“I just don't understand it” – Grappling With Evil in the Coen-Verse
In a post-release interview for their 2007 release No Country For Old Men, the Coen brothers deny any purposeful connection to their previous works, with one qualifier. “The similarity to Fargo did occur to us..”, Ethan Coen concedes, “[and] it’s by accident”.¹ Whether they had realized it or not, this illustrious duo of American filmmakers had created the perfect companion piece to Fargo, their classic helping of chilly Midwestern crime. Both Fargo and No Country For Old Men present us with morally upstanding protagonists faced with evil they can’t comprehend, shaking their faith in a morally just world.
Although thematically linked, aesthetically the settings of the movies could not be more different. Fargo takes place in Minnesota and North Dakota, shot on location to ensure authenticity, with piercing white snow and cozy winter coats accompanying most scenes. Other than a brief foray to Minneapolis, most of the movie takes place in quiet towns, with roadside bars and suburban homes giving the setting a sense of normalcy that avoids the urban sprawl of most crime films. Our main characters are not typical “Hollywood” types, either, especially Frances McDormand’s Marge Gunderson, a mild-mannered yet dedicated police chief who treks out in the snow each morning with a smile on her face and no ego in sight. It’s also the movie that gave rise to countless horrible attempts at a Minnesota accent, a factoid that I’m sure is less charming to the locals that have had to deal with it for nearly 25 years. The “darn-tootin” politeness of the characters is part of the movie’s unique charm; heroes and villains alike in the film are dedicated to the niceties of daily interactions. With some, like Marge, it’s authentic. But other characters use manners to mask the sinister intentions that lie beneath the surface.
No Country For Old Men, adapted from the 2005 novel by Cormac McCarthy, takes place in more familiar territory, at least for fans of the Western. It is West Texas in the 1980s, although besides the cars the decade is barely distinguishable. Wide open spaces dominate the landscape, the freezing slush of Fargo replaced with tumbleweeds and dusty Texaco gas stations. Tommy Lee Jones’s Sheriff Ed Tom Bell certainly looks the part of the stoic Western hero, complete with a cowboy hat and a glistening badge upon his introduction. The Coen brothers, seemingly learning their lesson with the success of Fargo, also shot No Country on location, and each blood-red sunset and ramshackle motel gives an undeniable sense of place. It is not a romantic vision of the West, though, a point driven home by the absolute absence of soundtrack in the film. Characters speak plainly to each other, and minutes go by where people say nothing at all. It’s a place where a new gun comes from “the gettin place”, where a discovery of life-changing money prompts only a mumbled “Damn”. The vistas are beautiful, but they are also harsh and unforgiving. People are not stopping to smell the roses here - if they do, they could end up dead.
At the center of both stories is vicious crime, although “vicious” is about where the similarities end. Fargo features a desperate car salesman Jerry, played with comic incompetence by William H. Macy, orchestrating a kidnapping plot of his own wife with the help of a few two-bit hustlers, most notably Steve Buscemi’s skeevy Carl, to pay off overwhelming debt with a ransom payment from his own father-in-law. Needless to say, things don’t go as planned; not only does the actual kidnapping go awry, but Carl and his partner end up shooting an officer and several citizens during a traffic stop where they are almost caught with Jerry’s captive wife. It is here where Marge comes into the fold, to investigate the murders - the crime is gruesome, but Marge is tough and professional, examining each piece of evidence with efficiency. In one clever scene, Marge tells her partner that she feels nauseous after taking a close look at the crime scene, a classic trope to show a normal person out of their element in the face of brutality. But it’s just morning sickness - that’s right, Marge is pregnant, and even though all of her coworkers show particular concern for her well being, she dismisses it with the signature Minnesotan politeness. As the crime begins to unravel, though, so too does Marge’s endearing optimism.
