Movie: No Country For Old Men

Interpretation:
Author418 is definitely on the right track, I think. The title comes from the first line of W.B. Yeats' famous poem "Sailing to Byzantium"; readers might profit from looking up the poem and reading some of the analysis of it.

But Cormac McCarthy, the literary giant who wrote the book, is also going deeper and darker than merely exploring the bewilderment of a retiring small-town sherrif. Killer Anton Chigurh (a play on "chigger," that annoying parasite in the South) is an agent of Chaos and Radomness. Crazy psycopath that he is, he sticks to a code that makes no sense to a sane person: Flip a coin. Heads, you live; tails, you die. And yet, McCarthy insists, does not the world often seem to operator in just such an insane manner? Notice who survives: the killer and the sherrif, which suggests that we may be able to strike a blow at evil/chaos/randomness, but we will never eradicate it, and that only those who can see and accept this vision can be truly alive or effective, although they may be sadder for it.

It's a shuddering view of the world, one designed to shake up our naive, complacent ideas that we can impose order or create a world that makes sense or operates rationally.

Rating: 3.5 with 4 votes.