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Oscars Postmortem: Why Did No Country Win?

Now that the dust has settled, the Coen brothers have finally, 11 years after Fargo won them for Screenplay, added Director, Best Picture and another pair of Screenplay statuettes to their Oscar pile. What hauled in the extra gold? A clue lies in the fourth Oscar for No Country for Old Men: Javier Bardem's Best Supporting award for his portrayal of Anton Chigurh.

Though the movie was narrated by Tommy Lee Jones' sheriff character, Ed Tom Bell; and though Josh Brolin's hunter character, Llewellyn Moss, has perhaps the most screen time, neither of those two excellent performances were even nominated. Bardem -- with his gargling speech, absurd haircut and Terminator limp -- breathed life into what was only ever meant to be a concept, rather than a character: the evil that cannot be understood.

It was this concept that lovers of No Country latched on to, because the ambiguity of the ending leaves no toe-hold for the audience. Ed Tom Bell is recounting a dream and we're relaxing and suddenly the credits are rolling and Chigurh is still out there. Chigurh had his chance at Ed Tom Bell, in the motel. He doesn't take it. Is it because Bell never "put his soul at hazard" or because the coin on the floor landed in Bell's favor (after opening the vent with the stash)? We're not meant to know.

The win for No Country may be as close as David Lynch ever gets to an Oscar. He had nothing to do with the movie, but surely he must approve of ambiguity's triumph in the final act: with a simple fade out the Coens told us that Josh Brolin's Llewelyn was a distraction from the real story, one that the Coens' faithfully adapted from Cormac McCarthy's novel.

That story is about Ed Tom Bell, but we ultimately do not know what to make of it, just as Bell does not know what to make of Chigurh. Like any given septuagenarian, Bell doesn't understand the world of "kids with green hair and bones in their noses." And like any human being, he just can't understand pure evil.

But is Chigurh without all scruples? It is alluded, in fact, that he does have his own sort of warped set of principles. If he says a thing, he does it. He obeys the will of Fate, as embodied in his famous coin. He doesn't murder the children who witness his car wreck, just buys their silence. And then there's the unexpected detail that makes the character a cinematic legend: his aversion to blood. It's subtle, but a killer who is averse to one of murder's side-effects is rather the opposite of Daniel Day-Lewis' Oscar-awarded psychopath in There Will Be Blood. We can all comprehend a hired killer, someone with a maniacal drive to finish the job he was paid to do. Someone, even, who feels no remorse for his victims. There are a dozen serial killers at loose on television in any given timeslot. But we cannot comprehend that such a person, one who kills at the lightest provocation, cares if his boots get dirty in the line of work.

Chigurh fascinated us. He kept us watching after Josh Brolin's Moss left the scene, and kept us thinking long after Tommy Lee Jones' Bell stopped yammering about the old timers. He is an intentional enigma, as was said of another screen character for the ages, Robert DeNiro's Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver, Chigurh is "partly fact and partly fiction: a walking contradiction."

MORE:
No Country for Old Men Review, with scene-by-scene analysis of the final act
Oscars 2008 Liveblog

About J. Ott

John Ott is a writer, filmmaker and futurist. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook and Google+.