Today I want to talk about one of my favorite movies of all time, “No Country for Old Men,” (2007) directed by the Coen brothers. “No Country for Old Men” is a masterclass in sound editing… but not for the reasons you think.
Unlike almost every movie in modern Hollywood, “No Country for Old Men” does not have a score. The entire movie, a thriller in which a hitman, played by Javier Bardem, relentlessly hunts down a well-meaning man played by Josh Brolin, would seemingly need some reliance on the score to help build tension throughout the movie. Instead, the Coen brothers strategically removed any background music or score to help keep the film grounded in reality, and it works in building tension.
Just look at the infamous coin toss scene above. The silence between dialogue, the sounds of the candy wrapper and the creaking floor, the looks each actor gives one another and the noise of the coin itself all work in building the tension that this coin flip is deciding the fate of the shopkeeper.
The next scene does a fantastic job of setting the tone through the sounds of the actors. Woody Harrelson’s character plays another operative in pursuit of the money Bardem’s character is after, and you can feel the fear by listening to the inflection in the actor’s voice, the tears he’s holding back, and the sound of him being killed. The silence between each line by the characters serves to build up to the inevitable, and the phone ringing is a fantastic way to scare the audience prior to the killing of Harrelson’s character.
The next scene I want to talk about is another pursuit scene, where the first half of the scene involves building tension, from the creaking of the floorboard to the footsteps of Bardem’s character in pursuit of Brolin’s character and the suddenness of the door handle popping off. From there, explosive shotgun blasts and windows crashing fill the rest of the scene, offering a high-stakes chase scene that keeps your heart racing.
Lastly, I want to talk about the last scene of the movie and how the background noise completes the film. Tommy Lee Jones’s character is a huge part of the film, as he’s been trying to protect Brolin’s character from Bardem. He fails to do so and continues to see the world around him get darker and darker. As the film progresses, we see that Jones is the real protagonist of the film and how helpless he feels in an evolving world. An earlier scene mentions Jones’s father being a former sheriff, and this scene serves as a finality to Jones’s role in the film. What makes this scene so significant, is the sound of the clock ticking in the background, signifying the world passing Jones by and his own mortality.
I could talk for years about how perfect this movie is but I wanted to bring to attention how the Coen brothers defied the industry and were able to pull off such an intense movie without relying on a score and instead using ambient sounds and the sounds of their actors to do so.