Why I Didn’t Love ‘No Country for Old Men’
Because I read the book. The film conveys Cormac McCarthy’s story extremely well, but its soul got lost in the transition. Nearly everyone I know who watched the movie without having first read the book couldn’t make a damned lick of sense out of the seemingly bizarre ending. The Coens couldn’t quite figure out how to incorporate the last 30 pages of McCarthy’s novel, which seem to serve as a reflection upon the author’s own place in a changing world.
Through Sheriff Bell’s character, McCarthy examines what it means to live in a world where people are disconnected from social networks, a world that has changed so much, and so quickly, that the advice and knowledge of our forebears falls flat, and offers little practical guidance. Bell’s character has a long, drawn out conversation with his uncle, which is also present in the film adaptation. That conversation serves to humanize Bell, and demonstrates to us that though he and the antagonist, Anton Chigurh, are moral opposites, their personalities both developed out of chance circumstances and human weakness. We are able to see that the Sheriff became the moral pyre in an attempt to compensate for his past cowardliness; Chigurh’s psychopathy likely comes from a rough childhood, or something. Unlike the film, the novel manages to convey Bell’s deeply seeded guilt, and a longing to be the man that he believed his father to be.
Point is, the dream recounted at the end of the film is supposed to make sense. Sheriff Bell describes a dream to his wife, wherein he is lost in the darkness, and sees his father upon a horse bearing firelight; before his father can say or do anything to show him the way, Bell wakes from it and realizes that he is without guidance in this world. The Coens told a great story about men, greed, and insane ambition, but did little to bring life to McCarthy’s/Bell’s interpretations of what was really happening.
