West Texas in June 1980 is desolate, wide open country, and Ed Tom Bell (Tommy L

ee Jones) laments the increasing violence in a region where he, like his father
before him, has risen to the office of sheriff.
Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), hunting pronghorn, comes across the aftermath of a
drug deal gone awry: several dead men and dogs, a wounded Mexican begging for wa
ter, and two million dollars in a satchel that he takes to his trailer home. Lat
e that night, he returns with water for the dying man, but is chased away by two
men in a truck and loses his vehicle. When he gets back home he grabs the cash,
sends his wife Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald) to her mother's, and makes his way
to a motel in the next county,[5] where he hides the satchel in the air vent of
his room.
Hitman Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) has been hired to recover the money. He has
already strangled a sheriff's deputy to escape custody and stolen a car by usin
g a captive bolt pistol to kill the driver. Now he carries a receiver that trace
s the money via a transponder concealed inside the satchel to Moss's hideout. Bu
rsting into the room at night, Chigurh surprises a group of Mexicans set to ambu
sh Moss and murders them all. Moss, however, one step ahead, has rented the conn
ecting room on the other side, so by the time Chigurh removes the vent cover wit
h a dime to grab the cash, it is already back on the road with Moss.
Tracking the satchel to a border town hotel, Chigurh's pursuit climaxes in a fir
efight with Moss that spills onto the streets, leaving both men wounded. Moss fl
ees across the border, collapsing from his injuries and waking up in a Mexican h
ospital. There Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson), another hired operative, offers p
rotection in return for the money.
After Chigurh cleans and stitches his own wounds with stolen supplies, he gets t
he drop on Wells back at his hotel and kills him just as Moss calls the room. Pi
cking up the call and casually raising his feet to avoid the blood on the floor,
Chigurh promises Moss that Carla Jean can be saved only by returning the money.
Moss remains defiant.
Moss arranges to rendezvous with his wife at a motel in El Paso to give her the
money and send her out of harm's way. She reluctantly tells Bell to try to save
her husband, but Bell arrives too late. He sees a pickup carrying several men sp
eeding away from the motel and finds Moss lying dead in his room. That night, Be
ll returns to the crime scene and finds the lock blown out in his suspect's fami
liar style. Chigurh hides behind the door of a motel room, observing the shiftin
g light through an empty lock hole. His gun drawn, Bell enters Moss's room and n
otices that the vent cover has been removed with a dime and the vent is empty.
Bell visits his Uncle Ellis (Barry Corbin), an ex-lawman. Bell plans to retire b
ecause he feels "overmatched," but Ellis points out that the region has always b
een violent. For Ellis, thinking it is "all waiting on you, that's vanity."
Carla Jean returns from her mother's funeral to find Chigurh waiting. When she t
ells him she does not have the money, he recalls the pledge he made to her husba
nd that could have spared her. The best he can offer is a coin toss for her life
. She refuses to play, instead stating that the choice is his alone. Chigurh lea
ves the house alone and carefully checks the soles of his boots. As he drives aw
ay, he is injured in a car accident. He leaves before the police arrive.
Now retired, Bell shares two dreams with his wife (Tess Harper), both involving
his deceased father. In the first dream he lost "some money" that his father had
given him; in the second dream, he and his father were riding horses through a
snowy mountain pass. His father, who was carrying fire in a horn, quietly passed
by Bell with his head down and was "going on ahead, and fixin' to make a fire"
in the surrounding dark and cold. When Bell got there, he knew his father would
be waiting. Then he woke up.

