Taking Sailor to Byzantium

There’s not much that’s as vile as stepping barefoot into an unseen deposit of cat vomit. That was more or less the first thing that happened to me upon the arrival of this so-called “new” year, and while I don’t know what that could possibly portend as far as my future is concerned, it was a cold, mushy reminder that winter is poised to drag on for another two months and I’m already sick of it. December has always struck me more as a challenge to one’s executive capacity than the cornucopia of merriment and joy that Target® would like us to imagine. Was it ever otherwise? My mind reels back to the novels of Laura Ingalls Wilder, in which winter was an obstacle to be bested by the frantic efforts of Ma and Pa, working like draft horses to provide food and fuel enough to keep from freezing or starving—a vast desert of time in which Christmas was a one-day oasis featuring a couple pieces of horehound candy and a doll made from a clothespin and some bits of yarn.

In our largely season-agnostic world one emerges blinking from the wreckage of the holidays bright and early on January 2nd like a plane-crash survivor, only to find the same old routine lying in wait—a nauseating yellow-brown carpet of post-modern, computer-bound labor and entertainment¹ stretching out to the distant horizon and, one knows all too well, far beyond it, all the way up to the next wad of holidays lurking in the appendices of the calendar twelve months hence. It’s enough to make a man take up heavy drinking. Tequila with scorpions in it. Bring it on.

Of course some act of will could break the monotony, if one were so disposed as to conjure one. Alternately, a change could come from without. Seems tempting, to those fresh-faced newborns among us who have not tangled with fate.

Shortly before my daughter left town to return to the ass-end of the universe—that is to say, Maine²—we watched No Country for Old Men, one of my all-time favorite movies. Not holiday fare I’ll admit, but if you think I care, please go back and read the last three paragraphs again. I watch No Country every year or so. It draws me like few films do at this stage in my life, and given that Sailor hadn’t seen it, and she’s always been receptive to my desire to share violent and weird movies with her, we cued it up on the old electric picture machine and dove into the deep end of the Coen brothers’ oeuvre, and I’m here to tell you that this film waxes with every viewing.

In the two weeks since the credits rolled I’ve been thinking back over it, trying to find something coherent to say about this story which I love so much—an almost note-for-note perfect adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name—beyond the simple facts of the plot. Which are these:

Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), an avatar for the sort of silent male self-confidence that died with the likes of Gary Cooper, stumbles across the aftermath of a drug deal gone awry in the West Texas desert. Moss is a retired³ welder and Vietnam veteran living in a mobile home with his wife Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald), and it’s clear enough that for all his admirable qualities—which extend to the gentle and humorous love he shares with Carla Jean—there are qualities that aren’t quite working for him. And so when he tracks a survivor from the debris of the desert shootout only to find a corpse clutching a bag of cash, we learn that even the calm and collected Llewelyn is not free from desire.

The act of taking the cash—to all appearances witness-free—sets of a chain of events that lead to Llewelyn being hunted by one Anton Chigurh, who is like a human manifestation of an earthquake or a forest fire. Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem with a characteristic sort of overgrown bowl cut which would surely be a Halloween favorite if it wasn’t so incredibly homely, is a cypher. It’s clear he’s a hired gun, but from what egg he was hatched is a mystery. Emotionless, relentless, and utterly without ruth, Chigurh cuts a bloody path toward his prey, matching each of Llewelyn’s entertainingly resourceful moves with one of his own. Chigurh is a lot like the indestructible and to-all-appearances clairvoyant Freddy Kruger or Jason that emerged from 80s shlock horror, except that Chigurh is no cartoon. The trail of bodies he leaves behind him exit the world in gruesome, unflinching scenes, starting from the very outset when Chigurh strangles a sheriff’s deputy from behind with the handcuffs in which he is bound. The scene plays out at bloody length, the deputy’s frantic kicking leaving a flurry of shoe-polish marks on the linoleum police-station floor.

Take this photo to Supercuts. I dare you.

