Like [Fargo heroine] Marge herself, the Coens have a longstanding curiosity about matters of morality. But hard as they might try, they can't seem to shrug off the realities of evil as calmly as their most famous heroine.
There's a certain moral rigor in all of their movies (well, maybe not in The Ladykillers) that has always suggested, to me, a subtext of spiritual inquiry. Where do these sharply contrasting ideals of right and wrong come from? On what basis do the Coens define virtue and nobility? Christians see goodness as a reflection of who God is, but in many of their films, the Coens, who are Jewish, don't offer a theology to speak of. Crucially, however, they don't exclude the possibility, either.
I don't know that Joel and Ethan Coen have answered the question yet; they may not have the answer. But they at least understand the question. No Country for Old Men—which won the 2008 Oscar for Best Picture—was a full-on breakdown of the Coens' moral compass. The film followed the devastating trail of death and depravity left by Anton Chigurh, a serial killer over whom human concepts of justice and morality have no power. Tommy Lee Jones plays the local law enforcement, but he's nowhere near so chipper as Marge Gunderson: "I feel overmatched," he says, paralyzed by his inability to enforce goodness or bring evildoers to justice.
What, then, of the Divine?
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No Country for Old Men is one of my favorite films. I watched it again a couple of months ago, knowing full well that I’d have to wait until Mootette had already gone to bed. Wouldn’t want her getting nightmares.
My take on Anton is that he thinks of himself as a force of nature in a universe determined by an impersonal fate - people unlucky enough to cross his path at the wrong time, or do the wrong thing, well.. get what’s coming to them, in Anton’s eyes. We see his belief system challenged by his last victim, the wife of the late Llewelyn, with her claim that the coin, “ain’t got no say.” That’s the only time we see Anton loosing his cool.
The “old men,” father and son Wells are different. The elder Bells sees the younger struggling with the desire to hold back the evil in the world, and calls it vanity. That isn’t good enough for the younger Bell, and he retires. The odd thing about the elder’s charge of vanity, is that this type of moral judgement doesn’t make any sense in a universe ruled by impersonal fate and /or chance. It’s a subjective judgement-call, that only makes sense if there is a standard of morality that has a personality - such that morality as we know it is derivative of -that- Personality.
So, there’s the Divine, for you.