No Country For Old Men (film)

''No Country for Old Men'' is a 2007 American neo-Western crime thriller film written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, based on Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel of the same name. Starring Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, and Josh Brolin, the film is set in the desert landscape of 1980 West Texas. The film revisits the themes of fate, conscience, and circumstance that the Coen brothers had explored in the films ''Blood Simple'' (1984), ''Raising Arizona'' (1987), and '' Fargo'' (1996). The film follows three main characters: Llewelyn Moss (Brolin), a Vietnam War veteran and welder who stumbles upon a large sum of money in the desert; Anton Chigurh (Bardem), a hitman who is tasked with recovering the money; and Ed Tom Bell (Jones), a local sheriff investigating the crime. The film also stars Kelly Macdonald as Moss's wife Carla Jean, and Woody Harrelson as a bounty hunter seeking Moss and the return of the $2 million.

''No Country for Old Men'' premiered in competition at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival on May 19. The film became a commercial success, grossing $171 million worldwide against the budget of $25 million. Critics praised the Coens' direction and screenplay and Bardem's performance, and the film won 76 awards from 109 nominations from multiple organizations; it won four awards at the 80th Academy Awards (including Best Picture), three British Academy Film Awards (BAFTAs), and two Golden Globes. The American Film Institute listed it as an AFI Movie of the Year, and the National Board of Review selected it as the best of 2007.

More critics included ''No Country for Old Men'' on their 2007 top ten lists than any other film, and many regard it as the Coen brothers' best film. , various sources had recognized it as one of the best films of its decade, and as one of the best films of the 21st century. ''The Guardian''s John Patterson wrote: "the Coens' technical abilities, and their feel for a landscape-based Western classicism reminiscent of Anthony Mann and Sam Peckinpah, are matched by few living directors", and Peter Travers of ''Rolling Stone'' said that it is "a new career peak for the Coen brothers" and "as entertaining as hell".

Plot

In 1980, hitman Anton Chigurh is arrested in Texas. In custody, he strangles a deputy sheriff and uses a penetrating, air-powered captive bolt pistol to kill a stranger on the highway and escape in his car. He spares the life of a gas station owner who correctly guesses the result of Chigurh's coin toss.

Hunting pronghorns in the desert, Llewelyn Moss comes across the aftermath of a drug deal gone bad. He finds several dead men and dogs, a wounded Mexican man begging for water, drugs in the vehicle, and two million dollars in a briefcase. He takes the money and returns home. Feeling guilty, Moss returns with water but finds the man dead. Two men in a truck pursue him, but he escapes into a river. Reaching home, he sends his wife, Carla Jean, to stay with her mother, then drives to a motel in Del Rio, where he hides the briefcase in his room's air duct.

Chigurh, hired to recover the money, arrives to search Moss's home, where he uses his bolt pistol to blow the lock out of the door. Investigating the break-in, Terrell County Sheriff Ed Tom Bell observes the blown-out lock. Following a tracking device in the money, Chigurh goes to Moss's motel room and kills a group of Mexicans, waiting to ambush Moss. Moss has rented a second room adjacent to the Mexicans' room with access to the duct where the money is hidden. He retrieves the briefcase before Chigurh opens the duct.

Moving to a hotel in the border town of Eagle Pass, Moss discovers the tracking device, but Chigurh has already found him. Their firefight spills onto the streets, killing a bystander and wounding both. Moss flees across to Mexico, stashing the case of money along the Rio Grande. Finding Moss severely injured, a passing norteño band takes him to a hospital. Carson Wells, another hired operative, fails to persuade Moss to accept protection in return for the money. Chigurh cleans and stitches his own wounds with stolen supplies and sneaks up on Wells at his hotel. Unsuccessfully bartering for his life, Wells is murdered by Chigurh. Moss telephones the room, intending to bargain with Wells, but Chigurh answers the call instead and vows to kill Carla Jean unless Moss gives up the money.