From IMDB
Plot Summary for
No Country for Old Men (2007) More at IMDbPro »
In rural Texas, welder and hunter Llewelyn Moss discovers the remains of several
drug runners who have all killed each other in an exchange gone violently wrong
. Rather than report the discovery to the police, Moss decides to simply take th
e two million dollars present for himself. This puts the psychopathic killer, An
ton Chigurh, on his trail as he dispassionately murders nearly every rival, byst
ander and even employer in his pursuit of his quarry and the money. As Moss desp
erately attempts to keep one step ahead, the blood from this hunt begins to flow
behind him with relentlessly growing intensity as Chigurh closes in. Meanwhile,
the laconic Sherrif Ed Tom Bell blithely oversees the investigation even as he
struggles to face the sheer enormity of the crimes he is attempting to thwart. W
ritten by Kenneth Chisholm (kchishol@rogers.com)
After stumbling across a case of money among dead bodies, Llewelyn Moss thinks h
e can keep it quiet, but when silent killer Anton Chigurh locates Moss and his m
oney, Vietnam veteran Moss makes a run for it. With bodies falling everywhere An
ton goes, it's only a matter of time before he catches up with Llewelyn. Whilst
all this is going on, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell is overseeing the investigation and be
gins to see the country in a different light than it once was. Written by FilmFa
nUk
After he finds $2 million in the desert where a drug deal has apparently gone wr
ong, working man Llewelyn Moss finds himself on the run. His pursuer is Anton Ch
igurh, an unemotional killer with a unique murder weapon at his disposal. Throug
hout, soon to be retired Sheriff Ed Tom Bell attempts to convince Moss, mostly t
hrough his wife Carla Jean, that he should turn the money over to the authoritie
s or this could all end in tragedy. Written by garykmcd
))))))))))))))))))))))
It is 1980. In a West Texas police station, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) uses t
he handcuffs around his wrists to garrote the deputy who had arrested him. He st
eals a squad car and intercepts a random motorist. He kills the motorist using a
compressed air gun then steals his car.
Somewhere else in the desert, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) stumbles across the ca
rnage of a drug deal gone bad. Mexican criminals and pit bulls lie dead on the g
round; only a mortally wounded driver remains alive. The driver asks for water b
ut instead Llewelyn follows the trail of one of the criminals who had gotten awa
y. Llewelyn tracks him to a tree where the criminal died. He finds a satchel fil
led with two million dollars. He takes the money and returns home to his wife, C
arla Jean (Kelly McDonald) who is irritated that he has been gone all day and re
fuses to tell her where he found the guns and money he had brought home. That ni
ght, Llewelyn feels guilty for not giving the wounded driver water and resolves
to take him a jug. He arrives around dawn and discovers that the driver has been
shot and killed. More gunmen appear, disable his truck and fire on him, hitting
him in the shoulder. They chase him to a river bank where Llewelyn tries to swi
m away. The gunmen's pit bull leaps in to the water after him. Reaching a far sh
ore, Llewelyn is barely able to shoot and kill the dog before it is upon him. Re
alizing he is facing some dangerous individuals, he tends his wounds then sends
Carla Jean to stay with her mother in Odessa while he travels separately with th
e money.
At a service station, Chigurh becomes suspicious when the elderly clerk (Gene Jo
nes) asks him if he's from Dallas. Chigurh flips a coin to decide whether or not
to kill the clerk. The clerk correctly guesses that the coin came up heads. Chi
gurh gives the man the coin and tells him not to mix it with any other coins. La
ter that night, two well dressed men take Chigurh to the site of the failed drug
deal. After he takes the VID tag from Llewelyn's truck and examines the corpses
, the well dressed men give him a tracking device that he can use to find the sa
tchel of money, which has a transponder in it. Chigurh then kills them.
Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) and Deputy Wendell (Garret Dillehunt) find
 the motorist's burning car. They then follow another trail to the drug deal sit
e. Ed Tom recognizes Llewelyn's disabled truck. He and Wendell perform a prelimi
nary examination of the scene then decide to call in the federal authorities. Ed
Tom is disturbed by what he sees.
Chigurh uses the VID tag to find out Llewelyn's address. He uses the air gun to
break in to Llewelyn and Carla Jean's trailer. He tries to intimidate the traile
r park manager into revealing Llewelyn's place of employment but has to settle f
or a phone bill that reveals the couple make a lot of calls to Odessa, TX. Llewe
lyn gets a room at a motel and hides the satchel of money in the air ducts. He t
hen purchases tent poles and shotgun at a local sporting goods store, which he f
ashions into a hook and sawed-off shotgun. He then rents another room behind the
first room. Later that night when returning to the motel he sees the Mexicans'
truck in front of his first room. He goes to his second room and begins to retri
eve the money using the tent-pole hook to pull it through the air duct. Meanwhil
e, Chigurh happens past the motel and the tracking device goes off. He rents a r
oom, determines which room has the satchel and uses his air gun to break into th
e room. He finds three Mexicans and kills them with a high powered rifle with a
silencer. Meanwhile, Llewelyn has escaped with the money.
