Yes, as Martin Hyde just explained. I’ve seen the movie several times, and read the book, but as I read MH’s post, something occurred to me for the first time:
Moss wasn’t there when the Mexicans arrived, but they were after the cash, which was there all along. They obviously knew this because the transponder brought them to it. Their receiver had to have been pinging pretty damn loud, with the target about a dozen feet away. So why didn’t they tear the room apart? It wouldn’t have taken a rocket surgeon to check the heater duct. They still could have waited for Moss if they wanted to kill him on principle.
I just know there’s going to be a headslappingly obvious answer to this.
They knew it was close but they could have thought it was in another room in the motel. They wouldn’t know which room, and rather than break into the other rooms or raise suspicion by renting more rooms, they lay in wait for Llewellyn. ??
All they knew for sure that they found was the transponder. They needed Llewellyn in order to find the money.
I happened to watch the last 40 minutes or so of this movie last night. I remember being puzzled by the final sequence at the subsequent motel, the Desert Sands, and now I think I have it figured out, for the most part. I’m typing it up to help keep the progression straight.
Moss brings the valise to the Desert Sands and again hides it in the ductwork.
Moss calls his wife from a pay phone and asks her to join him there.
His wife calls the sheriff and, reluctantly, lets him know where Moss is.
As Moss is returning to his room, a woman at the motel swimming pool tries to lure Moss into her room with the promise of beer.
Cut to Sheriff Bell, who approaches the motel at the tail end of a gun battle, and sees a few guys departing hastily in a pickup truck.
At the motel, Sheriff Bell finds multiple gun casings, a dying Moss, and a dead Mexican in a hotel room.
(The Mexicans lured Moss into a motel room, but he was well armed, and a gun battle ensued in which Moss was killed before they could beat out of him where the valise was.)
(Chigurh shows up later at the deserted, taped off crime scene. Now that he knows Moss’s habit of hiding the valise in air conditioning ducts, he unscrews the vent and quickly finds the valise. Just as he’s retrieved it – )
Sheriff Bell returns to the deserted, taped off crime scene to see what he can learn. He sees the unscrewed vent. Does he guess?
Yes, it’s explained in a brief scene that Bell remembers that in previous incidents, Chigurh has gone into crime scenes after the fact. Bell suspects this could be happening at the Desert Sands and that perhaps Moss has hidden the money in the hotel room so well that the initial search by the police that processed the crime scene failed to turn it up.
So Bell decides to return to the Desert Sands. Throughout the movie, Bell has been going through a bit of an internal struggle in which he feels that he isn’t up to the task and challenges of being a police officer and that if he ever had whatever internal strength was required it has fled him in his old age. Bell fears Chigurh, and views him as a manifestation of the wickedness and depravity of man that Bell himself is either now no longer able to deal with or was never truly able to deal with. So when Bell heads back to the Desert Sands alone, it is not just to see if Chigurh really had been back to the crime scene but to bring to a close all of the internal conflicts that have been raging inside Bell throughout the movie.
He pauses before he enters the room, knowing full well at this point that Chigurh had indeed been in the room since the scene was processed and might even still be inside the room. Bell opening the door is, in part, Bell confronting his internal demons and fears.
It’s left ambiguous by the way the Coen’s shot the scene as to whether Chigurh was actually in the room when Bell opened the door, or was somewhere else. As Bell is outside we do flash into a shot of the interior of a hotel room with Chigurh hiding in it. This could be the room Bell goes into, and the Coens are flashing “back in time”, to a few moments ago when Chigurh was in there. Or, it could be Chigurh was in another hotel room, as maybe Moss made the valise accessible from an alternate room. It could be Chigurh being seen in the motel room is a visual manifestation of Bell’s fears. It could be Chigurh is in the room and hides behind the door when Bell opens it–I think that is probably what most people suspect when they first view the scene. But careful viewing makes it look pretty unlikely that Bell wouldn’t have noticed Chigurh behind the door when he opened it, he opens the door essentially all the way and it’s push basically onto the wall inside the room. But it is left ambiguous.
In the book,
Chigurh is unambiguously not in the room, but in a car in the parking lot watching Bell’s movements. In the book Bell’s “moment” to confront his fears is not when he enters the room but when he exits it back to the parking lot. As Bell thinks to himself that if Chigurh had been hiding in one of those cars, the moment Bell stepped out he would be exposed and probably unable to defend himself from that vantage point…Bell then steps out of the room confronting his fears in the book similarly to how Bell confronts his fears in the movie by entering the room. In the book Bell goes to his car and waits as backup arrives because he wants all of the cars in the parking lot searched, but Chigurh ends up slipping away.
I thought the Mexicans had found Moss’s motel room (they tracked the transponder) and were lying in wait for him, shot him as he came through the door. ??