Buscemi’s Carl is all chaotic energy, a wise-cracking scumbag who nonetheless shows a human side on occasion. In his introduction, even he is disgusted at Jerry’s plan. But there is money to be made, and his moral conflict stops there. Accompanied by his practically mute partner Gaear, Carl is far from a criminal mastermind, and together with Jerry they make for an incompetent pair of criminals. Once the crime goes of the rails with the officer’s murder, Carl and Jerry undertake increasingly drastic measures to save their own skins. In Fargo, evil is a downward spiral - as people are pushed to their limits, their true natures are increasingly exposed, and no amount of Midwest nice can mask it. The lines between Jerry and Carl blur with each drastic step. It’s a good thing, then, that the audience has Marge’s innate goodness to latch on to.
Sheriff Bell is a different breed of officer than Marge, although he shares her virtue. Bell is an experienced lawman who has seen it all, and although he doesn’t get the most screen-time in the movie he is undoubtedly its moral center. He moves slowly and deliberately, carrying the weight of decades of police work and the perspective of a tired man who is done seeing the worst humanity has to offer. Although committed to his job and to keeping the peace, he often seems a step behind, waxing nostalgic about the old days when things seemed more manageable and when the world made more sense to him. He’s gentle with people, but distant in his work. It’s a sharp contrast to Marge’s chipper attitude, brilliantly conveyed by Jones’s melancholy performance. Both Marge and Bell are fighting the good fight, but Bell appears to be losing.
No Country’s plot is sparked by Josh Brolin’s everyman character Llewelyn coming across a drug deal gone south in the middle of the Texas desert - everyone is dead, but the briefcase with money remains, and Llewelyn hops on the opportunity. What follows is a tense game of cat-and-mouse, with Sheriff Bell trying to find and save Llewelyn from the hitman looking to recover the money, someone who is more monster than man. Fargo is about the immorality capable in the average person, of the depths people are driven to by weakness and desperation. No Country is concerned with evil itself. In Javier Bardem’s instantly iconic hitman Anton Chigurh, there is no humanity at all. The mop-headed Anton is a killing machine, relentlessly pursuing every hint of Llewyn’s whereabouts and greeting random people with a coin toss that decides whether they will live or die. Unlike Jerry and Carl in Fargo, who are driven by that familiar human vice of greed, Anton has no obvious motivation. He plays the role of philosopher on occasion, telling people that life and death is as random as the coin toss that decides their fates. For Anton, the chaos in his wake is a fact of life. He is the perfect foil for Sheriff Bell, a man who is clinging on to belief in order against so much evidence to the contrary. Anton’s evil is existential in nature, going far beyond the desperate circumstances that had turned Jerry and Carl into loathsome men. Anton does not need circumstance or motivation to be evil: he merely exists this way. The Coen brothers leave you alone with the silent dread of Chigurh as he methodically stalks his prey. Anton is the summation of Bell’s whole career of bearing witness to the worst humanity has to offer, and the greatest test yet to his moral fiber.
Marge is early in her career compared to Sheriff Bell, and is far less jaded, often reminding us of her faith in the good in people. One scene that has nothing at all to do with the main crime is a great example. An old classmate named Mike Yanagita from high school calls up Marge after seeing her on TV interviewed over the murders, and they meet up for dinner. Marge, who is happily married, is blissfully unaware of Mike's cringeworthy ulterior motive. Only minutes after they meet, it’s clear Mike views the meet as a date. He tells Marge that his wife has passed away, and Marge balances sympathy with disgust as Mike makes his move only to be firmly rebuffed by Marge. Mike breaks down, telling Marge how lonely he has been, and she flashes sympathy on her face for the man despite his intentions. After the dinner, Marge is talking about the incident on the phone to her friend, and she learns Mike’s wife hasn’t died; they weren’t even married. Marge is shocked at his deception - “that’s a surprise!”, she tells her friend, clearly hurt that her instincts have led her astray.
