No Country for Old Men
By Cormac McCarthy
Has there ever been a better combination book/movie adaptation?
Having now read the book, I can say that I think the Coen Brothers did a great job adapting it in a way that was faithful to the story and made sense for the format and the specific actors.
There are a few themes in the book, though, that go beyond what is presented in the movie, which I think are worth noting.
Spoilers ahead…
1. Part of the generational difference between Ed Tom Bell (played by Tommy Lee Jones in the movie) and Lewellyn Moss is that Bell was a veteran of World War II and Moss was a veteran of Vietnam. Their status as veterans is mentioned throughout the book. Bell’s character and motivations are shaped by his experience winning a Bronze Star in a fight in which he had no choice but to leave members of his unit to die. The memory first leads him to chase Chigurh…but in the end he gives up the hunt.
2. In the movie, Moss’s wife doesn’t play as much of a role as she does in the book. It’s made clear that she is beautiful and that they are romantic with each other. He is significantly older: 36 to her 19. One of the things that she likes about him is his bravery, which, as we see, also verges into rashness and excessive risk-taking. The implied backstory is that, as a man in his 30s, he recklessly pursued and married a teenager.
In the book, he is joined on the road by a teenage girl. She tempts him, and, while he is not shown cheating on his wife with her, he certainly puts himself in a compromising situation with her. Then he’s found dead with her — compounding the pain suffered by his wife. Yet it was the same bravery/heedlessness for which his wife loved him that led him to be out on the road with the hitchhiker.
3. In a monologue, Bell mentions two dreams he had about his father. In the second one, he dreamed that they were going on horseback through a mountain pass: “He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there.”
This is very similar to imagery at the end of The Road (spoilers), where the father and the son are discussing carrying the fire. In that novel, it’s the father saying he cannot go any further and telling the son he has to carry the fire himself.
What is the fire? And is the meaning the same across these separate books? My interpretation of The Road is that the fire is the light of civilization and the cause for hope. In No Country For Old Men, Bell brings up the dream of his father with the fire after he’s mentioned that his father died younger than he is now, meaning that he is now the older man, in a sense. It’s also after he sees Moss, a younger man and veteran of a more recent war, killed in the conflict he, Bell, fails to prevent or solve.
Joseph Lawler 