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October 1, 2008
THE COEN BROTHERS (PART 2)
FARGO - Enough has been said already about FARGO, certainly in the handful of best movies of the last thirty years. FARGO is perhaps the blackest black comedy ever made, an absurd feat considering the whole movie is covered in snow and Midwestern niceties. William H. Macy's performance as a tragically stupid bumbler put him on the map; years later it seems silly that Cuba Gooding Jr. beat him for the Oscar. Steve Buscemi plays one of his many awful, unredeemable bastards, but this time even he is befuddled by a play that increasingly strange. The iconic scene is when Francis McDormand's Marge announces she's "gonna barf" - it goofs on the movie tradition of the rookie who throws up at the crime scene. Marge is anything but a rookie, her seemingly dopey friendliness hiding a keen mind. Therefore she's the most redeemable of all the Coen's characters, a warm, pregnant maternal figure who is also a master detective. Only they could come up with something like that.
THE BIG LEBOWSKI - I blogged about it a few weeks ago. Where even the most convoluted of Coen stories is tightly plotted, LEBOWSKI feels like an explosion at the screenplay factory. When the nihilists show up with a marmot, you realize you're in the kind of story that even Sam Spade couldn't make sense of. The brilliance of this story is that rather than the keen, deductive mind of Spade, you get the marijuana haze of the Dude. Perhaps the most consistently funny movie ever made.
O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU - The Coens took on the depreshun South with O BROTHER, which plays on the "serious" film that Sullivan from SULLIVANS' TRAVELS (a masterpiece) planned on making. "Written by" the Coens and Homer, it's a story about getting home through an odyssey of tribulations and larger than life characters. Its similar to THE ODYSSEY is its least compelling feature; rather I appreciate its loving mythologizing of bluegrass music, gangsters, pomade, and Southern archetypes. In 2000, George Clooney was a revelation; he looked like Clark Gable but carried himself with more comic swash. In his first scene, he's explaining the prophetic potential of the blind, and he's always chatting his way out of a situation. Like the Dude, he's a bad Odysseus for this journey, but the Coens realize that's all part of the fun. This is a fun movie, sun-bathed in sentimental imaginings of a South that never existed, but that somehow pays homage to the one that does.
THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE - The least remembered of all the better Coen films, the black and white stylings of this film made it once distinguishable and unmarketable. Billy Bob Thorton plays a dull, dull man who gets in over his head in classic noir tradition. My thought is that the Coens just wanted to make a movie about a barber because they liked the barber pole and the potential for the happenings in a barber shop. Watching this again recently, I wished that John Goodman could have played the James Gandolfini part, and it's the only time I ever thought Frances McDormand miscast. And when Tony Shalhoub shows up as a philosophizing lawyer, the movie goes where most noirs don't: the aftermath. The Coens usually avoid the blatant commentary of revisionist films, but TMWWT consistently invokes the tropes and reinvents them. The normally self-serving noir hero, here embodied by Thorton, is a man who longs beauty and passion but lacks the means to express it - normally a subtext of a genre, here blatantly portrayed. Still, like all Coen movies, this is an experience that feels at once familiar but completely new.
INTOLERABLE CRUELTY / THE LADYKILLERS - The less said about these two the better. The former doesn't seem like a Coen bros. Movie, while the latter clearly does. THE LADYKILLERS is one I keep meaning to revisit, but I don't want to sit through Marlon Wayans completely out-of-place jive-talkin' homeboy (even though I do want to see J.K. Simmons and his yodeling girlfriend, if I remember right). The Clooney film was an incomprehensible gag film, but the Hanks/Coen pairing was a sad failure.
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN - A perfect adaptation in many ways, it offered career roles to its three leads. I've heard criticism that this is "just another serial killer movie," but I couldn't disagree more. This killer is singularly motivated, yet never explained. Chigurh is not pure evil, nor is he not not pure evil. The coin flip metaphor is appropriate - Chigurh sees the world operating on chance, while Tommy Lee Jones' Ed Tom Bell views it with an apparent moral order. NO COUNTRY reminds me most of the great Sergio Leone movies, where there is always a good (Jones), a bad (Bardem), and an ugly (Brolin). The "ugly" character, while principled, can't settle between his greed and desire to do something heroic. Of all their films, this one is populated with the best performances: everyone is excellent, from Bardem's oscar winning role to Brolin and Kelly Macdonald in their revelatory performances to Woody Harrelson's stoic but self-serving bounty hunter. I'm particularly impressed with the mood, which is tone-perfect in adapting the subdued suspense of Cormac McCarthy's novel.
BURN AFTER READING - The Coens satire on the spook paranoia story has been criticized for being neither that suspenseful or that funny. As suspense, it's a mess, but it's supposed to be. Like the many characters I've mentioned before, Frances McDormand's sad sack of a computer dater and Brad Pitt's hilariously daft fitness freak are the last two twits on earth who should be blackmailing anyone. This is a hi-tech version of that 80s classic RUTHLESS PEOPLE, where schlubs try their hand at duties best left to professionals. But in this the professionals are nutjobs as well, as George Clooney and John Malkovich play swaggering neurotics in various phases of self-destruction. It's not quite so fun to single out two big movie stars like Pitt and Clooney for being hilarious, but their roles give them the ability to show off their considerable comic gifts. Clooney's nervy, scatter-brained, romantic marshal plays ever scene with the type of confidence only a really stupid person can have, while Pitt indulges in a spazzed-out caricature that (surprisingly) never stops being funny. The score here is a little off, it's probably the most mean-natured of the films, and occasionally the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach gets a bit tedious. But I like the way they imitate the cinematography and stylistics of the genre. The two scenes with JK Simmons are inspired in their own weirdly underplayed way. BURN may not be the supreme work of these two supremely gifted filmmakers, but it definitely reminds us why they need to exist.
THE COEN BROTHERS AWARDS
Best Picture: FARGO
Best Actor: Jeff Bridges, THE BIG LEBOWSKI
Best Actress: Frances McDormand, FARGO
Best Supporting Actor: M. Emmett Walsh, BLOOD SIMPLE
Best Supporting Actress: Judy Davis, BARTON FINK
Most Rarely Talked About But Awesome Supporting Performance: Phillip Seymour Hoffman, THE BIG LEBOWSKI
Best Score: MILLER'S CROSSING
Best Soundtrack: THE BIG LEBOWSKI
Best Scene-Stealer: Glen from RAISING ARIZONA
Best Big Man Behind A Desk: Michael Lerner in BARTON FINK
Best Opening Credits: BLOOD SIMPLE (watch it again; it perfectly sets up the mood)
Best Beginning: The unusually long intro to RAISING ARIZONA
Best Ending: BLOOD SIMPLE
Most Underrated Coen Performance: Tim Robbins, THE HUDSUCKER PROXY
Most Powerful Scene: Bernie's "death scene" in MILLERS CROSSING
Funniest Scene: "The Whites" (If you don't know what I'm talking about, we don't have much to talk about).
I'm sure there are more. If there's another filmmaker you'd like me to put under the microscope, post it in the comments.
| By Andytown | 10:04 PM
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Comments
Hey, Andy. So it's october and that time of year for me to catch up on the scary movies. Can you give me a quick top 10 list of your favorites?
Posted by: Andrew Irvine at October 20, 2008 8:42 PM