No Country for Old Dudes

You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
— Uncle Ellis, No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy

Book report: No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy.

Yes, I read the book first, finishing it a few hours before the matinee.

It’s a contender for the decade’s Great American Novel (2005). NCOM deals with Good and Evil, capitalized and in a largely Protestant sense of the concepts, with McCarthy’s can’t-put-it-down narrative skills. For me, 309 pages took three days.

The big thoughts with interesting characters in a suspenseful format is the main qualification. It is a very good book and made a very good movie. Neither is for the squeamish. Previously Brick mocked NCOM because write-ups indicated a high-concept slasher movie, with stopping the psycho at its heart.

NCOM is more than that — raising it beyond the book and movie Silence of the Lambs, which were thrilling, with developing characters, but not deep. No Country for Old Men, the novel and the movie, are not quite Westerns, an American concept. The novel and less so the movie are not quite war epics, with Vietnam and World War II shaping the three characters’ (the welder and the hit man veterans of the former, the sheriff of the latter) motivations and actions, not to mention how the three picked up key-to-the-plot survival skills.

Besides Good and Evil, NCOM deals with the two kinds of people who comprise most of the population of this country, with little beyond basic education and more pluck than luck. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell tries to do right all of the time, but in terms of job he’s becoming disillusioned. He’s the Good. Llewellyn Moss scrapes by, accustomed to disaster, but half-expecting a jackpot. The resigned-to-being-a-welder finds it, $2 million in cash, dropped in a bad drug deal. Anton Chigurh seems to be the clean-up man for either the buyer or the seller. He really likes his work. -30-