Reading the Coens: "No Country for Old Men" (2007)

"I always figured when I got older, God would sorta come inta my life somehow. And he didn't."

The world, according to No Country for Old Men, is not merely broken. It is ruled by death. The film doesn’t argue that things have gotten worse. It suggests they’ve always been this way, and we’re only now realizing it. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell says as much in the film’s opening:

“You can’t help but compare yourself against the oldtimers. Can’t help but wonder how they would’ve operated these times… The crime you see now, it’s hard to even take its measure. It’s not that I’m afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job. But I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He’d have to say, ‘O.K., I’ll be part of this world.’”

That’s the spiritual center of the film: a man who has spent his life enforcing justice is now uncertain whether justice still matters… or whether it ever did. Bell is not afraid of dying. He is afraid of being part of a world where evil is incomprehensible and unchecked. His resignation is not physical. It is moral.

The film offers no comfort. Anton Chigurh, the closest thing the Coens have ever created to a symbol, isn’t a person so much as a force. He is not chaotic, but ordered in his own way, a calculating, inhuman agent of fate. He flips a coin to decide if you live or die. To him, choice is just ritual. What happens is what was going to happen. Chigurh is death stripped of drama or meaning. He doesn’t hunt his victims with passion. He simply eliminates them.

Llewelyn Moss believes he can handle the danger, that he can outsmart the forces closing in. But it’s not his choices that fail him. It’s that he, like Bell, never really understands the nature of what he’s dealing with. The evil that confronts him is not just ruthless. It’s beyond comprehension. And that’s what makes it so devastating.

In the world of the film, God is not merely silent. He seems absent. Or worse, withdrawn in judgment. Bell says late in the film:

“I always figured when I got older, God would sorta come inta my life somehow. And he didn’t. I don’t blame him. If I was him I’d have the same opinion of me that he does.”

That is No Country for Old Men in a sentence. A recognition of evil, and a weary suspicion that God is done with us. It’s a theology of judgment without grace. The characters don’t cry out for mercy. They’ve already concluded it won’t come.

But this is where Christian theology speaks into the silence. The Bible does not shy away from the reality of evil. In fact, it affirms it more clearly than most modern stories. Psalm 73 speaks of the prosperity of the wicked and the confusion of the righteous. Ecclesiastes describes a world that seems random and unjust. Job faces hardship and injustice that can’t be explained. The prophets cry out to God to act, to break His silence.

And like Sheriff Bell, they wait.

But the biblical story doesn’t end in resignation. Where Bell wakes up from a dream, the Psalmist in Psalm 73 walks into the sanctuary and sees the truth. The preacher in Ecclesiastes concludes that God will bring every evil deed to judgment in the end. Job, after his long silence, hears God speak. The cross itself is the ultimate picture of innocent suffering, but it is not followed by a shrug. It is followed by resurrection!

The film ends with a memory. Sheriff Bell recounts a dream of his father riding on ahead of him in the cold, carrying fire:

“He just rode on past… and he had his blanket wrapped around him and his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin’ fire in a horn… and in the dream I knew that he was goin’ on ahead and 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. And then I woke up.”

It is the most poetic moment in the film, and its only flicker of hope. Bell yearns for guidance, for continuity, for someone who has gone before and made a place in the dark. But in true Coen fashion, the dream ends. He wakes. The fire is not reached.

This is the gap between the Coens’ vision and the Christian story. The Coens are honest about the darkness. They recognize the weariness, the futility, the loss. But they stop short of hope. They name the need for fire in the cold but never believe it could be lit.

The gospel doesn’t dismiss the bleakness of No Country for Old Men. It speaks into it. It says yes, this world is ruled by death, but it has been entered by One who has gone before us into the darkness, carrying light. Christ does not remain outside the world’s violence and injustice. He joins it, absorbs it, and overcomes it. He is not only the fire-bearer; He is the fire Himself.

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” – John 1:5