No Country For Old Men (2007) - The Way It Is!

★★★★★

The question is, would you rather keep up with the killing game and be part of this world inevitably becoming sicker and darker, or stay good, true and innocent even if that means being alienated and getting killed eventually? This is sort of a dilemma the opening narrative raises for our consideration. It may not seem to have anything to do with the plot, just like the title may seem completely irrelevant to the story itself, but that’s the theme hidden behind you have to keep in mind while watching such a masterpiece by Coen brothers!

This is not a film you’d appreciate immediately right after first checkout. The more you watch it, the more you’d love it and understand what is really going on there, what those pictures without any bit of score try to convey, and why those characters think and act and talk like that. Some may feel like the pace is sometimes pretty slow, especially when it comes to Tommy Lee Jones’s part, but it actually works like a timeout where you can take a short break from the nerve-wrecking chases set between Josh Brolin’s Moss and Javier Bardem’s Chigurh, whose performance alone is without doubt the highlight of the show that would keep haunting you like a nightmare even long after you’re done watching it.

The story is of no surprises or plot twists to trick our mind. In fact, there’s even no climax or so-called final standoff or shootout to wrap it up. The ending is considered anti-climax, unreasonable, weird, boring, insignificant by some including me when I first watched it. Now I’m so fascinated by how it plays out and ends. It’s like experiencing a typical life where things are not quite what they seem, and nothing’s really in control! As a matter of fact, there’s no such a thing as an end in life where you can finally get to sit back and call it quits! We’re never able to quit it until we ditch the thought of wanting to do so. But somehow we’re always convinced that there’s something we can or must do so that we would feel at ease, just like Mr. Moss in the film who thinks he has to fetch that dying guy some water even though he knows he’s not supposed to. That’s our bad indeed! We can’t help but keep coming back here to just get trapped and tortured! And we kind of like it!

To me the film is also a good demonstration of how karma plays its tricks so skillfully to mislead and upset those who think it’s a bitch after all. Simply put, karma’s a combination of predestination and free will. It’s like you participating in a card game where you have no control of what cards you’re given but it’s all up to you to how to play your cards in hand. The whole going on involves a lot of causes and conditions triggered by a whole lot more so yes, karma’s a bitch in a sense because to our mind of dualism, there’s definitely no way to see clearly how it works.

‘No Country For Old Men’ is all atmospheric and thrilling, and at times disturbing. It challenges how you look at fate and destiny and karma if you will. It may upset you at first but once you allow it to get under your skin, it’d probably be able to change the way you look at life itself, at least a bit if not completely!