Joel and Ethan Coen work together as a singular symbiotic creature writing, directing and producing films with a remarkably consistent coherency. This coherent vision is what has made many love their movies while others despise them. Boiled down to a ridiculous level, the vision of the Coen Brothers is essentially nihilistic. One of the most amazing aspects associated with their career is how they manage to persistently raise money to produce films of astonishing pessimism considering they began making movies in the era of the summer blockbuster. No Country for Old Men finally brought them Oscar gold for Best Picture; perhaps the only thing more astonishing than that it took until then for this honor to arrive is that when it finally did, it was to honor what would be the duo’s most breathtakingly pessimistic vision yet commit to screen.
The Coen Brothers don’t do happy endings. In the entirely of their canon, the only two of their films that have attained a certain high level of mainstream popularity that can be said to even come remotely close to a genuinely upbeat ending—which is not to say an ending completely free of irony—are Raising Arizona and Fargo. Within the idiosyncratic existentialist nightmare world of Coen characters, the endings of those two films are like something out of Spielberg or Frank Capra in comparison to No Country for Old Men. The moral of any Coen Brothers film picked at random is just that: the universe is random. Structured, sure, and maybe even logical and rational, but those two things have nothing to do with randomness. Even an utterly chaotic situation has a certain logic and rationality to its overall superstructure, but individual events can still happen completely at random. Raising Arizona made that message funny. Fargo, by film’s end, actually made it almost touching, or at least as touching as a Coen Brothers murder drama can be. While things don’t turn out perfectly even for the protagonists in those films, there is at least still room for hope and some optimism by the end.
No Country for Old Men does away with all hope and even the very last shred of optimism. Evil—personified in the malevolent form of Anton Chigurh—exists and all the planning and attention to detail and sinister intentions in pursuit of the larger good of executing the devil are of such little use and value that the tragic failure of heroism is so stripped of meaning that it takes place completely off-screen.
In fact, the closest thing to an actual triumph of “good” over “evil” has nothing to do with Llewellyn versus Chigurh or Bell versus Chigurh. The most emotionally intense sequence in the film is not one in which drama rises over a standoff concerning the drug money, but a standoff concerning a simple attempt at being pleasant. When Chigurh coerces the gas station owner into calling the coin flip against his will, the film starkly states that free will is a joke. Not just a joke, but a knee-slapper. Chigurh is not just being strangely menacing when he warns the attendant against putting the coin in his pocket where it will become just another coin. He’s telling him that if he does that, then he won’t know what is the coin that just saved his life because it will become just another piece of change.
It was not the coin that saved the man’s life. It was Chigurh. Coen Brothers nihilistic insistence that good cannot defeat evil—only fate can—has never been more chillingly represented. Faith is a joke that fate plays on the universe.
