The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen · a film · 2007 · 122 minutes
Mode
Pursuit thriller that becomes an elegy; crime story, Western and parable of chance in one structure, the comedy of the Coens’ earlier films turned to dread
Mythos
Death as a man who keeps appointments and lets a coin decide; the hunter who takes what is not his and is hunted; the old lawman who has outlived his law; the father who rides ahead carrying fire
Phase
Three strands braided across West Texas and the border in 1980 — hunted, hunter, sheriff — the sheriff’s always a step behind; the promised meeting withheld, the hunted man dead between scenes, the killer walking away, and the end given to a retired man’s two dreams
Presentation
Feature film in colour, about 122 minutes, from Cormac McCarthy’s novel of 2005; Roger Deakins’s photography, Skip Lievsay’s sound, Carter Burwell’s score so sparse it is near silence; long passages carried by footsteps, wind and air through a vent
Register
From a gas station proprietor’s small talk about the weather to a captive-bolt pistol at a door lock; a boot drawn back from spreading blood; a man checking his soles as he leaves a house
Scale
Three men and a woman, a county, a border, a year
Governing Proposition
A welder hunting antelope finds the dead of a drug deal and a case of money, takes it, and is pursued across West Texas by a killer who settles some of his killings by the toss of a coin, while a sheriff near retirement follows both and arrives after every event. The film withholds its climax: the hunted man is killed off-screen by other men, and the killer walks away from a car crash with a broken arm. The wager is that a thriller can refuse the meeting it has promised and give instead an old man’s two dreams at a breakfast table, and that the refusal will say what no confrontation could: that what is coming cannot be stopped, and was never waiting on anyone.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with the land, a run of West Texas dawns photographed by Roger Deakins without a figure in them, and over them an old man’s voice. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, played by Tommy Lee Jones, speaks of the sheriffs before him, some of whom never wore a gun, of a boy he sent to the electric chair, and of a kind of violence he does not understand and would rather not go out to meet. While he speaks, a deputy walks a handcuffed man into a station. The man, Anton Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem with a bowl haircut and a flat gaze, strangles the deputy from behind with the chain of his own cuffs, washes his wrists, takes the car, stops a motorist on the highway, and kills him with a captive-bolt pistol fed from an air tank, the tool used on cattle. The film has shown its two old men and its death, and has given them in that order.
Llewelyn Moss, played by Josh Brolin, lies on a rise with a rifle and misses an antelope. Following the blood of a wounded dog he finds, in the desert below, the remains of a drug deal: trucks, dead men, a dying Mexican asking for water, a load of heroin, and, further off, under a tree, a man dead with a case of money beside him. He takes the case home to the trailer and his wife Carla Jean, played by Kelly Macdonald. In the night, unable to leave it, he fills a jug with water and drives back for the dying man. The man is dead. A truck comes over the rise with its headlights, and the chase that follows, on foot through the dark and into the river with a dog swimming after him, is the film’s first set piece and its only one in the open.
The Coens wrote, directed, produced and, under their editing pseudonym, cut the film, from Cormac McCarthy’s novel of 2005. Carter Burwell’s music is reduced almost to nothing, and the sound, by Skip Lievsay, does the work music would do. It was released in late 2007.
Movement II
Moss puts Carla Jean on a bus to her mother in Odessa and takes the money to a motel in Del Rio, where he hides the case in the duct of the air vent, screwing the grille back with a dime. He does not know that a transponder is sewn into the money, and that a receiver chirps faster as it nears the case. Chigurh has the receiver. At the deal site he is met by two men in suits who have hired him, and he kills them both before the question of trust can be raised.
At a gas station in the middle of nowhere an old proprietor, played by Gene Jones, makes small talk about the weather and the drive from Dallas, and Chigurh turns the talk into an interrogation he will not explain. He tosses a coin and tells the man to call it, and when the man asks what he stands to win, says only that he has been putting it up his whole life without knowing it. The man calls heads and is right. Chigurh tells him not to put the coin in his pocket with the others, where it will become just a coin. The scene lays down the law the film will keep: chance decides, and the agent takes no blame for it.
Ed Tom and his deputy Wendell, played by Garret Dillahunt, ride out to the dead at the deal site and read the ground like a text. Ed Tom gets the whole story from the tracks and the shell casings and is in no hurry about it, and the film gives his slowness room, since it is the only comedy it allows itself without blood. At the Del Rio motel the Mexicans who have also tracked the money are waiting in Moss’s room. Chigurh blows the lock, kills them with a silenced shotgun, and finds the vent empty: Moss has already taken the next room and drawn the case out through the duct. He is gone, and the two men have now each seen the other’s work and not the other’s face.