Moss retrieves the case from the Rio Grande and arranges to meet Carla Jean at a motel in El Paso, where he plans to give her the money and hide her from danger. Carla Jean is approached by Sheriff Bell, who promises to protect Moss. Carla Jean's mother unknowingly reveals Moss's location to a group of Mexicans tailing them. Bell reaches the motel rendezvous at El Paso, only to hear gunshots and spot a pickup truck speeding from the motel (presumably the Mexicans fleeing the scene). Bell finds Moss dead in his motel room, as does a later arriving Carla Jean.

That night, Bell returns to the crime scene and observes the lock blown out. Chigurh appears to hide behind the door of the room, but when Bell hesitantly enters, he finds the room empty. He sees the vent cover removed. Later, Bell visits his uncle Ellis, an ex-lawman, and tells him he plans to retire because he feels "overmatched" by the recent violence. Ellis replies that the region has always been violent.

Weeks later, Carla Jean returns from her mother's funeral to find Chigurh waiting in her bedroom, per his threat to Moss. She refuses his offer of a coin toss for her life, stating that he cannot pass blame to luck: the choice is his. Chigurh checks his boots as he leaves the house. As he drives through the neighborhood, a car crashes into his at an intersection and injures him. He bribes two young witnesses for their silence and flees.

Now retired, Bell shares two dreams with his wife. In the first, he lost some money his father had given him. In the other, he and his father were riding through a snowy mountain pass; his father had gone ahead to make a fire in the darkness and wait for Bell.

Cast

* Tommy Lee Jones as Ed Tom Bell
* Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh
* Josh Brolin as Llewelyn Moss
* Woody Harrelson as Carson Wells
* Kelly Macdonald as Carla Jean Moss
* Garret Dillahunt as Wendell
* Tess Harper as Loretta Bell
* Barry Corbin as Ellis
* Stephen Root as Man who hires Wells
* Rodger Boyce as El Paso Sheriff
* Beth Grant as Carla Jean's mother
* Ana Reeder as Poolside Woman
* Josh Blaylock and Caleb Jones as Boys on Bikes
* Gene Jones as Gas Station Proprietor

The role of Llewelyn Moss was originally offered to Heath Ledger, but he turned it down to spend time with his newborn daughter Matilda. Garret Dillahunt was also in the running for the role of Llewelyn Moss, auditioning five times for the role, but instead was offered the part of Wendell, Ed Tom Bell's deputy. Josh Brolin, who was not the Coens' first choice, enlisted the help of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez to make an audition reel. His agent eventually secured a meeting with the Coens and he was given the part.

Javier Bardem nearly withdrew from the role of Anton Chigurh due to issues with scheduling. English actor Mark Strong was put on standby to take over, but the scheduling issues were resolved and Bardem took on the role.

Production

Producer Scott Rudin bought the film rights to McCarthy's novel and suggested an adaptation to the Coen brothers, who at the time were attempting to adapt the novel ''To the White Sea'' by James Dickey. By August 2005, the Coens agreed to write and direct the film, having identified with how it provided a sense of place and also how it played with genre conventions. Joel Coen said that the book's unconventional approach "was familiar, congenial to us; we're naturally attracted to subverting genre. We liked the fact that the bad guys never really meet the good guys, that McCarthy did not follow through on formula expectations." Ethan Coen explained that the "pitiless quality" was a "hallmark of the book, which has an unforgiving landscape and characters but is also about finding some kind of beauty without being sentimental." The adaptation was the second of McCarthy's work, following '' All the Pretty Horses'' in 2000.

Writing

The Coens' script was mostly faithful to the source material. On their writing process, Ethan said, "One of us types into the computer while the other holds the spine of the book open flat." Still, they pruned where necessary. A teenage runaway who appeared late in the book and some backstory related to Bell were both removed. Also changed from the original was Carla Jean Moss's reaction when finally faced with the imposing figure of Chigurh. As explained by Kelly Macdonald, "the ending of the book is different. She reacts more in the way I react. She kind of falls apart. In the film she's been through so much and she can't lose any more. It's just she's got this quiet acceptance of it." In the book, there is also some attention paid to the daughter, Deborah, whom the Bells lost and who haunts the protagonist in his thoughts.

