Empty Spaces

I'm not in a formalist mood these days, I guess, because the Coen Brothers' latest film, No Country for Old Men, based on Cormac McCarthy's novel, struck me as fantastic-looking and beautifully performed, yet strangely unsatisfying, devoid of humanity.

As much as it is about anything, No Country is about fate. Relentless, remorseless fate, sweeping humanity along a "dismal tide." But the film has nothing more to say about fate than that fate is and that free will is probably, at best, an illusion. There are two coin tosses in the film. In one, a man plays the toss, but doesn't know the stakes. In another, a woman, knowing the stakes, refuses to play. Who wins, who loses? Who lives, who dies? Fate decides.

Fate is embodied in Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a relentless, remorseless killer whose quirk is that he disdains ordinary guns for a hydraulic air gun. The breath of death, if you will. More Rutger Hauer's Hitcher than Hannibal Lecter, Chigurh appears from nowhere in west Texas and begins killing and does not stop, and when local Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) stumbles across the two million dollars that survived a drug deal shootout, Chigurh tracks him with a deliberateness that is more fitting to the walking dead than a live assassin; indeed, by the film's end Chigurh acquires a shuffling gait of which George Romero would be proud.

Did Moss--floating in on the tide--have a choice in his fate? Maybe, but even he doesn't believe it, telling his wife: "Things happen. Can't take 'em back." And once he starts his path is set. He believes, at times, that he can choose his destiny, but over and over it is made clear that he cannot. He's even told it. But he doesn't know it, and he never learns it.

Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) has grown old enough--by his own devices, maybe, but probably by chance--to learn it, and he oversees the proceedings with the detachment of one who is unhappy about life's meaninglessness, but who has come to terms with it. Invited to accompany investigative revisits to crime scenes, he demurs, seeing little point in combing over the petty details of life's atrocities. Bell sees the tide coming in, and he'd best prefer not to get wet by it.

There is a cold calculation to the film that I can't help feeling let down by. It is a marvel, in a way, filled with exquisite moments, Coenesque touches, as in the shot of smoky light filtering slowly through a blown-out hole. The tension is incredible, and achieved through exquisite timing. The actors, Jones in particular, are mesmerizing. And at the heart of it all is an empty space.