No Country For Old Men Analysis

The chosen sequence I will analyze is the Production/Editing of the film No Country for Old Men. This film which came out in 2007 was based on the novel written by Cormac MaCarthy of the same name. The movie was written/adapted, and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen (a.k.a. the Coen brothers). The film is often referred to as a neo-western thriller due to its degree of genre mixing as it tells the story of an ordinary man whom by chance stumbles on a fortune that is not his, and the ensuing cat-and-mouse drama as the paths of three men are brought together into the desert landscape of 1980s Texas.
With a total budget of $25 million, production was slated for the New Mexico cities of Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and Las Vegas with other scenes shot around Marfa and Sanderson in West Texas. The U.S.-Mexico

border crossing bridge was actually a freeway overpass in Las Vegas, with a border checkpoint set built at the intersection of Interstate 25 and New Mexico State Highway 65. The Mexican town square was filmed in Piedras Negras, Coahuila. In advance of shooting the film, a cinematographer said that the biggest challenge of the film was making it very realistic, to match the story, and not be so stylized.
The amazing part of the editing for this film was that all shots are storyboarded before they started shooting. In the film, there are only a dozen shots that are not in the final film. It's that order of planning, the way they approached everything. The fact that the Coen brothers’ decided to use practical effects over CGI saved them an enormous amount of time in the editing aspect of the film.
The famous coin-tossing scene between Chigurh(Javier Bardem) and the old gas station clerk is a good example; the camera tracks so slowly that the audience isn't even aware of the move. When the camera itself moves forward the audience is moving too. It feels you're actually getting closer to somebody or something. It to me has a much more powerful effect, since it's a three-dimensional move. You're just standing in the same place and concentrating on one smaller element in the frame at a time. Emotionally, that's a very different effect than CGI can ever give you.
One of the themes in the story involves the tension between destiny and self-determination.

The protagonists and antagonist are torn between inevitability, that the world goes on its way and that it does not have much to do with human desires and concerns, and the notion that our futures are undeniably connected to our past actions. Enda McCaffrey plays a character who refuses to acknowledge his own agency, noting that Chigurh(Javier Bardem) ignores repeated reminders that he doesn't have to behave as he does and suggesting that by relegating the lives of Carson and Carla to a coin toss, he hands responsibility over to fate in an act of bad faith that prevents him from taking responsibility for his own choices.
Over the duration of No Country for Old Men, Chigurh kills about 12 people, and curiously enough, the violence devolves as the film progresses. During the first half of the film, the Coens never shy from unleashing Chigurh. The devolution of violence starts with Chigurh's shootout with Moss(Josh Brolin) in the motel. Aside from the truck owner who is shot in the head after Moss flags him down, both the motel clerk and Wells's(Woody Harrelson) death occur

offscreen.
Wells's death in particular demonstrates that murder means nothing to Chigurh. Calm beyond comfort, the camera pans away when Chigurh shoots Wells with a silenced shotgun as the phone rings. He answers to Moss, and while they talk, blood seeps across the room toward Chigurh's feet. Not moving, he places his feet up on the bed and continues the conversation as the blood continues to spread across the floor. By the time he keeps his promise of visiting Carla Jean, the resolution and the violence appear dull. Though we're not shown Carla Jean's death, when Chigurh exits and checks the bottom of his boots for blood, it's a clear indication that his brand of violence has struck again.
Cuts or no cuts, the Coens showed loyalty to McCarthy’s work in many ways. With the exception of about ten scenes, they retained every bit of the book in one form or another, with one broad exception: the larger story of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell(Tommy Lee Jones). The way they altered Bell’s dialogue and development is an amazing adaptation of the book. McCarthy makes the book so that Bell provides its backbone and, in fact its title. While the movie was marketed around the characters, the resourceful Llewellyn Moss and the chilling Anton Chigurh, Sheriff Bell remains not just the main character, but the very moral compass of the narrative.
McCarthy shows Bell’s disillusion with the world around him through a series of thirteen internal monologues by Bell which open each chapter of the book. In these monologues, Bell details his unease with life and the pervasive criminal brutality he sees, as well as his back story of painful service in World War II and the dead daughter who haunts him. Bell’s ruminations are long-winded, heavily descriptive, and often dryly monotonous and repetitious; it would probably be fair to say that they make up the weakest collective part of the book, though they remain crucial to McCarthy’s story. Leaving Bell’s monologues out of the movie was likely one of the Coens’ easier decisions. The film’s ability to effect that difficult transition from McCarthy’s complex prose to the screen while fully retaining the book’s moral direction is a crucial reason for the film’s massive success.
The final scene, in which Bell reveals two disturbing dreams about his father, and his failure to live up to his legacy, and expresses fear about what is to come, is developed from McCarthy’s thirteenth and final monologue and is as poignant as the first scene is captivating. Interestingly, in an early version of the screenplay, the Coens intended the end of this scene to be given as a voiceover delivered around images of a snowy mountain pass, in much the same way as the beginning was done. Thankfully, they changed their minds, by keeping the camera directly on Bell. For it was better to see the despair on his haggard face than just to hear it. As Bell speaks, he is clearly affected and upset by his dreams, and at no point in the film has he looked weaker or more vulnerable than when he finishes and looks to his wife for help.
Adapting any book, to the big screen is an aggravating difficult balancing act; the director and screenwriter must create a watchable two-hour product but also can’t cut too much, so as not to risk sacrificing the book’s moral spirit. The Coens perform that balancing so well, for at that final frame, Tommy Lee Jones captures the soul of McCarthy’s book and wraps up the Coens’ perfect adaptation.