Richard Corliss of ''Time'' stated that "the Coen brothers have adapted literary works before. ''Miller's Crossing'' was a sly, unacknowledged blend of two Dashiell Hammett tales, ''Red Harvest'' and ''The Glass Key''; and '' O Brother Where Art Thou?'' transferred ''The Odyssey'' f_Homer.html" ;"title="Homer.html" ;"title="f Homer">f Homer">Homer.html" ;"title="f Homer">f Homerto the American south in the 1930s. But ''No Country for Old Men'' is their first film taken, pretty straightforwardly, from a [contemporary] prime American novel."

The writing is also notable for its minimal use of dialogue. Josh Brolin discussed his initial nervousness with having so little dialogue to work with:

I mean it was a fear, for sure, because dialogue, that's what you kind of rest upon as an actor, you know? ... Drama and all the stuff is all dialogue motivated. You have to figure out different ways to convey ideas. You don't want to overcompensate because the fear is that you're going to be boring if nothing's going on. You start doing this and this and taking off your hat and putting it on again or some bullshit that doesn't need to be there. So yeah, I was a little afraid of that in the beginning.

Peter Travers of ''Rolling Stone'' praised the novel adaptation. "Not since Robert Altman merged with the short stories of Raymond Carver in ''Short Cuts'' have filmmakers and author fused with such devastating impact as the Coens and McCarthy. Good and evil are tackled with a rigorous fix on the complexity involved."

Director Joel Coen justified his interest in the McCarthy novel. "There's something about it – there were echoes of it in ''No Country for Old Men'' that were quite interesting for us", he said, "because it was the idea of the physical work that somebody does that helps reveal who they are and is part of the fiber of the story. Because you only saw this person in this movie making things and doing things in order to survive and to make this journey, and the fact that you were thrown back on that, as opposed to any dialogue, was interesting to us."

Coen stated that this is the brothers' "first adaptation". He further explained why they chose the novel: "Why not start with Cormac? Why not start with the best?" He further described this McCarthy book in particular as "unlike his other novels ... it is much pulpier." Coen stated that they have not changed much in the adaptation. "It really is just compression," he said. "We didn't create new situations." He further assured that he and his brother Ethan had never met McCarthy when they were writing the script, but first met him during the shooting of the film. He believed that the author liked the film, while his brother Ethan said, "he didn't yell at us. We were actually sitting in a movie theater/screening room with him when he saw it ... and I heard him chuckle a couple of times, so I took that as a seal of approval, I don't know, maybe presumptuously."

Title

The title is taken from the opening line of the 20th-century Irish poet William Butler Yeats' poem " Sailing to Byzantium":

Richard Gillmore relates the Yeats poem to the Coens' film, saying:

Differences from the novel

Craig Kennedy adds that "one key difference is that of focus. The novel belongs to Sheriff Bell. Each chapter begins with Bell's narration, which dovetails and counterpoints the action of the main story. Though the film opens with Bell speaking, much of what he says in the book is condensed and it turns up in other forms. Also, Bell has an entire backstory in the book that doesn't make it into the film. The result is a movie that is more simplified thematically, but one that gives more of the characters an opportunity to shine."

Jay Ellis elaborates on Chigurh's encounter with the man behind the counter at the gas station. "Where McCarthy gives us Chigurh's question as, 'What's the most you ever saw lost on a coin toss?', he says, 'the film elides the word 'saw', but the Coens of course tend to the visual. Where the book describes the setting as 'almost dark', the film clearly depicts high noon: no shadows are notable in the establishing shot of the gas station, and the sunlight is bright even if behind cloud cover. The light through two windows and a door comes evenly through three walls in the interior shots. But this difference increases our sense of the man's desperation later, when he claims he needs to close and he closes at 'near dark'; it is darker, as it were, in the cave of this man's ignorance than it is outside in the bright light of truth."Spurgeon, Sara L. (2011), Part 2, Chapter 5: "Levels of Ellipsis in No Country for Old Men", p. 102, by Ellis, Jay.

