It's a hard world for little things ...

Rating: 10/10 (7 August 2014)

With its fatalistic resonance, the quote, used by the Coen brothers in "Raising Arizona" and borrowed from "The Night of the Hunter" could almost work as a subtitle for "No Country for Old Men"
And any critic toward 2007' Best Picture Winner, is irremediably confronted to that opening "No" summarizing everything the film stands for: nothing. The Coens brothers made fun of nihilists in "The Big Lebowsky" gave the word an entire new dimension here, thrilling like a dream and haunting like a nightmare. Indeed, in this film, it's not the night, but the "Nightmare of the Hunter".
But I'll be honest, I didn't get it the first time I saw it, but I give myself the benefit of the doubt since I was 25 at that time, and I think I was intelligent enough to grasp the film's concept. And indeed, I saw it again yesterday, 5 days before my 32nd birthday, and I didn't get it more than the first time; except that I started looking at the so-called flaws with more comprehensive eyes
I remembered the words I choose to title my review of "Shane", an old-fashioned and traditional Western classic, "the unseen and the unspoken elevate it to its iconic status". This description also works for "No Country for Old Men", except that the unseen is what divided opinions the most, it's for what we didn't see that some believed this movie had more a lot to say than what its first acts presented, but it's also why the rest felt betrayed and dismissed it as a pretentious attempt of making art for the sake of it.
But let's get back to the film. There are three men that fate reunited (although they'll never meet), each one is in one side of what we, humble mortals, call morality. There's Sheriff Bell, played by Tommy Lee Jones, an old timer contemplating the degeneration of humanity through the peaks of barbarity crimes had reached. But we can't be fooled, surely he belongs to a time where lynching, rapes and horrific crimes prevailed, he's not too old but too good and goodness and strength don't form quite an efficient pair.
On the other side, there's the one who elevated the film to its iconic status, Anton Chigurh (Oscar-winning Javier Bardem) the most impacting movie villain since Hannibal Lecter. He's dark, tall, looking even bigger thanks to a meticulous camera work, has a deep authoritative voice and an ominous aura above his shoulder, like a real-life Darth Vader. He would indeed look like Darth Vader from behind with his weird haircut. And there's his inseparable oxygen tank hiding under an everyday banality, a spectacularly deadly weapon. Anyway, in vileness department, Anton means business.
And in the course of his morbid odyssey, he'll meet friendly people from the American side of Rio Grande, and many of them will pay the biggest price to their encounter, a price that can be worth a quarter sometimes. Anton reminded me of a story about a king who was so cruel that when he surprised one of his slaves mocking him in public, he then told him the worse punishment had to come. What did he do? Nothing, and that was even worse, because the poor man died out of fearful stress. This is what we, what the poor gas station attendant understand, life can hang on nothing, a simple call, a coin, two millions, whatever.
Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is a hunter who found two million dollars in the middle of the desert, only trophy from a drug deal that left many Mexican cadavers and a dog rotting in the desert, the crime scene is magnificently rendered by Roger Deakins' cinematography, like a still-life painting. There's still life indeed, Moss takes the money and run, but out of principles, gets back to the crime scene to give some poor man's water. Wrong move, he puts himself on the track and worse, gets Chigurh on his footsteps. Moss is in the crossroads, bad enough to steal and endanger his sweet and caring wife Carla Jean (Kelly MacDonald) but good enough to care. You know at that time that either him or Anton will survive.
We have a sadistic killer, whose use of violence is random, remorseless and even more chilling when you try to give it a meaning. Then, you have a fatalistic journey where despite all of Moss' efforts, you feel like there's no way he'll get through it, because there's a movement incarnated by Chiugurh' slow walk in the middle of a motel, from nowhere to someone, this is the Great Reaper coming, you can't escape from it, you can only postpone the delay. And there's the main protagonist, a defeatist sheriff who can't face the facts that he's not cut for the job anymore, and spends most of his time desperately static, the's the nihilistic, he's the "No" in the title. He's the main character, the key of the story.
That might explain the narrative liberties the Coens took  both Moss and Chigurh are neatly drawn characters, they're mysterious but not their motives, and the movie's intelligence shall rise above obviousness. Bell, in his last courageous attempt to listen to Carla Jean's pleas, to save Moss and get Anton, comes too late, he didn't see what happened, neither did we. Why insisting on so many details, so many on-screen deaths, why making Woody Harrelson introduced as a bad-ass bounty hunter and killed as mercilessly as you stamp on a cockroach?
Because it's the unseen that best expresses life's futility, things either guided by God or the devil's hand, and there's no guarantee that goodness will be rewarded and that's what scares the most. The film has style, yes, but it's not about being deep, depth is nothing when nothingness can be deeper
So, don't blame the Coens brothers for what you didn't see, blame Sheriff Bell.