No Country For Old Men: Film Analysis

As of 2017, Western films are one of the least popular movie genres in North America based off of box office revenue. Bringing in a total of 0.99 billion dollars in box office revenue, since 1995, places Western films third to the bottom -- right on top of concert/performance films and multiple genre films (Statista.com). No Country for Old Men is arguably the first film of the twenty-first century to revive an interest in western films. No Country for Old Men is a political western, directed by Ethan and Joel Coen, that follows the stories of three men: Anton Chigurh, Llewellyn Moss, and Ed Tom Bell, through a third person restricted point-of-view. As a political western, No Country for Old Men, uses a disjunctive editing style, accompanied

This disjunctive editing style and the expansive landscape shots are juxtaposed because the western landscape is suppose to be expansive, but instead filming in a more flowing manner so that the viewer can get the full effect of the landscape, the scenes are cut short and montaged together. Lee Clark Mitchell brought up a really good point in his article “Dismantling the Western: Film Noir’s Defiance of Genre in No Country for Old Men, that was very similar to mine which is that the editing style has a claustrophobic feel to it that contradicts the typical Western wide-open spaces (341). Due to the lack of background music, or any sort of non-diegetic sound, the film relies heavily upon the natural sounds of the environment (most likely synchronized), to aid in the flow of the movie. The use of synchronized sound makes the viewer feel as though he/she is moving right alongside the characters in the film. Anything from the flight of a fly to the sound of Llewellyn Moss picking at his scabs after he was chased down the stream by the drug dealers, is

As the camera follows these three characters, the viewers view is restricted to mostly a montage of shots, with very little camera movement, and lots of crosscutting. This style of editing creates a lot of tension, which is necessary because without any of the non-diegetic sound that usually signals to the viewer when certain events are about to take place, the movie would be pretty boring to watch. An example of this would be when Llewellyn and Anton first cross paths in the hotel. During this scene the camera snaps back and forth between Anton and Moss’s perspective, as Anton is waiting right in front of Moss’s door. The crosscutting between the narrow shots creates a lot of tension because it restricts what the viewer can see, and because of the lack of background music or sound effects, the viewer just has to wait and see who will make the first move. Additionally, the third-person restricted perspective creates tension because, the viewer only knows what Llewellyn, Anton, and Ed know, so in the scenes where they cross paths, the perspective is limited to only what they can see, so you are almost just as on edge as the characters