While this is a film that has been out for three years, No Country For Old Men (based on the book by Cormac Mccarthy) still serves as a gritty depiction of human nature and the existence of evil. Playing out like Old Testament narrative, the movie unfolds in rural Texas with a drug exchange gone awry as welder and hunter Llewelyn Moss stumbles upon the remains and decides to take the abandoned two million dollars for himself. As a result, Moss is pursued across desert and asphalt all the way into Mexico by Anton Chigurh, an indifferent yet relentless serial killer. The investigation is overseen by Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) who grapples with the depravity that such a case reveals.
No Country For Old Men is difficult to watch. It is essentially two hours of violence and misery that ends with little resolution or hope. And yet it is one of the most thought-provoking films I have watched and has haunted me with its themes long after the final credits rolled. Like other works by the Coen brothers, it is at once a film about good and evil, justice and injustice, moral dilemma, and ethics.
I mention it here because I think No Country For Old Men represents the dividing line for two different Christian approaches to the arts. Some believers want art to express how the world should be. In general, people operating from this worldview see art (whether it be film, literature, music or whatever) to be explicitly evangelistic or moralistic. What constitutes a good film is one that represents life in sinless fashion.
The other view and the view that I think a Reformed world-in-life view and the Bible itself (as the supreme model of art) supports is the position that art expresses how the world is. The world is a dangerous place filled with violence and men of hatred. Evil at times prospers; wickedness goes unpunished. There is not resolution to every conflict in this present age. Such tension between the fact that the innocent suffer and God is just must cause us to cry out with Job: "It is all one; therefore I say, He destroys both the blameless and the wicked. When disaster brings sudden death, he mocks at the calamity of the innocent. The earth is given into the hand of the wicked; he covers the faces of its judges--if it is not he, who then is it (9:24)?"
Examining Job's remarks, we can first note that he acknowledges that both the righteous and wicked suffer. Though the film primarily displays the innocence suffering violence, it also shows both the natural consequences of sin and the natural calamity that is bestowed on the wicked. In the case of the former, Llewelyn Moss succumbs to greed by taking the drug money; although he has good motives, his avarice draws him into a path of viciousness and eventually death. With regards to the wicked suffering, Anton Chigurh is involved in a horrific automobile accident. In short, the movie's theodicy, or attempt to resolve how God can be good and suffering still exist, is complex and I believe captures the paradox of good and evil, rewards and consequences in the here-and-now that the Bible espouses.
While there is complexity to the why of human suffering, there is simplicity to the who of human suffering. Job's question is pithy. God rules and reigns over all events no matter how seemingly random. The implication of Job's inquiry is that the only antithesis to God governing all human evil, even evil that befalls the innocent, is chaos. For the majority of No Country for Old Men chaos seems to rule. The entire film is earthy, external, and visceral except for one small, well-paced concluding scene. At the end of the movie, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell is describing a dream he had of following a man on horseback through snow, night, and mountains, guided only by a chamber of light. The dream concludes with the Sheriff sitting by a campfire and being blanketed by the father-esque figure who had been leading him through the night. Upon this juncture, the film abruptly ends. Although some may accuse the Coen brothers of a deus ex machina by inserting a dream sequence in the end, I disagree. I think that the transcendent, visionary tone of the dream narration juxtaposes well with the raw, chaotic atmosphere of what precedes it. Besides, deus ex machinas resolve the conflict of the film. The dream does not resolve the conflict. The loss is still real and unchanged but the dream foreshadows a world when the righteous will be rewarded and the wicked punished. Thus, the nightmare of this existence will be replaced by a dream, but a dream that is reality. Good art stimulates this transcedent longing without minimizing the presence of pain, violence, and evil. In this sense, No Country for Old Men is as true of a film as there is. Our response as the church, should be that of Jeremiah: "Why does the way of the wicked prosper?" Until that day when final resolution arrives, we should not presume to know the mysterious providence of God.
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