For Fans of Clint Eastwood

If you have never watched Eastwood closely, Unforgiven is where to start. It contains everything: the mythic Western setup, the slow-burn direction, the refusal to let the hero stay heroic. Gene Hackman's sheriff is almost more interesting than Eastwood's killer-turned-farmer, and that tension, two versions of what justified violence looks like, is the whole film's engine. It won Best Picture in 1992 and it earned it.

Shot back-to-back with Flags of Our Fathers and almost entirely in Japanese, Letters from Iwo Jima is the film that should have sealed Eastwood's reputation as a world-class director. It is a WWII film with zero interest in heroism as a concept. It is interested in letters home, in the gap between what soldiers are told and what they see, in the ordinary human weight of a terrible situation. It lost the Best Picture race to The Departed. That was the wrong call.

The Coen Brothers made No Country for Old Men the same year Eastwood was deep into his late-career run, and the two filmmakers are in a kind of conversation. Both ask whether a man built for violence can survive a world that has moved past him. Tommy Lee Jones' sheriff narrates his own obsolescence the way Eastwood has been doing since Unforgiven: quietly, without self-pity, and with the gnawing feeling that there was never a time when things made sense.

Cormac McCarthy's novels have been filmed, partially filmed, and declared unfilmable in roughly equal measure. But anyone who watches Unforgiven, The Outlaw Josey Wales, or Pale Rider and wants to follow that thread to its darkest literary source should start with No Country for Old Men on the page. The prose is leaner than the Coens' adaptation lets on. All the Pretty Horses and The Road take the same moral seriousness into entirely different registers. McCarthy and Eastwood are not making the same argument, but they are staring at the same abyss.