I maintain that No Country for Old Men is significantly less bleak than people want to believe it is. What matters in this movie, much more than Anton Chigurh’s implacable pursuit of what Marge Gunderson would have called “a little bit of money,” more even than the principle of complete victory that he espouses through his actions, is that individuals get to choose. The fact that individuals choose things which are bad for them, or worse, bad for others, is part of the hope we feel in believing that our lives are not determined for us. Many are the people who will grant that we cannot have total control over our lives, but vanishingly few are the ones who believe that no individual can truly choose what s/he does.

Anton Chigurh likes killing. He enjoys it. He is not insensible to its pleasures. Even if you want to grant that for some reason he “has” to do the kinds of things he does, which you don’t have to grant, then you can still critique his methods for snuffing out life too willingly. He could leave off at rivals and investigators without going after families. It’s why he asks this question and not a different one. “What’s the most you ever lost on a coin toss?” is a fabulous line of dialogue. The conversation he has with that guy in the gas station is the goofiest thing Chigurh does in the entire film, the Cormac McCarthy version of George Clooney complaining that he doesn’t want Fop because “I’m a Dapper Dan man.” He makes a “Ain’t I a stinker?” face at the manager as he’s leaving and everything. It’s funny, in large part because we’re so freaked out by the encounter. At this point in the movie, we assume that Chigurh is going to blow this poor man away who married into a gas station. Chigurh blows everyone away, and that he doesn’t send this guy to wherever dearly departed Westexans wind up feels like Providence itself.

It is Providence himself. “What’s the most you ever lost on a coin toss?” is not a cool pick-up line to a murder. It’s not really a belief in chance as a motivator, or as an ultimate judge. It’s a statement of hope. There are other ways to phrase the same question to get basically the same kind of answer. The coin toss is a 50/50 proposition, and Chigurh might just as easily have asked “What’s the most you’ve ever won on a coin toss?” If Chigurh means to shoot the man behind the counter if one side of the coin shows, then the math checks out that the man has the chance to win an enormous amount on this coin toss. That’s how he looks at it. “I need to know what I stand to win,” he replies. This conversation has to start somewhere, and Chigurh, with hope that is expectation, begins it in the negative. Given his ‘druthers, he’d choose to shoot that guy because he wants to; he looks at the situation as if the man would lose, not win.