Trailing behind the peripatetic duel between Moss and Chigurh is Terrell County Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, played by Tommy Lee Jones as a man watching the world he thought he knew crumbling around him in a frenzy of senseless violence. From Bell we get a solid police procedural, which is entertaining enough, but Bell’s haunted expression is what draws one back to the film. “It's a mess, ain't it, Sheriff?” his deputy says to him as they examine the scene of the original shootout. Bell returns a mirthless joke, “If it ain’t, it’ll do till the mess gets here.”

There isn’t a lot of dialog in No Country, though what there is is absolutely electric; bursts of fire directly from the pen of McCarthy, a towering figure in an era when towering figures are in short supply. Most of the acting is done entirely with the face, and all of the leads give us a lot of meat to chew on without ever uttering a sound. It’s a feat akin, across media and genre, to Clare Torry’s wordless improvisation on Pink Floyd’s “The Great Gig in the Sky.” Better, probably.

The film also features a host of brilliant supporting performances. The highest profile of these is Woody Harrelson’s Carson Wells, a hitman brought in to intercept the out-of-control Chigurh, resplendent in his white hat and sour wit. “Just how dangerous is he?” asks the corporate drug-lord played by the chameleon-like Stephen Root. “Compared to what? The bubonic plague?” drawls Wells. Among the minor roles there are so many standouts one can hardly pick a favorite. I’ll go with Beth Grant, playing Carla Jean’s mother, a cranky old bat who announces to a cab driver in Odessa, “I’ve got the cancer” before inadvertently giving a fatal clue to yet another hitman who wins her trust merely by carrying her suitcase across a street for her, an act not unlike walking on water to a woman for whom chivalry is but a foggy dream from a distant youth. Props to Gene Jones as the hapless gas station owner who has no idea that the coin toss Chigurh asks him to “call” is in fact the deciding factor in whether he’ll survive the encounter, and Kathy Lamkin as the portly, hatchet-faced trailer park manager who is the only person in the entire movie to get the best of Chigurh.

There’s much more to No Country than just a guy chasing a guy after a suitcase full of cash, but I’ll be damned if I understand yet quite what it is. There’s the role of chance in human lives for sure. Even Chigurh runs afoul of fate before the whole sorry mess is over, as he’s unexpectedly t-boned while driving sedately across an intersection even as he leaves the scene, having murdered everyone available to murder. But there’s something deeper; something in the dislocation Sheriff Bell feels. Something that cannot be put back or be made right again.⁴ The film concludes with what is to me one of the most moving scenes in any movie in the last twenty years, in which Bell sits in his kitchen telling his wife about two dreams he had the night before. In the conversation, Bell’s wife is always framed against a backdrop of domestic tranquility—the kitchen with its appliances and cooking utensils and cupboards—while Bell is shown against kitchen window, beyond which lies an empty brown landscape, devoid of any but the meanest life.

Bell’s first dream is simple—he lost some money his father had given him. The second dream, well, I have to print it in its entirety:

…it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin' through the mountains of a night. Goin' through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin'. Never said nothin' goin' by. He just rode on past... and he had his blanket wrapped around him and his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin' fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. 'Bout the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin' on ahead and he was fixin' to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up...

There’s a lot here. The fire in the horn. The father going on before, leading the way, preparing camp. I get it, at an unconscious as well as conscious level, but contrasting the memory of his father’s guiding light we see only the age in Bell’s fallen face. “I’m older now than he ever was by twenty years. So in a sense he’s the younger man.” There’s nobody for Bell to fall back on any longer; the cold and dark persists; and he finds himself incapable of leading the way as his father had done. To live that long and only then discover that all your mastery is an illusion—that’s brutal. And that’s Cormac for ya.

Anyway, if you haven’t seen it, take a couple hours. It’s worth your while. And if you have seen it, take a couple hours and see it again.⁵

1. Guilty as charged.

2. Maine is a lovely place in the summer, save for the black flies.

3. It’s hard to shake the sense that “retired” only tells part of the story here as Moss seems to be only around forty.

4. "Once there were brook trouts in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery." — Cormac McCarthy, The Road

5. Regarding the title of this piece:

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees,
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

— William Butler Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium