No Country for Old Men

Danger: Plot Spoilers…

“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.”

So starts the most recent Coen brother’s film.
‘No Country for Old Men’ tells the story of three men in particular, who interestingly never meet throughout the film. It begins and ends with the ageing sheriff Ed Tom Bell, played by Tommy-Lee Jones. He’s been working as a sheriff for many years and has seen the county (Texas) change massively over that time. It is now 1980 and Bell remembers a time when some sheriffs didn’t even wear guns. That time was long gone now. He was witnessing increasing violence as drugs were coming into the country. He tells the story of a boy who kills a young girl. The newspapers apparently said it was a crime of passion. The boy said he did it because he wanted to, that he had been thinking about killing someone as long as he could remember. All of this seemingly meaningless violence Bell is struggling to cope with.