Movement III
In a hotel in Eagle Pass, Moss finds the transponder in the money, and understands what has been following him. He sits in the dark with a shotgun across his knees. The film gives him the sound of boots in the corridor, the light under his door, and then the light going out as a hand unscrews the bulb. The sequence runs with no music, cut to footsteps, and is the film’s height as a thriller. Chigurh blows the lock through with the bolt pistol, Moss fires, and the two men fight down into the night street, wounding each other. Moss, bleeding, crosses the border bridge into Mexico, throws the case over the rail into the brush by the river, buys a coat off three youths with the bills in his hand, and wakes in a hospital in Piedras Negras.
Carson Wells, played by Woody Harrelson, is hired in a Houston office by the man who hired Chigurh, played by Stephen Root, to recover the money and remove the problem. He is an easy, knowing man, the one person in the film who talks about Chigurh as though he could be managed. He finds Moss in the hospital and offers him a deal. Then he goes back to his hotel in Eagle Pass and Chigurh is on the stairs behind him. In his room Wells bargains for his life while Chigurh talks about the uselessness of rules a man abandons when they stop serving him. The telephone rings. Chigurh shoots Wells, lifts his feet out of the way of the blood as it spreads, and answers. It is Moss on the line. Chigurh tells him what will happen to his wife unless the money comes back, and Moss tells him what he intends instead.
Chigurh is shot in the leg and treats himself in a motel bathroom with supplies stolen from a pharmacy after setting a car on fire outside it as a diversion. The film gives these minutes to a man cleaning a wound, and they are as patient as the gas station scene. Everything about him is a matter of procedure. The dread he carries comes from the steadiness, not from any speed.
Movement IV
Moss arranges to meet Carla Jean at a motel in El Paso and to send her on to safety. Ed Tom, who has visited Carla Jean and her mother in Odessa and promised her nothing but his help, drives there too. Carla Jean’s mother, played by Beth Grant, complaining of her cancer and her daughter, tells a courteous Mexican at the bus station where they are going. At the motel Moss talks with a woman by the pool who offers him a beer, and the film cuts away. When it returns, Ed Tom is arriving as a truck full of Mexicans fires on its way out of the lot, and Moss lies dead in his doorway. The death the film has been building toward for an hour and a half has happened between two shots, at the hands of men who have not been introduced. Carla Jean arrives on the bus to find the police tape.
That night Ed Tom goes back to the motel. The lock of Moss’s room has been punched through, and the sheriff looks at the brass cylinder in his hand and, for a long moment, at the dark circle in the door. Inside, in the dark, Chigurh sits with his shotgun and watches the light at the window. Ed Tom enters. The room is empty, the bathroom window locked, the vent grille unscrewed and lying on the floor beside a dime. Whether the two men were in the same room is left to the viewer, and the film does not lift the question. The sheriff has arrived after the fact again, and has nothing to show for his courage but a vent.
He drives to see Ellis, played by Barry Corbin, a relation crippled by a gunshot years back and living alone with cats in a house going to ruin. Ed Tom tells him he feels outmatched, and Ellis tells him the story of their Uncle Mac, shot on his own porch in 1909 by men who then sat on their horses and watched him die, and says that what is coming cannot be stopped and was never waiting on anyone, and that to think it was is vanity. It is the longest talk in the film, and the one a thriller would cut.
Movement V
Carla Jean buries her mother and comes home to find Chigurh sitting in her bedroom. He tells her that he gave her husband his word, and that this is the best he can do for her, and he offers her the coin. She refuses it. She tells him that the coin has nothing to say, and that it is he who decides. He explains, with what reads as sincerity, that he got here the same way the coin did. The film cuts to him leaving the house, pausing on the porch to look at the soles of his boots. Nothing else is shown.
At an intersection a car runs a light and hits his, and Chigurh climbs out with a bone through his forearm. Two boys on bicycles stop; one gives him his shirt for a sling and he pays for it, and insists they did not see him. He walks away down a suburban street, limping, as the sirens come. The hunted man is dead, the money is unaccounted for, and the killer has been stopped by nothing but chance, which he has spent the film insisting is the only agent there is.