In Dallas, the businessman who hired Chigurh (Stephen Root) is upset about the v
iolence Chigurh is causing. He hires Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson) to neutraliz
e Chigurh and get the money back.
Chigurh tracks Llewelyn to a small border town, where Llewelyn has rented anothe
r room. Chigurh kills the desk clerk then finds Llewelyn's room. Llewelyn shoots
at him with his sawed off shotgun and escapes through the window. Chigurh chase
s him and kills another driver who has stopped to help Llewelyn, causing an acci
dent. Llewelyn uses the confusion to shoot Chigurh, forcing him to retreat. Woun
ded, Llewelyn hides the money along the banks of the Rio Grande then crosses int
o Mexico and pays some people to take him to a hospital.
Ed Tom continues to be disturbed by what he saw in the desert and the apparently
deteriorating state of morals in the world. He goes to visit Carla Jean in Odes
sa and asks her to put him in touch with Llewelyn. Almost absent mindedly, he te
lls her how a local farmer was nearly killed by an animal he was trying to slaug
hter, and how slaughterhouses now used compressed air guns to kill cattle immedi
ately. In the border town, Chigurh steals medical supplies and, in a motel room,
cleans his wounds.
Carson visits Llewelyn in the Mexican hospital and suggests that he just hand ov
er the money so Carson can protect him. Llewelyn refuses and Carson tells him wh
ich hotel he is staying. On the way back across the border, Carson sees the satc
hel from the bridge. Back at his hotel, the same one at which Llewelyn was stayi
ng, Carson is confronted by Chigurh. Carson pleads for his life but when Llewely
n calls Chigurh kills him. Chigurh tells Llewlyn that if he brings him the money
, he won't kill his wife (though Llewelyn's life is forfeit). Llewelyn tells Chi
gurh he will kill him then hangs up. He calls Carla Jean and tells her to meet h
im in El Paso. Chigurh goes to Dallas and kills the businessman for hiring not o
nly Carson but the other Mexicans well.
The Mexicans have been watching Carla Jean in Odessa. They follow her and her mo
ther (Beth Grant) to the airport. One of the Mexicans helps Carla Jean's mother
who tells him she and Carla Jean are going to El Paso. In the airport, Carla Jea
n calls Ed Tom and tells him which motel Llewelyn is staying in El Paso. Ed Tom
drives there but discovers that the Mexicans have beat him there and killed Llew
elyn. All Ed Tom can do is comfort Carla Jean when she arrives. Later that night
, Ed Tom and the local sheriff (Rodger Boyce) have coffee and bemoan the declini
ng morals of American society. Afterward, Ed Tom returns to the motel and nearly
misses being killed by Chigurh who had been searching the room for the satchel
of money.
Ed Tom visits his uncle, Ellis (Barry Corbin) to tell him he's retiring because
he is too disturbed by the violence he's seen. Ellis tells him he's being vain a
nd relates the story about how Ed Tom's grandfather had died: shot by outlaws, h
e bled to death on his front porch as they watched. Meanwhile, Chigurh visits Ca
rla Jean, who has just buried her mother. She understands why he's there but sti
ll finds it meaningless. Chigurh flips a coin but Carla Jean refuses to play his
game. After killing her, Chigurh drives away. His car is struck by another car
and he suffers a compound fracture. He buys a shirt from a boy to use as a sling
then walks away.
At home, Ed Tom tells his wife (Tess Harper) about a dream he had. In it, he was
horseback riding with his long-deceased father. It was cold and his father rode
ahead to prepare a fire for them.
