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.[54] The three films share common themes, such as pessimism and nihilism.[55][56][57][58] 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 [and] circumstance" in earlier works including Raising Arizona, which featured another hitman, albeit less serious in tone.[59][60] Numerous critics cited the importance of chance to both the novel and the film, focusing on Chigurh's fate-deciding coin flipping,[61] but noted that the nature of the film medium made it difficult to include the "self-reflective qualities of McCarthy's novel."[62]
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. "Be there in about 15 minutes.""[63] 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."[10]
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."[64] Roger Ebert writes that "the movie demonstrates how pitiful ordinary human feelings are in the face of implacable injustice."[10]
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."[65]
Variety critic Todd McCarthy describes Chigurh's modus operandi: "Death walks hand in hand with Chigurh wherever he goes, unless he decides otherwise ... [I]f 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."[66]
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."[67]
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".[68]
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."[69]
Arne De Boever believes that there is a "close affinity, and intimacy even, between the sheriff and Chigurh in No Country for Old Men [which is developed] in 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."[70]
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."[31]
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."[71]
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."[72]
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."[73]
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 [boots] for blood, it's a clear indication that his brand of violence has struck again."[74]
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."[33]
Joel Coen seems to agree. In an interview with David Gritten of The Daily Telegraph, Gritten states that "overall [the film] seems 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.'"[47] In addition, Ethan Coen states that "we're not conscious of it, [and] to 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, [and] it is by accident."[75]
Richard Corliss of Time magazine adds that "there's also Tommy Lee Jones playing a cop as righteous as Marge in Fargo",[76] while Paul Arendt of the BBC stated that the film transplants the "despairing nihilism and tar-black humour of Fargo to the arid plains of Blood Simple."[77]
Some critics have also identified similarities between No Country for Old Men and the Coens' previous film Raising Arizona, namely the commonalities shared by Anton Chigurh and the fellow bounty hunter Leonard Smalls.[78]