That’s a fair supposition, but we already saw how uber-cautious Moss was at the first motel, and how his suspiciousness saved his neck. At this second motel, there was a whole exchange between Moss and the woman at the swimming pool, and you could see that she was getting him to let down his guard before the camera switches away to Sheriff Bell and his approach to the motel.
Since I haven’t read the book, I was only filling in what I deduce took place off camera: They were trying to lure him into a situation that he would otherwise have avoided because he was too crafty. They almost succeeded, but Moss took at least one out. Good thing, as they were probably going to torture him to reveal the valise’s hiding place.
Since I hadn’t seen this scene since the movie’s first run, I misremembered it as Chigurh doing these killings, just like at the first motel. Nope, those were regular bullet casings Sheriff Bell saw on the ground, but Chigurh’s weapons were that cattle-killing thing or some firearm with a huge silencer on it.
Weren’t there two motel doors taped off as the Sheriff approached? There might have been two motel rooms involved again, this time side-by-side. One was Moss’s, and the other was the one that the Mexicans hoped to lure him to. Chigurh hid in the one that the Sheriff didn’t enter.
I don’t think the woman was part of the ambush though. Their interaction may have relaxed Moss, but I don’t think it was intentional. He’s cute and she’s lonely.
Yeah, the transponder is not how the cartel guys found Llewellyn at the Desert Sands. If you remember after the motel where Llewellyn retrieves the valise using his homemade hook to pull it out of the ductwork, he checks into a multi-story hotel in the downtown of some Texas town (not sure if it ever mentions which.)
It is in that hotel where, in the middle of the night Llewellyn gets up out of bed after he’s been thinking. He realizes there is simply no way anyone could have found out through any means that he was at that hotel or what room he was in. He had told no one specifically where he was going and there wouldn’t have been an opportunity for him to have been followed–so he knows something is up with how they found him at the first motel. So he decides to really take a look at his valise full of money–and sure enough just a few layers down he finds one of the $100 packs is hollowed out and has a transponder in it. He takes it out and lays it on the night stand in that hotel and does not (obviously) pick it up to carry it with him. Shortly after he discovers that transponder he has his big shootout with Chigurh that leaves both Llewellyn and Chigurh seriously injured. Llewellyn gets patched up in Mexico and Chigurh breaks into a pharmacy and steals painkiller and other medical supplies and patches himself up in his hotel room.
So how does the cartel track Llewellyn? Because of his wife’s mother. Llewellyn’s game plan after his stay in the Mexican hospital is to meet up with his wife and her mother and give his wife the money. She is then to basically go to the wind and be removed from the situation. This will free Llewellyn up to go after Chigurh as Llewellyn realizes he has to take Chigurh out to live and to keep the money.
Unfortunately, the cartel has done its research already on Llewellyn’s family, and while they don’t know where he is (Chigurh knows at that point that Llewellyn is in a hospital in Mexico, but isn’t immediately looking to pursue him but instead plans to go after Llewellyn’s family to force Llewellyn to come to him), the cartel knows about his wife’s mother. They’re watching her, and they follow her to the airport and see what plane she boards and where she’s going. When her and her daughter arrive in the airport in the town where the Desert Sands is, a very nice Mexican gentleman helps Llewellyn’s mother-in-law with her bag; and strikes up some pleasantries with her. During that, he inquires as to where she is staying, and she reveals that she is staying at the Desert Sands.
So before Llewellyn’s wife and mother in law have even made it to the Desert Sands, the assumption is this guy immediately phones the cartel muscle in the region and they go flying full speed to the motel. We don’t see what happens, but from what Ed Tom Bell sees, Llewellyn is killed, one of the cartel guys is killed, and the woman by the pool that tried to lure Llewellyn into her room was shot down by some crossfire.
So Llewellyn didn’t have the valise at the Desert Sands? It was still tossed in the weeds at the border?
I really need to watch this again, because I’ve forgotten who had the money and when. It’s kinda like the progress of that gold chain on The Wire.
I tried to convince my husband that Chigurh would have honored his promise to Llewellyn’s wife – that if she’d called heads or tails correctly, he’d let her live. He insists she would have been killed anyway.
I think you might be right, at least based on the film. When he takes out the coin after she pleads with him not to kill her, he says “this is the best I can do.” From that I take it he is willing to give her a way out - it a salve to his own screwed up internal logic.
But I doubt you can win the argument with your husband, because I think you can make a plausible argument either way :).
No, Llewellyn has the valise at the Desert Sands. Llewellyn gets the valise in the beginning of the movie and no one ever has possession of it again until after Llewellyn is dead. Now, Llewellyn stows it in a couple places and leaves it, but no one else gets their hands on the valise while Llewellyn is alive in the movie.
Full valise chronology:
Llewellyn acquires it from the shootout.
Llewellyn hides it in his trailer.
Llewellyn flees his home with the valise, and stores it in the ducts of his motel.