-----
The film opens with a shot of desolate, wide-open country in West Texas in June
1980. In a voice-over, the local sheriff, Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), tells o
f the changing times: in the old days, some sheriffs never wore guns, as did his
late father, who was the sheriff before him; in the modern day and age, however
, Bell once sent an unrepentant teenage boy to the electric chair who had killed
a girl simply because he wanted to kill someone, had been "fixin'" to do it for
some time, and would do it again if he had the chance.
Along a desert highway, a man named Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) is being arres
ted by a deputy (Zach Hopkins). Back at the otherwise empty police station, the
deputy speaks to Sheriff Bell on the phone, describing an odd device in Chigurh'
s possession, a compressed air tank which the deputy believes is an oxygen tank
like those used by medical patients. The deputy has his back to Chigurh, who sne
aks up behind him and garrotes him with his handcuffs just as the deputy hangs u
p the phone. Chigurh falls back on the floor with the deputy, a strange emotionl
ess grin washing across his face as his wriggling victim finally expires. After
cleaning himself up in the station bathroom, Chigurh - driving the deputy's poli
ce car - pulls over a man in a Ford along a deserted highway. Politely asking th
e man to step out the car, Chigurh holds the hose attached to the compressed air
tank, placing the nozzle at its end to the puzzled driver's forehead; he fires
it through the man's skull, and we sense the device's function as a gun designed
to put down cattle. Chigurh then drives off in the man's car.
Elsewhere, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is hunting pronghorns. Setting the sights
of his hunting rifle on one, he fires, scattering the animals. Walking to where
the herd stood, he notices a trail of blood. Realizing the pronghorn left in a
different direction from the blood trail, he spies a wounded pit bull hobbling a
way. Retracing the dog's trail, Moss eventually comes upon several pickup trucks
parked in the middle of the wilderness. Coming closer, he finds several bodies
shot to death, most appearing to be Mexican, and even a dead pit bull. Under a t
arp in the bed of one pickup, Moss sees what appears to be a great deal of heroi
n. Opening the passenger door of one of the trucks, he finds the driver is still
alive, but badly wounded. The panting stranger begs Moss for "agua", but Moss s
ays that he has no water. Moss asks the man where the "last man standing" - the
winner - is, but doesn't get an answer. He carefully takes the man's submachine
gun off the seat and an ammo clip from his shirt pocket, and follows another blo
od trail; he suspects that whoever survived would have sought shade, and heads t
oward a distant patch of trees. Through his binoculars, he sees someone is sitti
ng under a tree, facing the other way. After waiting some time, seeing that the
man does not move, he makes his way to the tree and finds that the man is dead.
At his side are a silver Colt .45 pistol and a satchel, which Moss finds to hold
$2 million.
Moss returns to his trailer home with the "agua" man's submachine gun (which he
hides in the crawl space under the home), the silver pistol and the satchel. Mos
s's wife, Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald), asks Moss what's in the satchel, but doe
sn't believe him when he off-handedly tells her. That night, Moss can't sleep, g
uilty that he left the man in the truck to die. He gets up and grabs a jug of wa
ter and the semi-automatic, explaining to Carla Jean that he's "fixin' to do som
ething dumber than hell".
Driving up near the site of the drug massacre, Moss goes to find the man and giv
e him water. Upon opening the door, Moss sees that the wounded man is now dead f
rom a gunshot to the head. Looking back to where he'd parked his pickup truck at
op the ridge, Moss dimly sees in the predawn light another truck now parked alon
gside his. Two men get out and slash the tires on Moss' truck. He tries to hide
behind one of the dead men's trucks, but is fired upon by the men who are now ap
proaching in their truck, using bright searchlights. Moss flees with the pickup
pursuing him, but is shot in the shoulder just as he reaches a river embankment.
As Moss tumbles towards the river with dawn breaking, the two men, apparently M
exicans, sic a pit bull on him. Evading continued gunfire, Moss dives into the r
iver and swims downstream, eventually crossing to the other side with the pit bu
ll gaining ground. On the opposite bank, Moss frantically dries his .45 and mana
ges to shoot the pit bull dead just as it leaps at him. Returning to his trailer
, Moss tends to his wounds and puts Carla Jean on a bus to go stay with her moth
er.
