Cormac McCarthy has left us at 89 years old. He leaves a towering legacy behind of great books and great movies. McCarthy’s voice was unique and beloved both for his freeform writing style and his often stark confrontation of human truths, hard truths, ugly truths.
Plenty of filmmakers have tried to capture McCarthy’s. But only once, in my opinion, did a film do justice to a McCarthy novel — becoming something of a masterpiece in its own right, and one of the best films ever made: No Country for Old Men.
When we all first saw No Country back in 2007, there was much discussion as to whether it was too dark, or that it ended too many times, or that “they” wouldn’t go for it because of its bummer ending. But by then, the Coen brothers could not be denied, not just because of the level of excellence of this fine, fine film, but because of the films they’d already made, like Fargo, Miller’s Crossing, Raising Arizona, etc.
No Country is still one of the few films the Coen brothers made that they didn’t originally write. They didn’t change much in adapting it: they cut down the part about the drug cartels in Texas and much of the lengthy dream described at the end by Tommy Lee Jones as Ed Tom Bell, but otherwise they were lovingly faithful to McCarthy’s writing voice, with a touch of Coens humor here or there. After winning Best Adapted Screenplay at the 2008 Oscars, Ethan Coen reportedly told McCarthy “Well, I didn’t do anything, but I’m keeping it.”
The film is funnier than the book, with many of the characters delivering the lines in deadpan style. But No Country remains a dark film and a dark book. It has to be. It’s about death. It’s about time running out. It’s about aging out of a world you once ruled over.
But it’s about more than that. It’s about great cinema. It’s about Roger Deakins’ incomparable eye, along with pitch-perfect casting across the board. It is every bit a Coen brothers film, without a doubt, but to me it’s their best because it is infused with McCarthy’s vision. When they made this movie, they didn’t just tell the story. They brought to life the mind and imagination of this writer. And that is rare and astonishing.
I’ve had people ask me what the movie is about. They might have watched it once and wondered why so many people love it and why it won Best Picture. And it’s true that if you don’t watch movies over and over again like I do, you might not get what all the fuss is about. The film it was up against, There Will Be Blood, is arguably more accessible as it’s painted in broad strokes and has a driving theme it wants you to notice.
But No Country’s theme is hidden. You have to listen closely and carefully to find the clues. Why, as the movie is winding down, does Chigurh get hit suddenly out of nowhere by a car? Why does he kill Carla Jean when he didn’t have to? Why does Llewelyn Moss think he can get away with stealing money?
It’s not an easy film to untangle, but once you figure it out, its rewards last a lifetime. Trust me, I know. I watch it often. I watch it to remind myself of what great cinema actually looks like, and that there was a time when the film industry still made movies like that, by the best directors. This film doesn’t exist to right the wrongs of society, or to be a social justice delivery device. It is a film made by people who love making movies based on a book by a writer who had something to say and the talent to say it.
It’s just plainly written, beautifully said:
“I always thought when I got older that God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didn’t. I don’t blame him. If I was him I’d have the same opinion about me that he does.”
No Country the novel is more than just about death. It’s specifically about the old world being caught off guard by the new world of drug lords. Guys like Ed Tom can’t keep up with the new breed of criminal. He’s old school. But the movie, I think, is less about the “money and drugs” and more about death.
Moss believes he can outsmart and outrun Chigurh. Even though he is warned that he’s in over his head by my favorite character, Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson), and hopes to be stopped by Ed Tom, as his wife Carla Jean worries and frets — Moss won’t listen to any of them.
I love how the two main characters, Moss and Chigurh, mirror each other — both in motel rooms, both at pharmacies, both doctoring their own wounds, both trading money for clothes to cover up their bleeding wounds. In the end, no one can save Moss. They get there all too late. There is nothing you can do about it because “You can’t stop what’s coming. It ain’t all waiting on you. That’s vanity.”
Moss’ death is not any more sad than anyone else’s death. The older you get, the worse it all is, trust me. Our brains are too fragile to handle the awareness that comes with age. But if anyone was prepared for death, if anyone knew what a one-way journey our lives are, it was he.
“It’s not about knowing who you are. It’s about thinkin’ you got there without takin’ anything with you. Your notions about startin’ over. Or anybody’s. You don’t start over. That’s what it’s about. Every step you take is forever. You can’t make it go away. None of it.”
Strangely enough, McCarthy’s most recent books are somehow about the children of a physicist associated with J. Robert Oppenheimer. I guess you can’t live in Santa Fe, New Mexico and avoid having Oppenheimer on the brain. From The Atlantic:
“The Passenger” and “Stella Maris” function together and apart, a bit like those early stereo recordings where, as it were, you can hear Ringo and Paul on the left speaker and George and John on the right. “The Passenger” tells the story of Bobby; “Stella Maris” tells the story of Alicia. The two are the children of a Jewish physicist who worked with J. Robert Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project. They grew up in Los Alamos, and both showed a remarkable aptitude for mathematics. Bobby got a scholarship to Caltech, but instead of earning a doctorate he dropped out, because he wasn’t a good enough mathematician. As he explains, the history of physics is full of people who gave up in this way, because they couldn’t add anything to “the rare pantheon of world-shaping theories.” Buoyed by a family legacy, Bobby went to Europe and raced cars (Formula 2), until a crash in 1972 landed him in a coma. It’s 1980 when we join Bobby’s adventuring in “The Passenger”; he is thirty-seven and is working out of New Orleans as a deep-sea salvage diver.
It seems as though all things are connected in ways you never expect. Here is an interview with McCarthy and David Krakauer from back in 2017:
It is our lament that we must say goodbye to people. Death is so silent. That’s the thing about it that I’ve discovered as I’ve lost some people close to me recently, and two cats. It’s just so damned quiet because all of that energy that makes a life is gone. And that, more than anything, is why No Country for Old Men is so much about death — not in a bad way, just in an inevitable way. All of that quiet…
We offer a crisp salute to Cormac McCarthy for leaving his mark and for inspiring to Coens to make one of my all time favorite movies. It just doesn’t get better. Maybe it never will.