Filming

The project was a co-production between Miramax Films and Paramount's classics-based division in a 50/50 partnership, and production was scheduled for May 2006 in New Mexico and Texas. With a total budget of $25 million (at least half spent in New Mexico), production was slated for the New Mexico cities of Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and Las Vegas (which doubled as the border towns of Eagle Pass and Del Rio, Texas), with other scenes shot around Marfa and Sanderson in West Texas. The U.S.-Mexico border crossing bridge was actually a freeway overpass in Las Vegas, with a border checkpoint set built at the intersection of Interstate 25 and New Mexico State Highway 65. The Mexican town square was filmed in Piedras Negras, Coahuila.

In advance of shooting, cinematographer Roger Deakins saw that "the big challenge" of his ninth collaboration with the Coen brothers was "making it very realistic, to match the story ... I'm imagining doing it very edgy and dark, and quite sparse. Not so stylized."

"Everything's storyboarded before we start shooting," Deakins said in ''Entertainment Weekly''. "In ''No Country'', there's maybe only a dozen shots that are not in the final film. It's that order of planning. And we only shot 250,000 feet, whereas most productions of that size might shoot 700,000 or a million feet of film. It's quite precise, the way they approach everything. ... We never use a zoom," he said. "I don't even carry a zoom lens with me, unless it's for something very specific." The famous coin-tossing scene between Chigurh and the old gas station clerk is a good example; the camera tracks in so slowly that the audience isn't even aware of the move. "When the camera itself moves forward, the audience is moving, too. You're actually getting closer to somebody or something. It has, to me, a much more powerful effect, because it's a three-dimensional move. A zoom is more like a focusing of attention. You're just standing in the same place and concentrating on one smaller element in the frame. Emotionally, that's a very different effect."

In a later interview, he mentioned the "awkward dilemma hat''No Country'' certainly contains scenes of some very realistically staged fictional violence, but ... without this violent depiction of evil there would not be the emotional 'pay off' at the end of the film when Ed Tom bemoans the fact that God has not entered his life."Chapman King; Wallach; Welsh (2009), p. 224.

Directing

In an interview with ''The Guardian'', Ethan said, "Hard men in the south-west shooting each other – that's definitely Sam Peckinpah's thing. We were aware of those similarities, certainly." They discuss choreographing and directing the film's violent scenes in the '' Sydney Morning Herald'': "'That stuff is such fun to do', the brothers chime in at the mention of their penchant for blood-letting. 'Even Javier would come in by the end of the movie, rub his hands together and say, 'OK, who am I killing today?' adds Joel. 'It's fun to figure out', says Ethan. 'It's fun working out how to choreograph it, how to shoot it, how to engage audiences watching it.'"

Director Joel Coen described the process of film making: "I can almost set my watch by how I'm going to feel at different stages of the process. It's always identical, whether the movie ends up working or not. I think when you watch the dailies, the film that you shoot every day, you're very excited by it and very optimistic about how it's going to work. And when you see it the first time you put the film together, the roughest cut, is when you want to go home and open up your veins and get in a warm tub and just go away. And then it gradually, maybe, works its way back, somewhere toward that spot you were at before."

David Denby of ''The New Yorker'' criticized the way the Coens "disposed of" Llewelyn Moss. "The Coens, however faithful to the book", he said, "cannot be forgiven for disposing of Llewelyn so casually. After watching this foolhardy but physically gifted and decent guy escape so many traps, we have a great deal invested in him emotionally, and yet he's eliminated, off-camera, by some unknown Mexicans. He doesn't get the dignity of a death scene. The Coens have suppressed their natural jauntiness. They have become orderly, disciplined masters of chaos, but one still has the feeling that, out there on the road from nowhere to nowhere, they are rooting for it rather than against it."