After filling up at a gas station in the dead man's Ford, Chigurh goes to pay fo
r some candy from the gas station proprietor (Gene Jones). When the proprietor t
ries to make polite conversation out of simple friendliness, Chigurh gets upset
at the inane smalltalk, and engages the man in a quiet but increasingly hostile
debate over the point of his amiable questions; the man is genuinely perplexed b
y his customer's anxiety, and tries to defuse the argument by saying he needs to
close the station, which only further irritates Chigurh due to it being still m
idday. He asks the man what is the most he's lost in a coin toss, and it becomes
increasingly clear that Chigurh will harm the proprietor if he calls the wrong
side of the coin. Much to his relief, the proprietor calls the right side of the
coin, which Chigurh insists he must always hang onto and keep separate from his
other coins, because this is now a "lucky" coin.
After nightfall, two men in suits pick up Chigurh and bring him to the drug mass
acre. They note Moss' slashed tires and assume that the Mexicans did it. Chigurh
tears the identification plate out of Moss's truck and proceeds to survey the m
assacre with the two men. The two men give him a transponder on which they said
they're getting "not a bleep." Chigurh picks up a gun laying next to one of the
several massacred men at the site and coolly shoots them both dead with it.
The following morning, Sheriff Bell is called into check out a roadside car fire
, which draws attention to the nearby drug massacre site. Meeting his inexperien
ced deputy, Wendell (Garret Dillahunt), Sheriff Bell tells him they'll ride hors
eback to the drug massacre. The car on fire is the Ford belonging to the man Chi
gurh killed the day before. While going over the massacre, Sheriff Bell recogniz
es the truck parked nearby as belonging to Moss.
Going to the Mosses' trailer, Chigurh uses his cattle gun to shoot out the lock
on the door. Recognizing that they've left in a hurry, Chigurh briefly sits on t
heir couch and drinks some of their milk. He goes through the mail which has bee
n delivered, and examines their phone bill which includes numerous calls to the
same number in another city. He then goes over to the office of the trailer park
manager (Kathy Lamkin) and questions her about Llewelyn's whereabouts. When the
manager refuses to tell Chigurh where Moss works, he seems to contemplate killi
ng her, but changes his mind when he hears someone in the bathroom. Sheriff Bell
 and Deputy Wendell go into the Mosses's trailer a bit later and see that someon
e has shot out the lock.
Moss has taken a cab to stay in a motel, where he hides the satchel of money in
his room's ventilation duct. He leaves and purchases a tent for its poles, some
duct tape, wire cutters, and a shotgun and ammo. He returns to the motel and ren
ts a second room, adjacent to the rear wall of his first room. There, he saws of
f the shotgun and fashions a pole with a hook (made of cut clothes hangers) duct
-taped to the end of the pole to pull the satchel from the duct into his second
room.
As he is doing this, Chigurh is driving around when the transponder he received
from the two men starts to go off. He finds the motel, and by the frequency of i
ts beeping he deduces which room the signal is coming from, Moss's first room. C
higurh checks into the motel. He takes off his boots so he can quietly walk up t
o the room where the signal is coming from. As he is walking outside the motel,
he does not hear Moss noisily pulling the stachel with the hooked pole from the
vent into his second room. At the door of Moss's first room, he uses the cattle
gun to shoot out the lock. Inside are two Mexican men, one with a semi-automatic
rifle, but he quickly and bloodily dispatches both with a silenced shotgun. The
bathroom door opens and another Mexican with a Uzi opens fire on him but Chigur
h kills him. Going into the bathroom, he finds a fourth man cowering behind the
shower curtain. He closes the curtain and shoots him. Moss, hearing the Uzi gunf
ire, escapes quickly, but not before replacing the vent grate. Chigurh searches
the room for the money but does not find it. Finding Moss's second room he searc
hes it also and finds nothing, then finally uses a dime to unscrew the grate and
look inside, where he sees the stachel's drag marks. Moss has escaped, managing
to hitch a ride. The driver who picks him up tells him he shouldn't be hitch-hi
king because it's dangerous.
