The Coen Brothers‘ adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s exploration into the modern American West, “No Country for Old Men,” frames a vignette of a crime that ultimately makes a statement on the Western itself. ScreenPrism’s analysis of the metaphor-laden film focuses on the final scene where Tommy Lee Jones’ Sheriff Bell explains the various dreams he recently had to his wife. Each dream, as ScreenPrism’s analysis notes, focuses on the various aspects of the film’s overarching themes and understandings of the world the Coen Brothers set for audiences.
As the audience, we bear witness to what ScreenPrism notes as a NeoWestern Noir. With a romanticized view of the old West, both audiences and Bell feel perplexed by the story of villain Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) and hero Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin). From Bell’s understanding of the American West, and older adaptations of stories and vignettes told with this setting, the ambiguity and moral insecurity of the supposed hero and villain make for a film with a melancholic tone that offers little comfort by the film’s end.
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‘No Country For Old Men’ shifts from the straightforward good guy/bad guy/old West formula of previous films to adapt a story where the first action audiences and Bell witness the supposed hero doing is stealing money, unable to escape his sin. The film’s villain relies on the mercy of a coin toss to demonstrate the arbitrary nature of one’s life; how it is subject to chance. Bell lives in a world of absolute chaos and randomness, as the video essay determines in its main hypothesis. Unable to grapple with the uncertainty of the world, Bell becomes an observer to the story, the most passive of the film’s main characters. In doing so, not only does Bell escape the violence subjected to by Moss and Chigurh, he, and the audience, finds himself as the old man for whom there is no country.