Josh Brolin discussed the Coens' directing style in an interview, saying that the brothers "only really say what needs to be said. They don't sit there as directors and manipulate you and go into page after page to try to get you to a certain place. They may come in and say one word or two words, so that was nice to be around in order to feed the other thing. 'What should I do right now? I'll just watch Ethan go humming to himself and pacing. Maybe that's what I should do, too.

In an interview with Logan Hill of '' New York'' magazine, Brolin said, "We had a load of fun making it. Maybe it was because we both [Brolin and Javier Bardem] thought we'd be fired. With the Coens, there's zero compliments, really zero anything. No 'nice work.' Nothing. And then—I'm doing this scene with Woody Harrelson. Woody can't remember his lines, he stumbles his way through it, and then both Coens are like, 'Oh my God! Fantastic!'"

David Gritten of ''The Daily Telegraph'' wonders: "Are the Coens finally growing up?" He adds: "If he filmfeels pessimistic, Joel insists that's not the Coens' responsibility: 'I don't think the movie is more or less so than the novel. We tried to give it the same feeling.' The brothers do concede, however, that it's a dark piece of storytelling. 'It's refreshing for us to do different kinds of things,' says Ethan, 'and we'd just done a couple of comedies.'"

Musical score and sound

The Coens minimized the score used in the film, leaving large sections devoid of music. The concept was Ethan's, who persuaded a skeptical Joel to go with the idea. There is some music in the movie, scored by the Coens' longtime composer, Carter Burwell, but after finding that "most musical instruments didn't fit with the minimalist sound sculpture he had in mind ... he used singing bowls, standing metal bells traditionally employed in Buddhist meditation practice that produce a sustained tone when rubbed." The movie contains a "mere" 16 minutes of music, with several of those in the end credits. The music in the trailer was called "Diabolic Clockwork" by Two Steps from Hell. Sound editing and effects were provided by another longtime Coens collaborator, Skip Lievsay, who used a mixture of emphatic sounds (gun shots) and ambient noise (engine noise, prairie winds) in the mix. The foley for the captive bolt pistol used by Chigurh was created using a pneumatic nail gun.

Anthony Lane of ''The New Yorker'' states that "there is barely any music, sensual or otherwise, and Carter Burwell's score is little more than a fitful murmur", and Douglas McFarland states that "perhaps he film'ssalient formal characteristic is the absence, with one telling exception, of a musical soundtrack, creating a mood conducive to thoughtful and unornamented speculation in what is otherwise a fierce and destructive landscape."Conard, Mark T. (2009), Part 2, Chapter: ''No Country for Old Men As Moral Philosophy'', p. 163, by McFarland, Douglas. Jay Ellis, however, disagrees. " cFarlandmissed the extremely quiet but audible fade in a few tones from a keyboard beginning when Chigurh flips the coin for the gas station man", he said. "This ambient music (by long-time Coens collaborator Carter Burwell) grows imperceptibly in volume so that it is easily missed as an element of the mis-en-scene. But it is there, telling our unconscious that something different is occurring with the toss; this becomes certain when it ends as Chigurh uncovers the coin on the counter. The deepest danger has passed as soon as Chigurh finds (and Javier Bardem's acting confirms this) and reveals to the man that he has won."Spurgeon, Sara L. (2011), Part 2, Chapter 5: ''Levels of Ellipsis in No Country for Old Men'', p. 100, by Ellis, Jay. In order to achieve such sound effect, Burwell "tuned the music's swelling hum to the 60-hertz frequency of a refrigerator."

Dennis Lim of ''The New York Times'' stressed that "there is virtually no music on the soundtrack of this tense, methodical thriller. Long passages are entirely wordless. In some of the most gripping sequences what you hear mostly is a suffocating silence." Skip Lievsay, the film's sound editor called this approach "quite a remarkable experiment," and added that "suspense thrillers in Hollywood are traditionally done almost entirely with music. The idea here was to remove the safety net that lets the audience feel like they know what's going to happen. I think it makes the movie much more suspenseful. You're not guided by the score and so you lose that comfort zone."

