The Ballad of Joel and Ethan Coen

 

The indefatigable film historian Joseph McBride has now tackled the work of my favorite filmmaking duo, Joel and Ethan Coen. Having written his share of huge door-stop biographies (Frank Capra, John Ford, Billy Wilder, et al), Joe is now devoting  himself to critical assessments of some of Hollywood’s then-and-now greats. The new book is a slim volume called The Whole Durn Human Comedy: Life According to the Coen Brothers.

 I turned back to McBride’s book recently after having watched one of several films that the Coens wrote but did not direct. A British TV movie called Gambit (2012), dealing with high-stakes shenanigans in the London art world, seems to contain the brothers’ trademark blend of suspense and black humor. Starring a stellar  cast from both sides of the pond—Colin Firth, Alan Rickman, Stanley Tucci, Cameron Diaz—it promised to be an enticing romp, along the lines of their Intolerable Cruelty. Unfortunately, without Joel and Ethan’s deft directorial touch, the film seems less buoyant than leaden. The plot (as overseen by director Michael Hoffman) twists and turns, but to little avail. McBride is right when he generalizes that “Coen scripts directed by others tend to go disastrously awry.”

 When the Coens are in charge of their own turf, though, odd and wonderful things happen: like Fargo, and Blood Simple, and Barton Fink, and Inside Llewyn Davis and O Brother, Where Art Thou? (The last of these is a clear nod to a key influence on the Coens, Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels, which argues the importance of comedy in chronicling the often-dark human condition.) But there are many—both moviegoers and critics—who consider Joel and Ethan taciturn and cynical, and it is they whom McBride is addressing in this book. He begins each chapter with a common complaint about the brothers’ films, then artfully proceeds to debunk it. Are they, for instance, the heartless cynics whom their detractors decry? Are they too fond of caricature, especially ethnic caricature, as seen in the satiric portrayals of Jewish Midwesterners in A Serious Man? Discussing that film as well as The Big Lebowski and the Southern caricatures that abound in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, McBride labels the Coens “equal-opportunity mockers.” Are they lacking in empathy for their characters? Or overly fond of a bleak nihilism that reveals their contempt for any sort of belief system? McBride’s in-depth discussions of Fargo and No Country for Old Men help disprove these claims.

 McBride ends his book with an unexpected chapter called “’Magic*Mirth*Mystery” in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.” I enjoyed the 2018 film, an anthology-style collection of 6 Western tales,  but never stopped to think of it as a compendium of the brothers’ previous concerns. But McBride insists that “like such films as John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Carl Dreyer’s Gertrud, and Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind, Buster Scruggs is a distillation of the Coens’ work, an eccentric, allegorical, and often nakedly emotional presentation of the filmmakers’ deepest thoughts and feelings.”

 The film opens with a segment in which the Coens exercise their fondness for parody and meta filmmaking. Here is a lampoon of the singing-cowboy trope, calling in every cliché of classic Westerns, including the gunfight in the main street of a sad prairie town. But as the film moves forward, it enters much darker territory, focusing on human cruelty and violent death. Its final chapter, which  hints at the Afterlife, circles back mordantly to the film’s opening, with its mock-elegiac Western ballad, “When a Cowboy Trades His Spurs for Wings.” Brilliantly macabre fun!

 

 

There Simply Will Be Blood: The Coens’ “Blood Simple”

Last night I partied hearty with two of filmdom’s most talented bros: Joel and Ethan Coen. Fran McDormand was there too, along with a gaggle of Coen pals, on the main street of the quaint semi-rural village where they make their home. My goal was to conduct an interview about filmmaking, but my questions were swept away as we ate, drank, and caroused, culminating in a exuberant hora.

 Then I woke up.  (Well, it was fun while it lasted.)

 The cause of this dream, I am sure, was my late-night viewing of the Coens’ very first feature, Blood Simple. This twisty neo-noir from 1984 marked a number of other firsts for the brothers. It was shot by Barry Sonnenfeld, then a recent film-school graduate but now an acclaimed director of such films as Get Shorty. The score was the Coens’ first of many collaborations with the talented Carter Burwell. It was the first film editor credit for Roderick Jaynes, the Dickensian film editor who is the pseudonym for the busy Coens when they’re in editing mode. It was the first-ever professional screen credit for McDormand, who has been married to Joel Coen since the year the film was made.

 The Coens are known for bloody tales laced with black humor. And they love to explore out-of-the-way geographical locales where violence is always on the brink of erupting. That’s what brought them to suburban Texas for a story about a crass bar owner (Dan Hedaya) his restless wife (McDormand), a no-better-than-he-should-be employee (John Getz), and a private detective who’s up to no good (played by the always memorable M. Emmet Walsh). As is often true in the Coen universe, none of them is exactly made of heroic material. But their various forms of greed and lust intertwine in ways that are sometimes gruesome, sometimes darkly funny, as when a corpse doesn’t seem to want to stay dead.

 The video release of Blood Simple I watched had an extra treat for film buffs: a featurette in which Sonnenfeld and the two Coens look back at this early work and explain in detail what they could and should have done differently. Blood Simple was made on the slimmest of budgets, after the brothers created an enticing trailer as a way to drum up funding, and some of their economizing proves amusing to discuss. In an early dialogue scene, Getz and McDormand are seen seated in a moving car as the rain pours down. As we learn, the “rain” is actually a crew member on the roof, manning a water-squirting contraption, and the car in question is three highly different vehicles, each of which has certain qualities (like seats close together) that the scene requires. Much later, there’s a violent clash between McDormand and her screen husband on a suburban lawn. In the featurette, Joel and Ethan  explicitly point out which parts of the cobbled-together scene were shot on the Texas location, and which parts were pickup shots staged in various east coast locales.

 That’s the nature of filmmaking on a low budget, but the brothers are also frank about the ways in which their newness to the filming process ended up working against the aesthetic results. They complain now about their early fondness for lurid lighting effects (like “congo blue” filters) and about their apparent inability to keep some of the actors in focus. They point out with chagrin that the light source on their characters’ faces keeps changing directions, and admit to other lazy choices. They can afford to be honest, because they’re now among the most honored filmmakers of their generation.