No Country for Old Men

Llewelyn Moss finds the money and believes being good at this gives him a chance to keep it. Anton Chigurh comes after him, killing as though he is following rules older and colder than anything he decided. Sheriff Bell walks through the wreckage and increasingly reads it as proof that the world has turned into something he no longer understands. Moss dies offscreen, Chigurh walks away from a car crash, and Bell retires and tells us about a dream of his father riding ahead in the dark.

Moss mistakes competence for control

Moss is good at nearly everything this chase asks of him. He reads tracks, guesses where the pursuit is, hides the money, improvises weapons, crosses the border and survives things that should kill him. His skill keeps proving itself just long enough to let him believe the situation is still manageable. The money turns a terrible decision into a technical problem, and Moss is much better at technical problems than at going back over the decision.

Chigurh turns choice into fate

Chigurh talks like a man carrying out something inevitable. The coin is his cleanest trick: he puts a person's life on an object, then behaves as though the result has taken the choice off him. Carla Jean refuses the whole setup. She tells him the coin does not decide anything. He does. That is the moment the philosophy comes off and leaves a murderer standing there.

The Coens keep putting him inside long stretches with no music telling us what to think. Boots on a floor, the hiss of the bolt gun, a phone ringing, an air vent coming loose. Everything is louder because nothing is cushioning it. His inevitability is built out of deliberate movements, one at a time.

Bell makes violence a story about decline

Bell looks at the bodies and reaches for history. He remembers older crimes, talks to other old lawmen, and wonders whether something has fundamentally changed. The old men keep spoiling the story. Uncle Ellis reminds him that brutal things were happening here long before Bell arrived and will keep happening after. Bell wants an explanation big enough to make his exhaustion mean the age failed, rather than that he did.

The film gives him no golden age to go back to. His retirement is a real defeat without even the comfort of knowing he diagnosed it right.

The ending denies everyone mastery

Moss never gets the confrontation the film seems to be building. Bell arrives after he is already dead. Chigurh walks out of Carla Jean's house and a car hits him at an ordinary intersection. The man who lectures people about inevitability ends up bleeding on a curb because a stranger ran a light.

Then the chase just stops. Bell sits at a kitchen table and talks about two dreams. The last image belongs to an old man describing his father riding ahead with fire, somewhere further on than Bell can see. Nobody mastered any of it. Bell is left with memory and the hope that someone is waiting up the road.

Conscience sends Moss back

Going back with the water is the strangest thing Moss does, and he knows exactly how dangerous it is. The dying man asked, Moss walked away, and then he could not sleep. It does not cancel out taking the money. It shows that conscience is still working inside a man already making decisions against it.

Death changes Bell's horizon

Bell talks about retiring as though he has simply hit the limit of what he can do, and then the dreams go somewhere else entirely. His father is dead. Bell is older now than his father ever got to be, and he still pictures himself following him through the dark. The fire up ahead does not solve any of the violence. It changes what he is looking at.

• You are good at this. When does that stop being a reason to feel safe?
• Do you call it bad luck because not knowing is worse?
• Who have you hurt and never gone back to?
• What have you never called a sin because the word costs too much?