Tommy Lee Jones's Texas (Spoiler Alert!)

I'll admit it: what stuck me to No Country for Old Men was nostalgia for Texas. I'd lived in El Paso; Big Bend National Park had been my home page since I left the region; I'd changed my life completely, and nine years' worth of diaries drone my angst. To hear the diaries tell it, I always knew I'd come back. And this movie plopped into the hotbed of my grief, where it sizzled, happily, no doubt hastening my return. I’d walked in all the places where this movie was filmed. I'd been to Presidio and Sanderson. I'd drunk whiskey from a flask, in campgrounds just yards from that international border, and had my clothes and all my gear soaked time after time by the West Texas squalls. Without knowing it, I left my taproot stuck in caliche, and so I came back, like badly-weeded grass. If these people will have me, I'm theirs.

So, what's this story? It's simple: PTSD meets Mexican mafia, and they clash (where else but) on the border. The enormity of evil overwhelms the locals—all but two. One, the traumatized Vietnam vet, fights back using all his soldier wiles and holds his own longer than he can be expected to, but his intentions are not pure, and eventually he succumbs. The other, the good and simple sheriff, muses, plods, has God on his side. That's the way McCarthy ends it. He might as well have said, "and God will help you."

I like everything about the Sheriff Bell character: his wry relationship with his wife, his palms-up affable nature around his colleagues, his dogged progress as he makes his way, Columbo-like, along the trail of bodies, in the direction of the demonic Chigurh. I knew guys like Bell, when I lived out there. I imagine Tommy Lee Jones had a lot of fun playing this guy.

As much as I like Tommy Lee Jones, and always have—from the Loretta Lynn story, through The Fugitive and of course Men in Black I and II—my favorite scene’s the one he does with Barry Corbett (Northern Exposure’s Maurice, himself a native Texan just like Jones). Corbett plays Bell’s Uncle Ellis, a wheelchair-bound ex-deputy, living out his last days on the West Texas plain in the company of an infestation of feral housecats. Bell pays him a visit in a moment of despair, and here’s what Ellis tells him.

Ellis:    What you got, ain’t nothin new. This country’s hard on people. You can’t stop what’s comin. It ain’t all waitin on you. That’s vanity.

There’s a lot going on in the book, that doesn’t make it into the movie, here, and that’s fine. No Country, the movie; No Country, the book: the more times I watch and read, the more distinct the two become. Here, my challenge is not to define, or explain, or judge, the one in terms of the other.

But just this once, I have to type a passage from the book.

In the movie, as Ellis says, “This country’s hard on people,” Bell tips his chin and looks out the window, along the bleak, beloved horizon. It’s just an instant. In the book, Ellis goes on in this vein, for awhile. “This country will kill you in a heartbeat,” he finally adds, “and people still love it.”

I know I do.