James Roman observes the effect of sound in the scene where Chigurh pulls in for gas at the ''Texaco'' rest stop. " hescene evokes an eerie portrayal of innocence confronting evil," he says, "with the subtle images richly nuanced by sound. As the scene opens in a long shot, the screen is filled with the remote location of the rest stop with the sound of the ''Texaco'' sign mildly squeaking in a light breeze. The sound and image of a crinkled cashew wrapper tossed on the counter adds to the tension as the paper twists and turns. The intimacy and potential horror that it suggests is never elevated to a level of kitschy drama as the tension rises from the mere sense of quiet and doom that prevails."Roman, James (2009), Chapter 9: "The New Millennium, 2000–2008", p. 379.

Jeffrey Overstreet adds that "the scenes in which Chigurh stalks Moss are as suspenseful as anything the Coens have ever staged. And that has as much to do with what we ''hear'' as what we ''see''. ''No Country for Old Men'' lacks a traditional soundtrack, but don't say it doesn't have music. The blip-blip-blip of a transponder becomes as frightening as the famous theme from '' Jaws''. The sound of footsteps on the hardwood floors of a hotel hallway are as ominous as the drums of war. When the leather of a briefcase squeaks against the metal of a ventilation shaft, you'll cringe, and the distant echo of a telephone ringing in a hotel lobby will jangle your nerves."

Style

While ''No Country for Old Men'' is a "doggedly faithful" adaptation of McCarthy's 2005 novel and its themes, the film also revisits themes which the Coens had explored in their earlier movies ''Blood Simple'' and '' Fargo''. The three films share common themes, such as pessimism and nihilism. The novel's motifs of chance, free-will, and predestination are familiar territory for the Coen brothers, who presented similar threads and tapestries of "fate ndcircumstance" in earlier works including ''Raising Arizona'', which featured another hitman, albeit less serious in tone."Both book and movie offer glimpses of a huge, mysterious pattern that we and the characters can't quite see – that only God could see, if He hadn't given up and gone home." Numerous critics cited the importance of chance to both the novel and the film, focusing on Chigurh's fate-deciding coin flipping, but noted that the nature of the film medium made it difficult to include the "self-reflective qualities of McCarthy's novel."

Still, the Coens open the film with a voice-over narration by Tommy Lee Jones (who plays Sheriff Ed Tom Bell) set against the barren Texas country landscape where he makes his home. His ruminations on a teenager he sent to the chair explain that, although the newspapers described the boy's murder of his 14-year-old girlfriend as a crime of passion, "he told me there weren't nothin' passionate about it. Said he'd been fixin' to kill someone for as long as he could remember. Said if I let him out of there, he'd kill somebody again. Said he was goin' to hell. Reckoned he'd be there in about 15 minutes."Coen, Joel and Ethan, Adapted screenplay for ''No Country for Old Men


''Chicago Sun-Times'' critic Roger Ebert praised the narration. "These words sounded verbatim to me from ''No Country for Old Men'', the novel by Cormac McCarthy", he said. "But I find they are not quite. And their impact has been improved upon in the delivery. When I get the DVD of this film, I will listen to that stretch of narration several times; Jones delivers it with a vocal precision and contained emotion that is extraordinary, and it sets up the entire film."

In ''The Village Voice'', Scott Foundas writes that "Like McCarthy, the Coens are markedly less interested in who (if anyone) gets away with the loot than in the primal forces that urge the characters forward ... In the end, everyone in ''No Country for Old Men'' is both hunter and hunted, members of some endangered species trying to forestall their extinction." Roger Ebert writes that "the movie demonstrates how pitiful ordinary human feelings are in the face of implacable injustice."

''New York Times'' critic A. O. Scott observes that Chigurh, Moss, and Bell each "occupy the screen one at a time, almost never appearing in the frame together, even as their fates become ever more intimately entwined."