Llewellyn later retrieves it from the ducts via another room due to suspecting bad guys are in his original room. He takes it with him to another hotel, where he discovers the transponder.
Llewellyn, injured, heads to Mexico. As he’s walking across the border he hurls the valise over the chain-length fence into some tall grass by the river. Note that Carson Wells actually catches sight of the valise on his way back from visiting Llewellyn in the Mexican hospital. He doesn’t retrieve it right away, but instead heads back to his hotel. The presumption is he plans to come back and get it and settle the affair, but right after he enters his hotel Chigurh comes in after him and kills him.
Due to the conversation with Carson, Llewellyn for the first time understands that people involved in this thing might know where his wife is. (Carson reveals that he knows where his wife is, and says that Chigurh probably does as well and is probably heading there now.) Llewellyn rebuffs Carson’s offer of help, but later (for reasons we never discover) decides to call Carson at his hotel. However, it is Chigurh who answers, since he is in Carson’s room and has just murdered him. Chigurh calmly explains to Llewellyn that he cannot save himself, and he won’t lie to him and say that he can, but that he can save his wife. If Llewellyn returns the money to Chigurh, then he has Chigurh’s word that his wife will not be harmed, but after that moment if he refuses then his “wife will also be accountable.”
This whole thing prompts Llewellyn to get angry at Chigurh and decide that a) he is going to go after Chigurh and that b) he needs to get his wife safe and well out of the situation so he can freely pursue Chigurh. His plan for making that happen involves giving his wife the $2m and sending her on her way, and thus it necessitates Llewellyn meeting his wife in person.
After leaving the hospital, Llewellyn goes back to the clothing shop where he had purchased boots and socks earlier in the film, after crossing into the United States (he has to explain himself to the U.S. border guard as he’s crossing over wearing a hospital gown.) Once he’s properly dressed again, a scene is shown where Llewellyn walks down to the river bank and retrieves the valise.
After that I don’t believe the valise is explicitly seen again. But we know that Llewellyn is traveling to El Paso and is going to get a room at the Desert Sands, where his wife and his mother-in-law will meet him. Llewellyn will give the money to his wife and then pursue Chigurh.
Chigurh has no idea where Llewellyn is, but the cartel has been keeping tabs on Llewellyn’s mother-in-law’s house, which is how they find and follow Llewellyn’s wife and mother-in-law. They follow them and then when they land in El Paso a cartel man talks to the mother-in-law and is able to learn from her they are staying in the Desert Sands…cue shoot out between Llewellyn and the cartel.
The movie doesn’t show what happens to the valise at all. We know Llewellyn brought it with him to the Desert Sands. We know that the El Paso police do not find the valise when they search the room. Thus the ambiguity ( in the film, the book doesn’t leave it ambiguous what happens to the money.)
I doubt he would have killed her if she called the flip correctly. He wasn’t particularly mad at Llewellyn’s wife, and if under his code of honor he felt he could offer her the coin flip she would most likely be spared if she won.
In some ways Chigurh is understandable. People who disrespect him (the Man Who Hired Wells for example, by hiring Wells and tasking other people to also look for the money), people who get in his way (Llewellyn, the cartel) obviously become targets. But his interactions with others are less predictable.
For example, the convenience store clerk that Chigurh forces to flip, basically just tries to exchange pleasantries with Chigurh and that really pisses him off. He forces the clerk to flip, and it’s obvious he would have killed the clerk had he not won the toss. On the other hand, when Chigurh goes into the property manager’s office at Llewellyn’s trailer park and demands to know where Llewellyn works, the property manager essentially rudely tells Chigurh to mind his own business and leave–a much more egregious offense than the one committed by the convenience store clerk. Yet, Chigurh does nothing to the property manager.
Anyway, since he didn’t seem particularly mad at Llewellyn’s wife, I see no reason he wouldn’t honor the flip. Plus, whatever his code of honor, it seems a serious thing to Chigurh. I don’t believe he viewed himself as even having the power to go against the results of the coin flip. He doesn’t even really seem to want to kill Llewellyn’s wife, he almost acts as though it is out of his hands, he’s almost regretful when he tells her the best he can offer her is a coin flip. She even points out that of course, the coin has no say…Chigurh is the one who decides to shoot or not…but when Chigurh says “the coin got here the same way as I did” it suggests Chigurh feels he is bound by certain forces and he is not in fact an independent actor.
This is in keeping with both Chigurh in the book and similar characters in McCarthy’s other novels. Cormac McCarthy is big on creating characters like Chigurh that are “forces of nature” more than they are human beings.
FWIW, in the book Llewellyn’s wife does call the coin flip; loses the toss, and is shot.