Marge’s worldview faces its toughest test yet, though, in the shocking conclusion of the movie, where she deciphers Jerry’s role and finally gets on the trail of Carl and Gaear. By this point, the ransom plot has totally disintegrated, with Carl leaving Jerry’s wealthy father-in-law dead at the ransom handoff. Even Jerry’s wife is dead, seemingly killed by the mute Gaear for ambiguous reasons in the cabin where the criminals were hiding out. When Marge drives up to the snowy cabin and draws her gun, she witnesses one of the most memorable scenes in the whole Coen filmography: Gaear, after arguing with Carl over how to split the ransom money, is feeding him into the woodchipper.
Marge arrests Gaear, and the ride back in the squad car is a solemn one; the smile Marge has worn throughout the movie has evaporated. But notes of her optimism remain. Surrounded by the white glow of snow on all sides, she tells Gaear that “there’s more to life than a little money”, pleading with a man she just learned to be a brutal murderer. “It’s a beautiful day”, she says, if only to convince herself. “I just don’t understand it”, talking to herself more than she ever was to Gaear.
Sheriff Bell is no stranger to Marge’s confusion. At the end of No Country, he does not catch Anton, and he does not save Llewelyn, who is struck down in an El Paso motel by a separate group of drug dealers after the stash. Throughout the film, Bell has been a step behind Anton, picking at dead-end evidence that brings him no closer to justice. The shooting happens off-screen, as if to put us in the same powerless position as Bell, with the sheriff showing up just after the getaway car pulls away. Years of this powerless feeling have worn down Bell to finally retire, and the last few scenes of the movie take place in Bell’s newfound obscurity, a somber epilogue to a gruesome tale. A visit to his cousin Ellis gives Bell a chance to vent, to reveal “he feels overmatched” by the evil he encounters in the world, the brutality he was unable to stop. Bell has always expected God to enter his life, and “He didn’t”. Ellis warns him that he “can’t stop what’s coming...that’s vanity”. The best he can do? “Put a tourniquet on it”.
The only narration in No Country occurs in the opening minute. After briefly introducing himself as Sheriff, a path charted by his father, Bell recalls a story from earlier in his career. It was a man who had killed a fourteen year old girl, whom Bell caught and sent to the electric chair. The man told Bell he knew he was going to hell, and showed no remorse for his crime, even saying if they had let him go he was eager to kill again. “I don’t want to go out and meet something I don’t understand,” Bell tells us, echoing Marge. “A man would have to put his soul at hazard”. This apprehension informs the character that eventually lands in retirement a cynical man unsure of his place in the world. Anton and his path of violence were only the latest in a long run of soul-shaking incidents for Sheriff Bell, finally convincing him that his fight had been lost. We are left to wonder, what is Marge’s line? Is the incident in Fargo this moment for her, the moment she will eventually recall decades later as the time she began to doubt her place in the world?
Thankfully, Fargo does not end in the patrol car. The last scene in Fargo is one of genuine love, a quiet moment shared between Marge and her husband as they lay in bed, chatting with excitement about their child on the way. “We’re doing pretty good”, Marge says, and she means it, seeing only hope and new life on the horizon. The events of the film have shook Marge, but not enough for her to give up in her pursuit of doing good. Sure, maybe the years will take their toll and eventually Marge will identify more with Sheriff Bell than she would like. But for now, she perseveres.
In No Country’s very last scene, the newly retired Sheriff Bell tells his wife about a dream he has just had. In the dream, he imagined his father, who has long since passed away, on horseback. In his hands he is “carrying fire in a horn”, protecting the flame “among the dark and the cold”. As jaded and shaken as Bell is at this point, the dream points that his faith is not totally smothered. In the dream, his father carries the light of human goodness, one that faces constant threat from the “dark and the cold” of evil but cannot be extinguished. Bell has decided that it can no longer be his burden to carry that flame, and after decades of hardship it is easy to see why. But Marge, in all of the boundless optimism of Fargo’s finale, will carry that fire as long as she is able.
¹ NYFF: No Country For Old Men, https://www.cinemablend.com/new/NYFF-Country-Men-6574.html?