No Country For Bad Endings
The latest from the Cohen Brothers, No Country For Old Men, is an intriguing movie right up until the movie stops. This film doesn't have an ending. Rather, it reaches a point where the brothers apparently ran out of film stock, ideas, or both and then decided to simpy run credits.
It took quite a while to decide what the movie was about. I was pretty sure I liked it, except as noted above, but had to think about what I liked and why.
*SPOILERS GALORE AFTER THE JUMP*
Here's what I concluded. This is a story about the loss of innocence of a people. The folks in small-town Texas are completely unprepared for the evil that falls on them in the form of the relentless Chigurh.
Chigurh stands in for the Evil of Our Time, whatever time that may be. The film is set in 1980 (you have to do the math to figure it out, they don't put it on the screen) but I have no difficulty parking the concepts in 2007.
Sheriff Bell is the man whose job it is to protect good people from the bad ones but is completely unprepared for Chigurh. He is no Dirty Harry but just a small country Sheriff used to dealing with drunks and small-time drug dealers. Chigurh is several orders of magnitude beyond, a land shark who moves from one kill to the next with a steadfast calm and a clear head.
That's the thing about Evil: it isn't always crazy. The results of evil appear insane to civilized society but the perpetrators often act in a rational manner that fits within the structure of their rules. Which is why I think Chigurh represents Jihad. Sheriff Bell can't grasp the nature of evil on this scale. Hell, he doesn't even pursue Chigurh in anything like the way film cops go after a killer. More like he trails along behind Chigurh, shaking his head at one bloody mess after another.
In the end Bell can't deal with his failure to capture Chigurh and the escalation of violence. He has no tools for the fight and even less desire to participate, so he quits. Chigurh walks away, battered and injured but undeterred and therein lies the lesson. Unless Evil is pursued with relentless vigor and tracked to the ends of the earth until it is exterminated then Evil will come again.
And that, in the end, is a young man's work.