Scene Analysis: No Country For Old Men

The memorable coin toss scene in No Country for Old Men (Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, 2007) primarily serves to reveal to the audience more about the fickle and psychopathic nature of the primary antagonist, Anton Chigurh. This scene begins with a fade into an extreme long shot of the store that Anton is stopping by at. This initial shot provides some background context on the setting of the scene, more or less in the isolated rural countryside. The scene then cuts to a medium long shot of the store owner, right as Chigurh walks up to him. The conversation between Chigurh and the store owner starts normally, with Chigurh asking for the price of a pack of nuts and gas. However, the conversation soon takes a turn for the worse when the store owner asks Chigurh an otherwise innocent question of whether or not there was any rain from where Chigurh came from. While the rest of the conversation
While the store owner’s facial expressions mostly reflect a slight confusion and anxiousness, Chigurh primarily maintains a rather stern and forbidding demeanor. Moreover, the architectural framing of the window behind the store owner literally provides a window into the background of the scene. While the conversation is initially filmed with either Chigurh or the store owner as the subject of the shot in the middle ground and the back of the other in the foreground, the scene is then switched to having a point of view angle of either Chigurh or the store owner from the perspective of the other. This marks another transition in the tone of the conversation, as the store owner desperately tries to close his store. The scene then switches again the the previous format, before going back to the point of view angle again as Chigurh confronts the store owner about his marrying into the house he now lives