''Variety'' critic Todd McCarthy describes Chigurh's '' modus operandi'': "Death walks hand in hand with Chigurh wherever he goes, unless he decides otherwise ... everything you've done in your life has led you to him, he may explain to his about-to-be victims, your time might just have come. 'You don't have to do this,' the innocent invariably insist to a man whose murderous code dictates otherwise. Occasionally, however, he will allow someone to decide his own fate by coin toss, notably in a tense early scene in an old filling station marbled with nervous humor."

Jim Emerson describes how the Coens introduced Chigurh in one of the first scenes when he strangles the deputy who arrested him: "A killer rises: Our first blurred sight of Chigurh's face ... As he moves forward, into focus, to make his first kill, we still don't get a good look at him because his head rises above the top of the frame. His victim, the deputy, never sees what's coming, and Chigurh, chillingly, doesn't even bother to look at his face while he garrotes him."

Critic Peter Bradshaw of ''The Guardian'' stated that "the savoury, serio-comic tang of the Coens' film-making style is recognisably present, as is their predilection for the weirdness of hotels and motels". But he added that they "have found something that has heightened and deepened their identity as film-makers: a real sense of seriousness, a sense that their offbeat Americana and gruesome and surreal comic contortions can really be more than the sum of their parts".

Geoff Andrew of '' Time Out London'' said that the Coens "find a cinematic equivalent to McCarthy's language: his narrative ellipses, play with point of view, and structural concerns such as the exploration of the similarities and differences between Moss, Chigurh and Bell. Certain virtuoso sequences feel near-abstract in their focus on objects, sounds, light, colour or camera angle rather than on human presence ... Notwithstanding much marvellous deadpan humour, this is one of their darkest efforts."

Arne De Boever believes that there is a "close affinity, and intimacy even, between the sheriff and Chigurh in ''No Country for Old Men'' hich is developedin a number of scenes. There is, to begin with, the sheriff's voice at the beginning of the film, which accompanies the images of Chigurh's arrest. This initial weaving together of the figures of Chigurh and the sheriff is further developed later on in the film, when the sheriff visits Llewelyn Moss' trailer home in search for Moss and his wife, Carla Jean. Chigurh has visited the trailer only minutes before, and the Coen brothers have the sheriff sit down in the same exact spot where Chigurh had been sitting (which is almost the exact same spot where, the evening before, Moss joined his wife on the couch). Like Chigurh, the sheriff sees himself reflected in the dark glass of Moss' television, their mirror images perfectly overlapping if one were to superimpose these two shots. When the sheriff pours himself a glass of milk from the bottle that stands sweating on the living room table—a sign that the sheriff and his colleague, deputy Wendell ( Garret Dillahunt), only just missed their man—this mirroring of images goes beyond the level of reflection, and Chigurh enters into the sheriff's constitution, thus further undermining any easy opposition of Chigurh and the sheriff, and instead exposing a certain affinity, intimacy, or similarity even between both."

Depicted violence

In an interview with Charlie Rose, co-director Joel Coen acknowledged that "there's a lot of violence in the book," and considered the violence depicted in the film as "very important to the story". He further added that "we couldn't conceive it, sort of soft pedaling that in the movie, and really doing a thing resembling the book ... it's about a character confronting a very arbitrary violent brutal world, and you have to see that."

''Los Angeles Times'' critic Kenneth Turan commented on the violence depicted in the film: "The Coen brothers dropped the mask. They've put violence on screen before, lots of it, but not like this. Not anything like this. ''No Country for Old Men'' doesn't celebrate or smile at violence; it despairs of it." However, Turan explained that "no one should see ''No Country for Old Men'' underestimating the intensity of its violence. But it's also clear that the Coen brothers and McCarthy are not interested in violence for its own sake, but for what it says about the world we live in ... As the film begins, a confident deputy says I got it under control, and in moments he is dead. He didn't have anywhere near the mastery he imagined. And in this despairing vision, neither does anyone else."

