Essay Questions

What are the main differences between Cormac McCarthy's novel and this screen adaptation?

The script for the movie was, for the most part, completely faithful to McCarthy's original novel. There were only minor alterations made, and the Coen brothers made these because they believed they did not make any major differences to the narrative. For example, there is a teenage runaway who appears in the book in its latter stages; this character was removed for the purposes of the film. Bell's backstory was also limited, having taken up a far more extensive section of the novel. Another character-come-backstory removed from the film is Deborah Bell, the deceased daughter of the Bells, whose loss weighs heavy on them throughout the narrative.

Another tweak was in the character of Carla Jean Moss; after her husband's death, she is alone in her home when Chigurh appears, intending to kill her. Her reaction as a character in the novel is more or less what most sheltered women's reactions would be when confronted by an assassin in one's living room - she falls apart, melting down emotionally and mentally. However, in the movie, her reaction is slightly different. Although she is still palpably scared, there is a quiet resignation about her. She doesn't break down; she has been through so much that she merely accepts the home invasion and her likely impending murder as the next - and last - in a long line of things she has had to deal with, and she seems to feel that there is an inevitability about it. It is as though she realized that there was really no chance of any other outcome.

Are there traditional good guys and bad guys in this film?

Sometimes, the line between good and evil in the film is very clear and precise. Chigurh is an assassin. He feels nothing when he kills, other than pleasure and amusement. He does not seem to value human life; a life is something to be taken in return for a large pay-off. A human life is a commodity and he considers himself to be one of the best traders in the field. There is no blurring of the lines around Chigurh's character; he is evil incarnate, psychopathic and amoral. He is both the antagonist, and the traditional "baddie" character.

There are also other bad guy characters in the film whose actions are less depraved than Chigurh's but nonetheless deadly for it. The Mexican criminals, for example, are prepared to kill in order to get their money back, but they are also prepared not to kill if they can get their money back without doing so. They are bad guys, because they are criminals, but they do not operate in the same world of evil that Chigurh does.

Then there are the good characters, who sadly seem to also take the role of the victim in the film. One such character is Carla Jean Moss, whose life is ruined by her husband's unthinking theft of the briefcase filled with money from a crime scene near the desert. She has done nothing to cause what happens to her, yet she is powerless to stop the chain of events that ensue and ultimately lead to the deaths of her entire family.

The line between goody and baddy begins to blur slightly when it comes to Llewelyn Moss. He is a good man, for the most part, who does a bad thing, but it is easy to see how he would not consider it to be that bad of a thing that he is doing - after all, he is not stealing life savings from seniors, he is taking a briefcase filled with money from the scene of a crime that seems to have resulted in the key players' deaths. He is nice enough of a man to return to the scene later with water for one of the men there who has survived. Unfortunately, Moss's greed is what ultimately causes his death; if he had given back the money when he had the opportunity he may very well have made it out of the movie alive. He puts his family in harms way, which makes us view him as a bad guy, but in relative terms, when compared to the other characters in the film he is definitively a good character.