No Country for Old Men

    Since I got my homework done early last night, I went to the movie library in Becker Hall and decided to watch this one.
    For the most part, it was a well made film that was intense and engaging until the last fifteen minutes.
    The story revolves around a regular guy, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), who makes a bad decision that sets a chain of extreme consequences that endanger both him and his wife.  While out hunting, Moss stumbles onto a drug deal gone wrong. Dead bodies littler the ground around him and among them he finds a satchel full of money.
     He keeps the money.
    And it all goes downhill from there.
    The Mexican mob want their 2 million dollars back and they send several people after Moss, including a psychopathic hit-man named Anton Chigurh (chillingly played by Javier Bardem). The first scene in the movie establishes his character with pin-point accuracy as Chigurh strangles a deputy to death and then blows a civilian's head in with an air compressor. As we see more of Chigurh in the movie, he proceeds to kill his way through pretty much everyone he comes across, including the men who hired him in the first place and several Mexican gangsters who are also after the money. 
    The man pursuing this mess is Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (an excellent Tommy Lee Jones). Bell is clearly disturbed by all the violence and moral rot he sees around him and can clearly see he is losing the will to continue his job. In the opening voice-over, he laments the good old days of his father's and his grandfather's time when law agents didn't have to pull their guns very often.
     Things don't end well in this movie. Bell ultimately decides to quit his job as sheriff because he feels "over-matched." One of his old friends tells him in regards to all the rise in crime that "you can't stop what's coming." This is what I think robbed a lot of momentum from the movie. I was thoroughly engaged in the plot until the film seems to say, "Bell can't stop the violence, he can't stop Chigurh, so he may as well quit."
    What the heck?
    Who would want a sheriff who, when confronted by evil, would hang up the cape and go home?
    In one sense, I understand. America is sinking further and further into the depths of evil and sin, so there will always be more psychopaths to fight. And sense no one is allowed to make moral claims because they are "intolerant," more and more people will grow up without a solid moral compass.
    So maybe Bell can't stop what's coming.
    But should he have stopped trying?
    Edmund Burke said, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

    Maybe if Bell kept on the case, he would have eventually caught Chigurh, I don't know. But even if he never did, I think it's important that he would have kept trying. Maybe sometimes the fight is more important than the outcome.