No Country for Old Men

You could be forgiven for checking the soles of your shoes for bloodstains as you leave this movie. It gets very squelchy underfoot as the bodies pile up. This is not for the squeamish but it is the film that scooped the highest popularity prizes at this year’s Oscars. So what does that say about what we love to watch? How come we love to look so closely into the heart of our darkness.

Created by the Coen brothers, whose tragic-comic vision dominates American cinema, No country... is the story of a crime that turns into a massacre and the struggle of good men to redeem something from the human wreckage left behind.

That’s a scenario that fits well with a country locked into a senseless war. Iraq doesn’t need to be mentioned as no country for old men, but America’s south-west is no less unforgiving as a landscape for all human beings.

It’s beautiful but bleak, even apocalyptic at times. Death is senseless and shameful in its casual frequency. Drugs and the criminal gangs that trade them have corrupted respect for life and devalued the cost of everything.

I saw the movie on the same night our police struggled to control gang-provoked street violence around parties in Auckland and Whangarei. This is not simply a movie for Americans.

The human landscape of the film is as dried out as the desert itself. The characters move restlessly, driving pickup trucks through a world of trailer parks, downmarket motels and empty highways. Not a church in sight.
There is Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, played with laconic and understated brilliance by Tommy Lee Jones, and with rather more moral ambiguity, the fugitive Llewelyn Moss pursued by a psychopathic killer called Anton Chigurh.

Ed and Llewelyn do their best to find justice and protect loved ones, but Llewelyn is outwitted and overwhelmed and honest Ed the sheriff confesses that he is ‘outmatched’ by the weight of evil around him.

Maybe God will speak up and show up somewhere obvious and soon, he muses. But God doesn’t oblige, not obviously anyway. So what can good men and women do when the present world implodes around them and the future turns dark? Remember, all this is being posed on the big screen in the name of popular entertainment with a carton of popcorn in your hand. It’s a sobering thought for churches reluctant to talk too much about sin and evil in case it scares the new seekers and the old supporters.

Sheriff Ed marks his defeat by retiring, despite his old uncle’s advice that you’ve got to keep on keeping on, no matter how much evil there is around. Tough wisdom from a tough man who makes his coffee and lets it stew for a week.

Ed’s achievement lies not so much in the crimes he solves but in his ability to stay funny and sane and polite in an old fashioned ‘thank you and have a good day’ way, even in the face of violence and despair. He is an unlikely but authentic channel of grace, and even hope.

The film ends with a dream he remembers of his sheriff father riding ahead of him through the night, carrying a cattle horn filled with embers that will light a warm fire at a campsite ahead.

The achievement of the film and the reason it deserves its four Oscars is the craft and artistry of the production. Script, photography, performances choreographed to create as lean and understated testimony of some little hope in a world of overwhelming despair.

And because there is not a single extra wasted word or movement; because the truth it offers is pared and honed down to its essence, then even the most cynical and media-weary viewers, tired of overblown and excessive claims from advertisers and preachers and politicians, may well find their hearts strangely moved.

John Bluck is the Bishop Commissary for Waiapu.