No Country for Old Men

When No Country for Old Men got made into a movie a few years ago, it generated some wildly mixed reactions- some claimed it was the best movie of the year (as you can see by the sticker on the book, it won Best Picture), others thought it made no sense at all. I, like many others, enjoyed the movie purely as a border-crossing chase flick, as well as Javier Bardem's chilling turn as Anton Chigurh, the emotionless psychopath who is more force of nature than human. But like many others, I wondered what the hell Tommy Lee Jones was doing in this movie- he hardly seemed important at all for the overall plot, as he never catches Chigurh and rarely meets up with any other main characters. I had heard that this role made much more sense in the book. Now that I have read No Country for Old Men, I can say it does. Rather than two main characters (Llewelyn and Chigurh) in a chase and a third (Sherriff Bell) interrupting the action from the sidelines, the book version feels like three integrated stories, with Bell playing a much larger role than before. He starts every chapter with a few pages of thoughts on the increasing violence in his county since he became sheriff, and I found these parts to be the most interesting of the whole book. It's true that I already knew how Llewelyn and Chigurh's game of cat and mouse would work out and had less to be interested in there, but Bell's reflections on his career really drove home the idea that the world is changing for the worse and the fight against nutjobs like Chigurh will never end. I still think I enjoyed the movie more, but this is a case where two different versions of the same story complement each other well- if you wanted to know more about what was going on in the movie, reading the book will help.