Texas scrubland provides the ideal landscape for No Country For Old Men, the new film by the Coen Brothers. Barren scenery abounds, with intermittent trees providing just enough shade for a man to die under. The climate is a hardening sort, one that produces tight-lipped men prone to throwing their lives away on shaky bets, well aware that bad odds are better than none at all.

For Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), the wager that comes his way is a satchel full of cash, the remnant of a drug deal gone awry that he stumbles across in the desert. He takes the money home, warily, knowing that the people it belongs to are likely to come looking for it. They do, dispatching sociopath Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) to get it back, unleashing a cascade of sleepless nights, silenced gunshots and bodies struck dumb by the suddenness of their passing.

Chance and happenstance are recurring themes in the film, with lives wagered on flips of a coin and motel clerks and truck drivers dispatched simply for intersecting with Chigurh’s murderous path. The killer seeks to embody the element of chance, presenting himself to his targets as a stand-in for fate. “The coin and I got here the same way,” he rumbles to one unwilling victim.

Despite his pretensions, Chigurh has a choice. As his victims remind him, he doesn’t have to kill them, even as he rationalizes their deaths as inevitable under his twisted system of morality.

“He’s a peculiar man,” observes hired gun Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson). “You could even say that he has principles. Principles that transcend money or drugs or anything like that.” But while Chigurh uses his supposed principles as a shield for his amoralism, the film uses them to highlight the choice that often lies at the root of evil.

Chigurh desires to cloak himself as a force of nature, but the Coen Brothers don’t let him off that easily. In a film that meditates on the problem of evil—good Samaritans and dedicated sinners are struck down alike—Chigurh reminds us that conscious choice, not random happenstance, is responsible for his cruelty. Bad things happen because he’s greedy and doesn’t care who he hurts to get what he wants. Many of our current global tragedies can be reduced to the same factors, from the slaughter in Iraq to the greed and scandal currently devastating the mortgage industry. These acts have authors.

The characters in the film want to assume this callousness is something new. The opening words of the film has weary, but wise, small-town sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) expressing nostalgia for the old-timers and recounting the story of a boy sent to the gas chamber for murdering a 14-year-old girl.

“Papers said it was a crime of passion, but he told me there wasn’t any passion to it. Told me that he’d been planning to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember…I don’t know what to make of that. I surely don’t. The crime you see now, it’s hard to even take its measure.”

Similar thoughts surface throughout the film. Regulars at the town diner are bewildered by the newspaper’s tales of cruelty, killers in dog collars and old folks murdered for their Social Security checks. Lawmen on the edge of retirement commiserate about fading values.

“If you’d have told me that young people in my town would be walking around with green hair and bones in their noses, I don’t know what I would have said,” a sheriff tells Bell.

“It starts when you begin to overlook bad manners,” he responds. “Anytime you quit hearing sir and ma’am, the end is pretty much in sight.”

This nostalgia receives a harsh corrective, however, in a blunt speech from one of Bell’s fellow officers, an old man living in isolation in the desert, confined to a wheelchair after being shot in the line of duty. Bell goes to him in anguish at the blood that’s been shed, seeking absolution in the idea that modern crime—modern life—is simply too much for law and order to handle. The older man responds with a story of a murder from the turn of the last century, a deputy shot down on his porch in front of his wife and left to suffer through the night before dying. “What you got ain’t nothin’ new,” he says. “This country is hard on people…You can’t stop what’s comin’. Ain’t all waiting on you. That’s vanity.”

The grimness of this worldview is pervasive, but it’s leavened slightly by the suggestion that, while human evil may stem from choice, resistance can be a choice as well. It’s often a futile choice, but it’s available nonetheless. In one particularly well-acted scene, Bell highlights the power of choice by acting to confront Chigurh, even though he’s aware the other man is better, younger and likely to kill him. Similarly, Moss fuels his downfall with one altruistic act, an act he knows will doom him, but one he undertakes anyway.

In the film, Chigurh is used to highlight the way in which power can begin to assert its own moral force. In one pivotal scene, the assassin attempts to bully the manager of a mobile home community for information about Moss. When she resists his questions, the tension is palpable; the viewer is tempted to shout up to the screen, “Just give him what he’s looking for, lady, if you know what’s good for you.” Some critics, such as Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader, have misread that dynamic to be the movie’s main theme, complaining that the film fetishizes the “supernatural powers” of psycho killers.

But while Chigurh is relentless, the movie identifies more with Moss’ bravado in resisting him. In defending his found treasure, Moss isn’t motivated solely by greed. He also displays a sense of skewed populism—he found the money, and he’s sure as hell not going to let anyone take it away just because they talk bigger than him.

While others speak of Chigurh in breathless tones, making him out to be the magical killer that Rosenbaum laments, Moss is refreshingly resistant to this aura of invincibility. Even from a hospital bed, he’s able to scoff, “What’s this guy supposed to be, the ultimate badass?” Later, when Chigurh attempts to play this role by offering a dismal bargain, Moss’ bravado surfaces again. “I’m going to bring you something, all right,” he fires back over the phone. “I decided to make you a special project of mine. You ain’t going have to come looking for me at all.

The outcome isn’t predetermined, he argues, even as his body wearily transmits doubt. He has a shot at taking Chigurh out. And while it may not be the best bet, at least it’s one he’s choosing to make, unlike all the others, who had a monster sweep into their lives and set the terms for them.