NPR critic Bob Mondello adds that "despite working with a plot about implacable malice, the Coen Brothers don't ever overdo. You could even say they know the value of understatement: At one point they garner chills simply by having a character check the soles of his boots as he steps from a doorway into the sunlight. By that time, blood has pooled often enough in ''No Country for Old Men'' that they don't have to show you what he's checking for."

Critic Stephanie Zacharek of Salon states that "this adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel touches on brutal themes, but never really gets its hands dirty. The movie's violence isn't pulpy and visceral, the kind of thing that hits like a fist; it's brutal, and rather relentless, but there are still several layers of comfortable distance between it and us. At one point a character lifts his cowboy boot, daintily, so it won't be mussed by the pool of blood gathering at his feet ... The Coens have often used cruel violence to make their points – that's nothing new – but putting that violence to work in the service of allegedly deep themes isn't the same as actually getting your hands dirty. ''No Country for Old Men'' feels less like a breathing, thinking movie than an exercise. That may be partly because it's an adaptation of a book by a contemporary author who's usually spoken of in hushed, respectful, hat-in-hand tones, as if he were a schoolmarm who'd finally brought some sense and order to a lawless town."

Ryan P. Doom explains how the violence devolves as the film progresses. "The savagery of American violence," he says, "begins with Chigurh's introduction: a quick one-two punch of strangulation and a bloody cattle gun. The strangulation in particular demonstrates the level of the Coens' capability to create realistic carnage-to allow the audience to understand the horror that violence delivers. ... .Chigurh kills a total of 12 (possibly more) people, and, curiously enough, the violence devolves as the film progresses. During the first half of the film, the Coens never shy from unleashing Chigurh ... The devolution of violence starts with Chigurh's shootout with Moss in the motel. Aside from the truck owner who is shot in the head after Moss flags him down, both the motel clerk and Wells's death occur offscreen. Wells's death in particular demonstrates that murder means nothing. Calm beyond comfort, the camera pans away when Chigurh shoots Wells with a silenced shotgun as the phone rings. He answers. It is Moss, and while they talk, blood oozes across the room toward Chigurh's feet. Not moving, he places his feet up on the bed and continues the conversation as the blood continues to spread across the floor. By the time he keeps his promise of visiting Carla Jean, the resolution and the violence appear incomplete. Though we're not shown Carla Jean's death, when Chigurh exits and checks the bottom of his socks ootsfor blood, it's a clear indication that his brand of violence has struck again."Doom, Ryan P. (2009), Chapter 12: "The Unrelenting Country: 'No Country for Old Men (2007)'", p. 153.

Similarities to earlier Coen brothers films

Richard Gillmore states that "the previous Coen brothers movie that has the most in common with ''No Country for Old Men'' is, in fact, '' Fargo'' (1996). In ''Fargo'' there is an older, wiser police chief, Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) just as there is in ''No Country for Old Men''. In both movies, a local police officer is confronted with some grisly murders committed by men who are not from his or her town. In both movies, greed lies behind the plots. Both movies feature as a central character a cold-blooded killer who does not seem quite human and whom the police officer seeks to apprehend."

Joel Coen seems to agree. In an interview with David Gritten of ''The Daily Telegraph'', Gritten states that "overall he filmseems to belong in a rarefied category of Coen films occupied only by ''Fargo'' (1996), which ... is also a crime story with a decent small-town sheriff as its central character. Joel sighs. 'I know. There are parallels.' He shakes his head. 'These things really should seem obvious to us.'" In addition, Ethan Coen states that "we're not conscious of it, ndto the extent that we are, we try to avoid it. The similarity to ''Fargo'' did occur to us, not that it was a good or a bad thing. That's the only thing that comes to mind as being reminiscent of our own movies, ndit is by accident."

Richard Corliss of ''Time'' magazine adds that "there's also Tommy Lee Jones playing a cop as righteous as Marge in ''Fargo''", while Paul Arendt of the BBC
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