Friendo

 "If that's the way you want to put it."

"I don't have some 'way to put it'. That's the way it is."

The coin toss scene from No Country For Old Men (2007) contains no raised voices, no weapons appear, and there is no violence but it is one of the most tense and terrifying movies scenes you'll ever see.  Javier Bardem won an Academy Award for his performance as the murderous Anton Chigurh (though his haircut deserved equal billing) but just as fine in this scene is Gene Jones as the owner of the gas station who, while making casual chitchat with a customer, eventually realizes he's stumbled into some dark and dangerous waters.

Set in the West Texas of 1980, based on a book by Cormac McCarthy and directed by the Coen Brothers, of whom I am a great admirer, the movie won the Academy Award for Best Picture.  It is an unrelentingly grim film, portraying a brutal, unforgiving universe.  It is a fine film, but I left the theater knowing I would never watch it again, though I've seen almost every other Coen Brothers film multiple times.  I should have known that going in.  Years ago I'd read one of McCarthy's novels, Blood Meridian, finding the writing brilliant but upon finishing vowing I would never read another of his books because his vision of humanity was so bleak.

Along with the full scene below, this link is to an interview with Bardem in which he talks about the importance of Gene Jones to the scene (at 5:35 is when he starts to talk about the movie and then about the specific scene), and this takes you to an analysis of the scene along with background to explain why it is so chillingly effective.

The dialogue is so well done.  The contrast between the owner's casual use of words, with that imprecision in grammar we often use when passing the time and just being pleasant, with Chigurgh's literalist worldview, in which everything must be precise; to speak otherwise is meaningless.  Yet while Chigurgh insists on the precise meaning of words, the random outcome of a coin toss is just as essential to his view of life.