When I first saw this movie in theaters, I had long ago read the book. I came away thinking that the Coen brothers did an amazing job directing the film, but I actually had some negative views on the movie. It was masterfully directed, but I felt the story itself was poorly structured for cinema, which wasn’t a hit on either McCarthy or the Coens. The Coens worked with McCarthy’s story and did a great job directing, McCarthy wrote a book for people to read, not with an eye to whether it was a cinematic tale.
However, over the years I’ve come to like the movie more, and actually think the Coen’s successfully pulled off making the story more cinematic while remaining faithful to the novel. I also now think the movie itself is better than the novel (but No Country is not really one of McCarthy’s best novels, I might rank it his #5 best on my personal list.) The Coens actually do some interesting stuff that in a sense makes the movie a better story. For one, the way the death of Llewellyn’s wife is handled. You have to really pay attention, and remember that Chigurh is fastidious about keeping his shoes clean from blood (remember the scene with Carson Wells) to realize that he’s wiping his shoes as he comes out of her house because he had walked through her blood after killing her.
In the novel,
obviously Chigurh just shoots her, no nuance there.
The way the resolution with the money is left open-ended also I think, is better in some ways than the explicit way it is handled in the books. Although in that instance the way the book handles it does help show a bit more about Chigurh’s nature.
First paragraph: So how exactly does Chigurh know to go to the Desert Sands? The cartel guys certainly didn’t tell him.
Second: I thought that right about when Chigurh would have killed the property manager, he hears the sound of somebody else on the other side of an interior door; my take on it was that he decides not to bother killing two people instead of one, for crazy reasons of his own.
I’m not sure of that one, nor do Chigurh’s movements entirely make sense in the chronology of the film after he kills Carson Wells.
The guy who hired Carson (we’ll call him “the businessman” / Stephen Root’s character) works in a Dallas high-rise. I don’t know if it’s specifically stated, but my assumption is the shoot out between Chigurh/Llewellyn happens in El Paso, as it would make sense (El Paso is a good sized city right on the border), further we know the movie starts in Terrell County, TX and Llewellyn lives in Sanderson, TX (which IRL is in Terrell County), the closest city of any note where there is a border crossing is El Paso. It may even mention that the city is El Paso at some point, but I can’t recall.
[Quick note about Terrell County, I had to look it up just now to see if it was a real or fictional county. Sure enough it is real, and at 2300 sq mile it is five times bigger than New York City and has a population of 930, which is probably the smallest county population I have seen.]
So with that in mind, Llewellyn’s movements in the movie:
He starts in Terrell County and then heads toward El Paso with the money. He stays in two separate roadside motels either in or near El Paso then moves to a high rise hotel in El Paso itself. He’s injured by Chigurh there and crosses over to Mexico for medical treatment.
Meanwhile, Llewellyn has sent his wife to Odessa, Texas. He tells her to head to El Paso to meet up with him to get the money. He’s done this because he knows she isn’t safe in Odessa and with the money she can basically hide anywhere.
When her and her mother head to El Paso from Odessa they are already being watched, and a cartel man is there in El Paso to meet her at the airport.
Chigurh’s movements: Chigurh starts somewhere unknown, and is arrested by a sheriff’s deputy. He kills the deputy and starts heading toward Terrell County where he kills two Mexicans whom he meets at the scene of the big drug deal / shootout. Llewellyn had to leave his truck at the shoot out scene after he went back to give the injured Mexican water, so ostensibly Chigurh tracks him down via his vehicle registration.
Somehow Chigurh deduces the money is heading to El Paso (I’d have to rewatch to figure this out) and eventually finds the money with the transponder, but Llewellyn gets away and crosses the border at El Paso. I know that Chigurh looks at stuff in Llewellyn’s trailer and looks at their phone bill, so it’s possible he deduces from that something that clues him in on Llewellyn going to El Paso. It’s also possible the cartel helps him out, as they probably don’t know yet that Chigurh is also killing off cartel people left and right and maybe they had somehow followed Llewellyn toward El Paso. It’s also possible the cartel originally found Llewellyn just by driving out of Sanderson toward Mexico checking the major roadway from there to El Paso and the receiver they had went off (that’s how Chigurh knew specifically where the valise was, his receiver starts going off while he’s driving down the highway.)
From there, Chigurh leaves El Paso after stitching up his leg and killing Carson Wells, and heads to Dallas, where he kills “the businessman.” It’s on his way back from murdering the businessman that Chigurh’s car breaks down and a chicken farmer stops to help him. He ends up taking the chicken farmers truck, after asking the chicken farmer “where is the nearest airport”, to which the farmer replies “El Paso.”
At that point it’s hard to figure Chigurh, he had gone to Dallas to settle up with the businessman. But he was obviously heading back in the direction of El Paso when his car broke down…but he also obviously wasn’t going specifically to El Paso or why would he ask where the nearest airport was? I don’t really understand Chigurh’s movements at this point. Nor do I know how he found the location of the Desert Sands.
