A Giant Leap from "Fargo" to Kierkegaard, Sartre and Camus

Rating: 10/10 (30 April 2012)

The title comes from the opening line of W. B. Yeats' famous poem "Sailing to Byzantium," in which the aging narrator wishes to exchange his hard life in Ireland ("no country for old men") for an imaginary aesthetic existence in ancient Byzantium. But neither the novelist (Cormac McCarthy) nor the Coen brothers are promising any sort of deliverance through art or any other imagined alternative to mortal existence. This isn't a story for elitist intellectuals and interpreters of Yeats' frequently arcane visions. On the other hand, it's not a story for those those film-goers who insist on a traditional "movie bad guy" and simply cannot, or refuse to, see the universal and very personal meanings represented by the characters, all of whom--from Barden's unstoppable killer to Tommy Lee Jones' sheriff--mirror our deepest desires, fears, and insecurities. Although not a movie serving up the escape and closure expected by traditional theater audiences, it nevertheless has the power to grip and engage the viewer like few other films. And like a Flannery O'Connor short story, its dark humor and violence ultimately lodge in personal consciousness (I frankly was hanging on to my seat with white knuckles to the very end, before leaving the theater "sadder but wiser" for the experience).
The story is the Coen brothers' "bait" to get the viewer to think about non-trivial matters. After all, it's only we humans who are blessed with "self-consciousness"-- with the capacity to think about our individual "identities," and even about our own life and death. The key to putting together all that the spectator has experienced comes with the appearance of Tommy Lee Jones' sheriff in the final scene of the movie. He says that he's quitting as sheriff. He had expected "God to somehow come into his life" but is now too fully aware that God (much less he himself) is over-matched. The film's nemesis is a merciless "executioner" with less conscience than The Terminator and sufficient inscrutability to make even Woody Harrelson's perceptive diagnosis of him (as a psychopathic killer with principles, albeit devoid of "morality") inadequate. We, like the sheriff, are now faced with the inescapability of our own mortality and with re-visioning our past life in light of this disturbing reality.
Josh Brolin appears to be the sympathetic "hero." he has a John Wayne-like rugged individualism, a knack for survival, and commands instant respect from those around him once they learn of his service in "Nam"--but that won't cut it in the relentless, fatalistic, chancy determinism that, in the Coen Brothers' view of modern existence, controls our lives. Brolin's conscience requires him to return to the scene of a crime with water for the survivor of a drug deal gone terribly bad, yet he can dismiss his wife's concerns for her mother and he can be distracted by a female sunbather.
Brolin's wife suddenly becomes a central figure, but only briefly. She at least has no illusions about getting a lucky roll of the dice. Her fate, like that of all mortals, is preordained, and she refuses to play the Executioner's coin-flip game, representing mortality more accurately: "It's not me or the coin that decides what happens to me. It's you." But in this circular question about free will and the meaning of life, Bardem answers her back: "You're wrong. That's how I got here." It's a game of chance, and there isn't even an authentic card dealer. But its through Bardem's mysterious (and deadly) character that the movie destroys all of our illusions and ultimately goes after the worst of the deadly sins--pride, hubris, taking upon ourselves what belongs only to God. When will we learn? Why can't we?
And therein lies the film's admission of Aristotle's "fatal flaw" and along with it a small ray of light. Human agency has a role after all. Brolin did make a mistake and had the arrogance to think he could get away with his theft of the drug money intended for someone else. And for a moment, he let carnal desire distract him from the real threat. Moreover, he took his own life more seriously than that of his wife or mother- in-law, selfishly assuming that the Executioner was interested "only" in him.
The last two scenes practically "require" interpretation. The Executioner (vulnerable himself, but a better survivor than Harrelson or Brolin) walks away. Behind him he leaves the seeds of greed (and of fatal pride) in a young boy who took money in exchange for what began as a Good Samaritan act. The recovered Executioner now ambles off into a typical American neighborhood (like that in David Lynch's "Blue Velvet"). What's next on his agenda? The viewer can only speculate, even as the film cuts to Jones' sheriff relating a dream about meeting his father (who did not die an old man), and then says: "I woke up."
That awakening is what this movie is all about. The screen goes black waiting for the spectator's inner light to come on. It's time to wake up--perhaps now more than ever. There may be a future, but there will be no lottery tickets--even to those who win them. It's we who must act to make the best of that mortally-defined fateful span of existence that lies before us. We can't know if our efforts will bear positive fruit, but we can know that "good" isn't simply going to happen by wishing and waiting for it. And we can also know that our prideful moments can only bring more misery. And if we don't know this now, the storyteller seems to be saying, we most certainly will when we're older.
Finally, the film's setting must be taken seriously. It repeatedly points to a vacuum, a void, a land laid waste by the same human beings it once nurtured and empowered. Everyone wants answers. We have the power to find them, but only if we're not too complacent or proud to search for them.