The next day, in a high-rise office building in Dallas, a bounty hunter named Ca
rson Wells (Woody Harrelson) comes into the big office of a businessman (Stephen
Root). Wells tells the stern businessman that he has had past dealings with Chi
gurh and would know him by sight. Wells also compares Chigurh to the bubonic pla
gue and calls him a psychopathic killer. The businessman hires Wells to control
the "situation" with Chigurh.
That night, Moss goes to an old hotel near the Mexico border. While checking int
o the room, he asks the desk clerk how late he'll be working. The desk clerk tel
ls him 10 A.M. Moss gives him some money and asks him to give him a call in the
room to let him know if anyone checks in, as someone (not the police) is after h
im. Moss is unable to sleep that night while pondering how Chigurh was able to t
rack him down to the previous motel. Digging through the satchel with the money,
he finds a signal transmitter embedded in a hollowed-out pack of bills, and he
realizes Chigurh was able to track his signal with it. Hearing creaking footstep
s coming down the hallway, Moss calls the hotel desk; he can hear the phone ring
ing from downstairs, but there is no answer. Moss places the transponder on the
nightstand and goes to the sofa with the satchel and his shotgun and turns off t
he desklamp and faces the door, waiting for Chigurh to make a move, with his saw
ed-off shotgun pointing at the door. He sees Chigurh's shadow under the door and
slowly clicks the hammer on his rifle. Hearing the distinctive sound of the ham
mer cocking, Chigurh goes down the hall to unscrew the light bulb so that the sh
adow of feet will not be seen under the door. Suddenly, just as Moss perhaps rea
lizes that his position directly in front of the door might not be ideal, Chigur
h's air gun blasts the lock through the door and hits Moss in his right abdomen.
Moss fires as the door is thrown open, rendering the hallway momentarily silent
. Moss makes a break for the window and escapes, falling to the sidewalk with th
e satchel and his shotgun. As he runs down the alley, Chigurh fires on him from
the window. Running back into the hotel lobby to try to get the drop on Chigurh
in an ambush, he finds the desk clerk dead and opts to flee.
Moss then runs out into the street to wave down a man in a small truck. The man
seems startled by Moss's bloody appearance and firearm, but just after Moss gets
into the passenger seat, the man is killed by shots to the throat and face from
Chigurh's gun. In pursuit in his own truck, Chigurh continues to shoot at Moss
as he tries to speed off driving from the passenger side, with the dead driver s
till in the driver's seat. Swerving around a corner and losing control, Moss cra
shes into a parked car. He takes cover behind a parked car on the other side of
the street and waits for Chigurh. Using the reflection in a store window, he see
s Chigurh walk up to the crash. Just as Chigurh begins to see where Moss's blood
trail leads, Moss jumps up and opens fire, but Chigurh manages to dive for cove
r in time. Moss charges forward, crossing the street, shooting under the truck w
here Chigurh went down, flattening the tires in the process. Rounding the car, M
oss sees that Chigurh has escaped though, leaving his weapon behind.
Heavily wounded, Moss heads for the Mexican border. Walking along the bridge fro
m Texas to Mexico, he encounters a group of young sailors on shore leave in civi
lian clothes, returning from Mexico. He has lost so much blood, he can barely st
and. He gives five hundred dollars to one of them in exchange for his jacket and
a bottle of beer. After they leave, Moss throws the satchel over the high barri
er into the weeds on the riverbank beside the bridge, covers his bloody shirt wi
th the jacket and, posing as a "drunk Mexican" waves the bottle of beer drunkly
at the half-sleeping Mexican station guard as he stumbles past to cross over int
o Mexico; the sleepy guard is unconcerned with his identity, as his primary atte
ntion would be directed toward anyone crossing in the other direction.
