and at the time I thought extremely cynical. “There is no hope here,” I thought. “Life and death are both merciless and mysterious sometimes determined by no more than a flip of a coin.” Needless to say, I couldn’t put the book down.

And I couldn’t wait to see the film. Hollywood often takes good novels and turns them into bad movies. Last Sunday the Motion Picture Academy awarded “No Country for Old Men” the Oscar for Best Film of the year.

Josh Brolin plays Lew Moss, a Viet Nam veteran who while out hunting stumbles upon a drug deal gone bad. The desert floor is littered with dead bodies. It is a place good men do not belong. Moss eventually discovers 2 million dollars in drug money and takes it putting in motion a chain of violence that is uncontained and unconcerned with whom it touches.

He is pursued my Mexican mobsters and an assassin named Anton Chigurh, played with chilling dispassion by Javier Bardem. Chigurh views himself as the hand of providence, but he is in reality evil personified. Perhaps he is Satan himself, a disinterested prosecutor “Roaming the earth and going back and forth in it” visiting destruction on the guilty and innocent alike. He kills deliberately and without mercy. He is, as a friend so eloquently put it, “the bringer of the ultimate, unforgiving pain. Everyone in the film keeps trying to figure him out - to find him, to thwart him, to survive him. Nobody does.” You can’t outrun the devil.

The entire bloody mess is dumped in the lap of small town Sheriff Ed Bell played by Tommy Lee Jones. He is wise, patient and brave. At the end of the day, however, he is simply not up to the task. Battling evil is a job for younger men so he chooses to hang up his guns, to sit on the sidelines playing checkers with other old men. It is part of what is brilliant about the film. We want to root for Bell, but can’t. He is no hero. He is a cynic. He is everyman. He is each and every one of us that out of fear, exhaustion or just plain apathy fails to act; fails to do what we know to be right; leaves the job unfinished for those that will come after us. Bell complains that times have changed. But we realize that the bad that is currently walking the earth is the same evil that has always been and will always be. Chigurh cannot die because he is eternal. 

McCarthy says that our choices reverberate through time – that we are all pieces of a great cosmic puzzle attached through blood or through time. Bad decisions put into motion events that ripple outward affecting not just you, but everyone in your life and even people you don’t know. Like the coin the killer flips to decide whether or not to kill an old store owner evil travels sometimes miles at a time before landing in the hip pocket of some unsuspecting and innocent person. There is no such thing as fate. We are all simply standing in the pathway of a million and one bad decisions often made by people we don’t’ even know. Early in the film Josh Brolin says to his wife, “I’m fixin’ to do somethin’ dummer ‘n’ Hell.” He does. And hell follows. 

The Cohen Brothers eschew a neat and tidy “Hollywood” ending. But the film ultimately offers us hope. For if the former is true then it must also follow that when we make good decisions we unleash good into the world. So perhaps the real cynics are those that hold the only way to battle evil is by lesser evil. 

Yes, clearly there may be a dark side to my wife that I have somehow missed in the 20 years I have known her. That is certainly a possibility. But she certainly knows a good book when she reads one. “No country for Old Men” is a great book. It is also a great film.