‘How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?’
The Coen brothers adaptation of No Country for Old Men is one of those movies that is so perfect that I almost never want to see it again. The one time I did see it left such an impression that I’m worried that a second viewing might diminish it somehow. I have the same such fears about Silver Linings Playbook and There Will Be Blood. When I saw a copy of Cormac McCarthy’s novel winking up at me it felt like the perfect way to revisit the story without compromising that first golden viewing. And sure enough, Anton Chigurh and the stars that align around him are just as harrowing and powerful on the page as they are on screen…
When a drug deal goes horribly wrong at the Mexican–American border in south-west Texas, a young man who stumbles into a huge sum of money, a wily old sheriff and a cold-blooded killer must navigate their intertwining fates. McCarthy expertly weaves these strands together in this heightened morality tale that questions what it is to love, what it is to want and what it is to be alive. The big questions. Nowhere does the literary legend address the eternal Coco Pops vs Sugar Puffs debate but then some questions are too unanswerable even for the greatest thinkers.
Having previously read Child of God and The Road, I knew what to expect going into No Country for Old Men. A lack of punctuation. A Hemingwayesque sparseness. The grim inevitably of death. And all of those things were present and correct. What I didn’t expect was for McCarthy’s 9th novel to have so much heart. It’s there in the star-crossed relationship between Llewelyn and Carla Jean and it’s there in the tender exchanges shared by Sheriff Bell and his wife Loretta. Sure, this is still a dark novel with hideously dark outcomes but there are shafts of light peeking through.
A masterful and significant piece of work.