Passed out next to a fountain, Moss is awoken in the morning by a mariachi band
who at first play happily for him but stop suddenly when they see the blood spre
ading from his wounds. He holds out a blood soaked hundred dollar bill and asks
for medical help. That same morning, Chigurh limps up to a drugstore, one of Mos
s's shots having hit him in the leg. Removing the gas tank cap from a car parked
in front of the drugstore, he dips cloth in the gasoline and lights the tip of
the cloth with a lighter. As he walks into the drugstore, the car explodes, crea
ting panic among all those inside. As the clerks and customers run out to find o
ut if anyone has been injured or is in need of help, Chigurh nonchalantly stride
s into the pharmacy at the drugstore's rear and makes off with a bunch of medica
l supplies. Back at his hotel room, Chigurh lays plastic down on the floor, inje
cts a heavy dose of the stolen lidocaine into his leg, and proceeds to remove th
e shotgun pellets. He then cleans his leg in the bath, removes the remaining shr
apnel, methodically stitches his wounds, and applies clean dressings.
Sheriff Bell tracks down Carla Jean to see if she knows where Moss is running. W
hen she truthfully tells him she has no idea where Moss is, Bell warns her to le
t him know if she hears anything from him. Later, Deputy Wendell tells Sheriff B
ell that the D.E.A. wants to go over the drug massacre site with him, but Bell t
iredly declines. He rambles about a newspaper article about a couple who rented
rooms to elderly people, then tortured and killed them so they could collect the
ir social security checks. They remained unsuspected despite the numerous fresh
graves in their yard, until a victim escaped into town wearing nothing but a dog
collar. Bell quietly expresses his bewilderment at the callous brutality of suc
h crimes, which seem to be increasing as the years pass.
When Moss awakens in a Mexican hospital, he sees Wells is at his bedside with fl
owers, having apparently been able to track him down within three hours. Wells e
xplains that he is willing to help Moss, and that he may be able to arrange to g
ive him a small cut of the money if Moss returns it, but that Chigurh will not b
e making any such deals; he dryly notes how easily Moss was found despite his be
st efforts to be elusive. It is revealed that both Moss and Wells are Vietnam ve
terans. When Moss asks if "Sugar" is the "ultimate bad ass", Wells says Chigurh
has no sense of humor but does have his own code of honor, is "highly principled
, almost." Wells gives Moss the number to his hotel room to give Moss time to co
nsider the deal. Walking back over the U.S.-Mexico bridge, Wells is able to see
where Moss has thrown the satchel.
When Wells walks back into his hotel, Chigurh follows him in. Chigurh greets Wel
ls warmly, but keeps him at gun-point. Upstairs in the room, Wells recognizes th
e bleakness of his situation and desperately tries to cut a deal with Chigurh. H
e offers to retrieve the money for Chigurh, but Chigurh remains uninterested in
any deal. Upon realizing that there's no way Chigurh will let him live, Wells re
signs himself to the predicament and tells his adversary how crazy he must be. W
hen the room phone rings, Chigurh kills Wells. Chigurh answers the phone, and it
's Moss calling. Chigurh lets Moss know that he knows exactly where he is and, i
nstead of coming to kill him in the hospital, he is going to go to Carla Jean's
mother's house, which he has located from the phone bill, and kill her. He makes
an offer that Moss give him the money and his own life, in exchange for allowin
g Carla Jean to live. Moss tells Chigurh he won't have to come after him, becaus
e he will come after Chigurh. Walking back from Mexico into Texas, still in his
hospital gown, Moss uses his veteran experience to verify his nationality to the
Border Patrol agent, who admits him back into the United States. He then goes i
nto the same store in which he had previously bought boots to buy some new cloth
es. He then recovers the satchel. Moss then calls Carla Jean and tells her to ta
ke her mother on the bus to El Paso, meet him at a motel where he's gotten a roo
m, then fly off to some safe location.
Back at the Dallas office building of the businessman who hired Wells, Chigurh b
ursts in to find the businessman conversing with someone from "accounting," and
shoots the businessman in the face. Chigurh tells the accounting man that the bu
sinessman was at fault for bringing the "Mexicans" in on the case. When the acco
unting man asks Chigurh if he's going to shoot him too, Chigurh says as he turns
to face the man: "That depends. Have you seen me?" Soon after, Chigurh feigns b
eing broken down on a roadside. When a chicken farmer in a flatbed pickup pulls
over to assist, Chigurh asks where the nearest airport is. The man tells him El
Paso. Chigurh asks if the chicken crates can be removed from the truck, which pu
zzles the driver. Cut to a car wash, where Chigurh is cleaning the feathers out
of the farmer's truck.
