Earlier this year we went and saw the movie No Country for Old Men. Jimbo’s girlfriend didn’t care for it. I thought it was one of the best movies I had ever seen. When it won four Oscars last Sunday night, it occurred to me that someone must have agreed with me.
I’m pretty sure that Jimbo’s girlfriend considered this just to be another shoot ‘em up movie with a lot of guys shooting at other guys and a lot of dead bodies lying about, and this is not the genre (if you’ll pardon my French) of movie that she enjoys. However this movie was telling Jimbo a story that was a lot more complicated than that.
Oscar winner Javier Bardem, a Spanish actor I had never seen before, plays a character named Anton Chigurh. His haircut looks like mine did twenty-five years ago. Chigurh is a reasonably emotionless killer who occasionally gives his prey a fifty-fifty shot at survival by means of a ceremonial coin toss. Chigurh walks through this movie, playing a grim-reaper-type, just as surely as the character Death in the movie The Seventh Seal.
Josh Brolin, playing a welder named Llewelyn Moss, wanders across a massacre, which was the aftermath of a drug deal gone bad. Among the carnage, he finds a survivor. Unable to get an answer from him as to who did all the killing, Moss finds a blood trail and follows it to the one more dead guy and a bag with 2 million bucks in it. Moss takes home the money and becomes the target of Chigurh, who is charged with recovering it.
Although Moss and Chigurh are relatively young men, the perspective of the story comes to us from Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, who is played by Tommy Lee Jones. Bell gives us a narrative of a world gone wild—a place and time that has passed by decent and normal people. Bell is nearing retirement and laments a time when life was measured and predictable. Hence, the “old men” reference in the title.
Chigurh is the symbol of an end that comes and gets all of us eventually. Some of us, like Llewelyn Moss, put up a struggle and deny the inevitability, as he shoots it out with the mop-topped grim reaper and they seriously wound each other.
By the way, Jimbo will never again suture a six-inch gash in his leg with a needle and thread without thinking of the scene in this movie where Chigurh does exactly that after being wounded in a shootout with Moss. Eventually Chigurh gets the upper hand and Moss is discovered dead on the floor of a motel room.
At the investigation of Mosses murder, Bell discusses with another local sheriff the decline of civilization. The sheriff describes to Bell another similar crime scene he has seen recently, and asks rhetorically how is it possible to prepare for that kind of violence?
In the next scene, Bell visits a relative, presumably an ex-lawman, and announces his plans to retire. They discuss a similar crime scene to the one he had discussed at Mosses murder site. The crime they discussed this time, however, had occurred one hundred years earlier.
Having the benefit of perspective of the proverbial old men in the movie, it occurred to me that it is not the times that are changing-- rather, it is our perspective of the times. We carry with us a remembrance of times past and times largely forgotten except by ourselves. We seem to be prone to lamentations of the way things used to be. I remember my father used to do that and I used to think that it was just because he was old.
Anyway, the movie had an extremely abrupt ending. Bell was sitting at the breakfast table telling his wife about two dreams he had. Then, boom, the movie was over. At the time, I thought it was the worst way to end a movie as I had ever seen. Having had a chance to mull it over, I think my initial thought was wrong.
I don’t dream much, but that night I had a dream. I don’t remember much about my dream, but I think I had a much clearer understanding.
Then I woke up.
And that is the way things happen in Jimbo’s world.
No comments:
Post a Comment