Ed Tom, retired, sits at breakfast with his wife Loretta, played by Tess Harper, and tells her two dreams of his father. In the first he lost some money his father gave him. In the second they were riding through a mountain pass in the cold and dark, and his father went past him carrying fire in a horn, the way people used to, and rode on ahead to make a fire out there in all that cold, and he knew his father would be waiting when he got there. Then he woke up. The film cuts to black on a clock ticking. No Country for Old Men took four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and Bardem’s for supporting actor. What has lasted is less the hunt than the breakfast table: a thriller that ended by declining to end, and left an old man’s dream to say what it knew.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure and on the silences, which carry as much as the talk. The gas station coin toss establishes the law by which Carla Jean will later be offered her life; the Ellis scene, which a thriller would cut, is where the film says that what is coming was never waiting on anyone; both dreams are required, and the second needs the first. The motel vent, the transponder and the boots are each set down once and used. What counts against is weighed: Carson Wells gets a full scene with his employer and dies within a reel, and the Mexicans who kill Moss are a necessity with no face, so the refusal of the climax is also a convenience. Held at the figure because even the air through the opened vent is doing work.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: there is a violence that exceeds comprehension, and the men whose work is to comprehend it are left with a bafflement the film articulates, not resolves. Ed Tom Bell opens the film saying he does not understand what he faces, and ends it with a dream he does not interpret. The film does not say the world grew worse; Ellis says it was always this way, and the uncle shot on his porch in 1909 is the evidence. Chigurh’s coin states the other half: the chance that falls on a life is not the agent’s, and the agent will not take the blame. Held at the gate because the condition is stated by its characters as often as shown, and the showing, in the hunt, is a thriller’s showing.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Elevation returns, and it is cold throughout. The hunt’s set pieces reach it: the pickup’s headlights on the ridge at night and the dog in the river; the motel room where Moss sits in the dark with the shotgun, hears the boots in the corridor, and watches the light under the door go out; the night street in Eagle Pass, two men wounded, gunfire without music; the lock cylinder blown across a room; Ed Tom in the doorway of the El Paso motel, the dark room before him. The ending is elevation of another kind, the father riding ahead with the fire in the horn, told plain at breakfast. What holds the axis here: the height is of dread, not transport, and the border crossing, the hospital and Wells’s errand run flat by design.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Myth built, not cited. Chigurh is death by chance made a man, and the archetype is load-bearing: he keeps the rules he states, lets the coin fall, and will not be argued out of the role by the one woman who names it. His haircut, air tank and boots keep him particular. Moss is the hunter who takes what is not his, given the hunter’s skills and allowed to fail. Ed Tom is the Western’s old lawman, who here never draws a weapon and never meets his adversary. The father carrying fire in a horn through dark and cold is the oldest image the film has, given as a dream, not a symbol. Held at the figure because unstoppable pursuit was a genre convention before the film took it up, and relies on the recognition.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The inheritance is the pursuit thriller and the modern Western, and the Coens’ own crime comedy. The departures are real: the protagonist killed off-screen, by men not his pursuer, at the point where the genre promises its meeting; a score so withheld it is close to no score; a close given to a retired man’s dreams over breakfast, with the killer alive and the money unaccounted for. The stake was commercial, taken on a studio’s money with a prestige cast. Held below the gate because the risks had precedent in the makers’ own practice — Fargo had already let its plot run past its genre’s shape — and in the source: the withheld climax, the dreams and Ellis are McCarthy’s, carried over faithfully. A faithful adaptation of a swerve is a smaller swerve.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The knowledge is carried by silence and elision: give the film a conventional score and the dread becomes suspense; show Moss’s death and it becomes a tragedy with a villain, which it refuses. The strands are cut so that Ed Tom arrives after everything, and this lateness, repeated, is the argument — he is never in the scene the film seems to make for him. The dreams close the film because nothing else could; a confrontation would answer a question the film holds open. The sound is the instrument: chirp, boot on gravel, air in a vent carry what dialogue will not. Held below the top where form is a container: the Wells thread and the hospital advance the plot in plain genre grammar.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Evidence over promise, and there are nineteen years of it. It has held and deepened on return: whether Chigurh was in the El Paso room when Ed Tom entered is still argued; so is whether Carla Jean died, given only as a man checking his boots. The two dreams are read anew each decade, as despair or consolation. The relation to McCarthy’s novel, what was cut and what was kept, sustains a second literature. Formal depth counts: the sound track rewards a close hearing for what it leaves out. Held at the figure because the film is lucid, and the re-reading it sustains is of two or three sealed moments; the hunt gives up what it has on a second viewing, and nothing in it is bottomless as the box in Mulholland Drive is.