Moss is by the pool at his motel where a sun-bathing girl flirts with him. She t
ells Moss that she has beer back in her room. He says that he's married and that
he knows what beer leads to, and declines her offer.
Mexican gangsters follow Carla Jean and her mother from their home to the bus st
ation in their pickup truck, discussing what to do in Spanish. After they've arr
ived at the bus station, Carla Jean steps away from her ailing mother, Agnes (Be
th Grant), to call Sheriff Bell and report where Moss is to meet them.
One of the well-dressed Mexican gangsters, gets out at the bus station and offer
s to help Agnes with their luggage. He chats her up, and she trustingly tells hi
m exactly where they are going; she is unenthused about the trip, as she is suff
ering from cancer and would prefer to remain at home. He and his associates driv
e off. A bit later, Sheriff Bell is driving up to Moss' motel as he hears automa
tic gunfire and sees, to his creeping dismay, a pickup truck, its crew of hired
assasins standing in the truck bed, speeding off. At the motel, Sheriff Bell see
s that the flirting girl is dead in the pool and Llewelyn Moss is dead in the op
en doorway of his room. That evening, Moss's wife arrives at the motel, and Bell
greets her with the bad news.
After dealing with local law enforcement associates and comforting Carla Jean, S
heriff Bell goes back alone to the hotel room, barricaded off with yellow crime
scene tape, where Moss was killed. Seeing that the motel room door has been shot
open in Chigurh's favored style, Bell draws his gun. We see Chigurh leaning aga
inst a wall in the dark (seemingly awaiting Bell) with his cattle gun and appare
nt fear or sadness in his teary eyes. Bell opens the room door and looks around
the room and the bathroom, not finding anyone. Sitting on the bed, Sheriff Bell
notices that the ventilation duct has been opened with a dime, just as Chigurh h
ad opened the vent earlier.
Apparently weeks later, Bell drives to a farm to visit his Uncle Ellis (Barry Co
rbin). Bell has retired, news which is frustrating for Ellis. When Bell explains
that he felt "outmatched", Ellis tells him that we have to continue with our li
ves no matter how evil life gets.
Later still, Agnes has died, and upon returning from her funeral, Carla Jean fin
ds Chigurh sitting in her mother's house. Chigurh explains that he made a "promi
se" to Moss that he was going to kill her. Chigurh offers that if she calls corr
ectly in a coin toss, he'll spare her life. Carla Jean dismisses Chigurh's game,
saying that he's the one who decides on whether or not to kill her, not the coi
n. He is unmoved, however, insisting on his lack of a free choice in the matter.
During this exchange, we see two boys ride past the house on bicycles. We next
see Chigurh walking out of the house, stopping to check his boots, apparently, f
or blood.
Driving off, he is looking at the same two boys in the rear view mirror as he pr
oceeds through the green light when he is suddenly hit broadside by a car speedi
ng through the intersection that he just entered. The other driver appears dead,
but Chigurh gets out of his car, his eye nearly popped out of his skull and his
bone protruding out of his elbow in a compound fracture. The two neighborhood b
oys come up to him to see if he's all right. Chigurh pays the kids for one of th
eir shirts, which he uses to make a rough-and-ready sling for his arm, and to ha
ve them not report having seen him. Chigurh limps away down the street.
At Sheriff Bell's house, he ponders what to do for the day at breakfast with his
wife, Loretta (Tess Harper); he is restless in retirement, but she rebuffs his
offer to help out around the house, as he will just throw off her established ro
utine. He recounts a dream he had about his sheriff father. Bell dreamed that he
and his father were riding a mountain pass in the night. His father, carrying a
horn with embers inside that glowed like moonlight, rode ahead into the darknes
s and disappeared. Though he couldn't see anything in the dark night, Bell dream
ed that he kept riding forward since his father would have a warm fire waiting f
or him. Bell ends the film with the final words: "And then I woke up."
Page last updated by briant-6, 8 months ago