I always figured that when I got older God would come into my life. He didn’t. I don’t blame him. If I was him, I’d have the same opinion of me that he does. — Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), ten minutes before the end of No Country for Old Men

Sheriff Bell’s dark ruminations amount to a closing deduction supported by two hours of onscreen mayhem and gloom, but if someone said these things to me, I would offer the following remarks. If God has never come into your life, how can you possibly know what his opinion of you might be? And if you experience him only as an absence he’s definitely part of your life, because he’s in your thoughts—even if your thoughts are untested, gut level assumptions. No Country for Old men is a grim, lumbering tale loaded with precisely the same kind of irrational, unexamined nihilism demolished decades ago by Chesterton and C.S. Lewis—but still dominating much of our film industry, today (see Michael Medved’s Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values).
The movie is expertly made—no question about it. It won Oscars for Best Actor in a Supporting Role, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Picture. I can’t argue with the first three awards, and if you ignore its bleakness, its riot of nauseating onscreen images, and its dismal concluding segment—if, in other words, you ignore what it’s about—the film probably deserves Oscar number four. Joel and Ethan Coen have pulled off a tough task in extraordinary fashion: based on Cormac McCarthy’s novel, No Country for Old Men is leisurely paced, but absolutely riveting.
The film doesn’t really have a conventional plot: punctuated by sudden, haphazard violence and brimming with carnage, it’s a long, straightforward chronicle of murder, theft, and relentless pursuit. A couple of minutes into No Country for Old Men, deer hunter Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) stumbles over the grisly remnants of a botched drug deal in the empty, rugged wastes of West Texas: surrounded by deserted trucks (one housing a mountain of brown heroin), dead bodies litter the ground—and a box-like satchel stuffed with $2 million in cold cash sits there for the taking. Convinced that he can simply vanish, Moss (easily the most foolish character ever written into a script) takes off with the loot. By nightfall, hit man Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) arrives. Heavily armed, looking for the money, and eager to murder as many people as he possibly can before finding it, he homes in on Moss—and just like that, Llewelyn has arrived at ground zero of an awful nightmare.
Chigurh makes Hannibal Lecter look like a Tibetan monk. Intelligent, poker faced, taciturn, radiating quiet homicidal mania—and sporting a weird pageboy haircut—he kills randomly, deciding to murder perfect strangers (or let them live) by flipping a coin. He is terrifying, and by film’s end he’s slaughtered at least ten people, including Llewelyn. His preferred weapons: a shotgun fitted with a huge silencer and a pneumatic contraption used on cattle in slaughterhouses. With Bell and his deputies in hot pursuit, Chigurh chases Moss all the way to the Mexican border. Along the way, the two men exchange several bloodcurdling salvos from heavy duty shotguns, and both of them score hits. Like many shoot ’em up westerns and war movies dating from the 1930s, No Country for Old Men rattles with violence—and the film’s explosive content is fine: it’s a gangster movie, after all.
But the filmmakers’ morbid obsession with mayhem’s revolting aftermath isn’t fine. Maybe the Coens believe that blood and guts all over the place equals feature film “realism.” Well, just how realistic is this movie? In one long, preposterous segment, Chigurh creates a diversion by blowing up a parked automobile, saunters on a leg riddled with .006 buckshot into a small town pharmacy, steals gauze, syringes, morphine, antibiotics, and surgical implements, returns to his car, drives to a motel, takes a hot bath (all of this with blood pouring from his injuries), and removes the shotgun pellets from his own leg. He dresses his wounds—at last—and resumes his search for the $2 million. Hey, as they say, it happens every day. And if the Coens believe that graphic carnage shocks or surprises today’s audiences, I have another question. How could anything flickering onscreen in American theaters shock viewers 41 years after Bonnie and Clyde premièred in the United States?
Even worse: Chigurh eludes Bell and his deputies. Surviving a broadside automobile crash, the most grotesque, menacing movie villain I’ve ever seen clambers out of his car, leaps to his feet, and simply runs away. So one crook (Llewelyn) goes down, and one escapes. Crime, in other words, does pay (half the time, at least), and even if you lose the loot, plenty of cash and hordes of living, breathing targets for your twelve-gauge shotgun will be available tomorrow. (Viewers never learn what happened to the $2 million.)
No Country for Old Men amounts to a frontal assault on the virtue of hope and a slick, louring invitation to embrace apathy and crushing despair. Lecturing Bell on law enforcement, money, drugs, and the general order of things, an old, retired lawman insists that “you can’t stop what’s coming—it ain’t all waitin’ on you.” Give up, in other words. Stop thinking that winning a few battles against criminals makes a difference. If you don’t, you’re naïve, at best, and (at worst) a genuine fool. Really? Maybe in many of today’s feature films—but not in the real, daylight world where hope is a practiced virtue (not a free vanilla ice cream cone), where evil isn’t front-page news, and where grownups don’t roll over and surrender every time devilry rounds the corner. Apparently, most viewers agree. According to a video store employee’s estimate, 15 customers out of 20 complain—heatedly—about the cynical implications of Chigurh’s survival and escape. Dime store nihilism might be fashionable in many quarters of the film industry, but not for most Americans.

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Joe Roquemore, the film critic for The Chicago Daily Observer, is a Chicago area author and movie analyst.