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Released in 2007, so force and reach are scored together. The force: a prestige thriller that showed the genre could refuse its climax and its score, and that the neo-Western of the border could carry fate as its subject. The reach is real and moderate. The border crime film and the prestige neo-Western that followed are open heirs: Villeneuve’s Sicario (2015), Mackenzie’s Hell or High Water (2016), Sheridan’s Wind River (2017), and in television Breaking Bad (2008–2013), whose New Mexico and whose unhurried killers owe the film a grammar. The Coens’ own True Grit (2010) followed from it. Held well below the gate because what it redirected was a sector of American prestige film and not the form; the withheld climax did not become a convention, and the pursuit thriller went on meeting its villain.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Survival is weighed across two decades, and the surface gives it little to lose. The setting is 1980, chosen, not contemporary: the telephones, the trucks and the motels were already of the past when the film was made, and read as period now as then. It was placed tenth in the BBC critics’ poll of the century’s films in 2016, and its Best Picture award has not come to look like a mistake. Charged against it: Chigurh has been imitated to the point of parody, and the prestige violence it exemplified is now familiar. What holds the figure is the span: level with There Will Be Blood and In Rainbows, works of its year, a tenth short of the gate, and far below what has lasted centuries.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Command of the medium at the highest mark, load-bearing throughout: Roger Deakins’s photography, dawn desert and motel corridors lit by a single lamp; Skip Lievsay’s sound, the receiver’s chirp, the bolt pistol’s cough, the wind, and the silence where a score would be; Carter Burwell’s score reduced to a few sustained tones few viewers notice; the editing under the Coens’ pseudonym, which cuts the motel pursuit to the rhythm of footsteps and gives Ed Tom his lateness; Jess Gonchor’s motels and offices; Javier Bardem’s Chigurh, a stillness with a voice, and Tommy Lee Jones’s face doing the film’s thinking; Josh Brolin and Kelly Macdonald, whose Texas is exact. The costs are small: the Wells thread is told at genre pace, and the dog in the river is visibly handled. Nothing is wasted.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the proprietor’s talk of weather and the drive from Dallas, and Carla Jean refusing the coin in her mother’s house. One law governs them — the coin. The Coens’ comedy, the deputy’s pride, the trailer-park manager refusing an address, the boys asking about the bone through the arm, is the law in a lighter key: people speak in the forms they have, and the forms do not fit what came. Chigurh’s dread is the same law met head-on. Ed Tom’s bafflement, Ellis’s cats, the two dreams obey it. Held at the figure by one scene that strains it: the Mexicans’ arrival at the El Paso motel, which the law requires and the film cannot show without becoming another film, so it is given as sound and aftermath.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The orders held: the law, in a sheriff’s office, a courthouse and newspaper stories read aloud; history, in the border and the drugs crossing it, and in Ellis’s uncle shot in 1909; marriage, in Ed Tom and Loretta at their table and Moss and Carla Jean in the trailer, shown from inside; the natural order, in the antelope, the desert and the dog; and the sacred, once, in the fire carried in a horn. Integrated: Ellis’s story and Ed Tom’s dreams are one argument. What holds the axis here is absence: labour is thin, a welder who never welds; the family beyond marriage is a mother who dies between scenes; the state is a county sheriff and men in suits; consciousness is given from outside, in faces. A wide country in a few hands.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.5, then The Inevitable and The Inner Law at 9.0. A making in which Deakins’s light, Lievsay’s silence, the cut to footsteps and Bardem’s stillness each bear weight; a structure in which the Ellis scene, both dreams and every silence are required; and one law, the coin, governing the gas station’s small talk and a woman’s refusal in her mother’s bedroom alike.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.7 — the law, border history, two marriages, the natural order and one sacred image are held in one structure, but labour is thin, the family beyond marriage is a death between scenes, and consciousness is given only from outside: a wide country in a few hands. Above it, Pressure on Tradition at 8.0, a redirection of a sector of prestige film and not of the form, and The Swerve, The Bottomless Well and The Imperishable at 8.4: a faithful adaptation of another man’s departures, a lucid film whose re-reading is of a few sealed moments, and a span of two decades.
The Necessity Cap clears at 9.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 9.5, The Inner Law at 9.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on two of five: The Unconcealment at 8.5 meets the bar of 8.5 exactly, The Archetypal Deep at 8.7 clears it, and The Swerve at 8.4, The Imperishable at 8.4 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.0 fall short of it, the first two by one tenth and the last by five. The Universal Minimum is met — no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.0, against 7.5 — and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.7. The work is held below the summit by three axes of the Epochal Gate, The Swerve at 8.4, The Imperishable at 8.4 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.0 against the 8.5 it requires, and by its aggregate, 8.6 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of No Country for Old Men as released in 2007, about 122 minutes, the theatrical cut, from the dawns under the sheriff’s voice to the clock ticking over black. No print, script or recording was consulted. Cormac McCarthy’s novel is not part of the work, and nothing from it is imported; where the film departs from it, the film is judged. Dialogue is described rather than quoted. Figures that could not be verified, among them the sum in the case, the minute of Moss’s death, the number of killings shown and the box-office returns, are not given.