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In filming, the brothers consciously aimed for a documentary style, which partly alleviated critics' concerns with the "distance" issue — if it was a true story, it was supposed to be told from on high, wasn't it? The rest was taken care of when Roger Deakins convinced the pair to let him shoot with longer lenses and ease off on the wide-angles.
And though the brothers made great visual hay with the snowy backdrops, and their beloved "long road" shots, sets were purposely muted and charmless. This was the brothers at their least technically braggadocious and their least allusive, and the critics and the Academy had finally found a Coens movie they could get their arms around.
Which is why "Fargo" and "Blood Simple" — "as scarifyingly assured a debut as any since Orson Welles," raved the New York Times in 1984 — are by far the two critical favorites in the Coen brothers' canon:
You only have to see them once.
Single viewing is an occupational hazard for reviewers, to be sure; it also replicates the average moviegoer's experience, and that's proper journalism. And it's equally sure that most movies don't bear a second look. But to any critic, professional or otherwise (and the Coens certainly do flush out the critics) who has departed a Coen brothers movie feeling unsatisfied, unimpressed or just plain annoyed — watch it again. Background static turns clear. Stunning, rhapsodic set pieces — every Coens movie has at least one, usually involving killing — stand out. Gratuitously referential bits (I'm thinking of the musical numbers) acquire an individual redemption, if not actual germaneness. And the little things start to shine.
The Big Sleeper
Take "The Big Lebowski." It's as true a story as "Fargo," with The Dude (Jeff Bridges) and Walter (John Goodman) lifted directly from people the Coens knew in L.A. It's not weighted down with any overt allusiveness, besides its Chandlerian structure. And it's a kidnapping tale, sort of.
Watch it once, and it baffles a bit. It's amusing enough, with John Goodman always yelling at Steve Buscemi and Jeff Bridges always confounded by John Goodman, and the Coens have good fun with bowling as the sport of couch potatoes. The presence of Sam Elliott as the cowboy narrator of a Gulf War period comedy is quirky enough — Elliott, reportedly, kept asking the Coens why they'd cast him — and the music is great as ever. You walk out of it shaking your head at the Busby Berkeley dream sequences, and smiling at John Goodman. There's nothing the Coens find funnier than big fat guys yelling, and as the converted-Jew Vietnam vet Walter Sobchak, Goodman delivered the meatiest, most hilarious Actual Person imitation seen on the screen in quite some time. In a year where the Oscar-snub stories centered around Bill Murray for Best Supporting Actor in "Rushmore," Goodman's lack of even a nomination was perhaps the height of the Academy's Coen ignorance.
Yet somehow, you walk out and your expectations have bruised a bit. The movie you just saw was a comedy, and it was funny, and yet you're not really laughed out. The Dude was always smoking dope, and he was funny, and it turned out the other Lebowski faked the whole thing, and that was fine. And the "Hotel California" set piece with John Turturro as Jesus Quintana is pure joy. But somehow the movie was like an overheard conversation with a lot of inside jokes, and you felt left out. And you don't pay nine bucks to feel left out.
Watch it again.
The dialogue between Dude, Walter and Donny starts to bubble up to the surface, overlapping in clean-cut chunks like Welles' in "Touch of Evil." The method dope-trip structure of the film, which crests with the first failed ransom drop and unravels leisurely from there, becomes apparent. The little comic touches — Phillip Seymour Hoffman's flaring nostrils, the porn name "Karl Hungus," Goodman's jowly apoplexy — start to gleam.
Watch it again.
Listen to Goodman say, "You want a toe? I can get you a toe by three-thirty — with nail polish." Find the bits of pathos in Goodman's eulogy at the end. Listen to the thug say, as he pees on the Dude's rug, "Ever thus to deadbeats, Lebowski."
Watch it again.
The protagonist Dude's character — "not a hero, 'cause what's a hero?" as Elliot's narrator intones — deepens. He is the little guy fighting for justice after being dragged into the kidnapping plot by a name confusion. Or is he admirable, struggling to keep his peculiar integrity while all around him are losing theirs? Does he even think about things like that? Possibly. He's the tumbling tumbleweed, picking up phrases and insights from other characters — "this aggression will not stand, man," borrowed from the first President Bush on TV at the Ralph's — which he continually passes off as his own.
Very Coen, that. The brothers have spent their filmmaking careers acquiring bits of fluff from street corners, paperback novels and other American masterpieces, and rolling them up into a cliché-twisting amalgam of ordinary crap that, shot from the proper angles and delivered with the clean, crisp, actorly performances they nearly always get from their cast, makes for some of the sharpest, brightest, most durable set-piece cinema on the American landscape.
O brother
"O Brother, Where Art Thou?" is another such bird's nest. It gets its title from Preston Sturges' "Sullivan's Travels" (1941), in which a big-time comedic movie director (Joel McRae) takes to the American road, determined to make "the greatest tragedy ever made" — a serious, socially redeeming film about the common man called "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" He has various misadventures, meets Veronica Lake, becomes imprisoned on a chain gang, and finally decides that comedies are all the common man has to console himself in "this cockeyed caravan" called life.
The central joke in the Coens' "O Brother" — besides the "Odyssey" reference — may well be that it's the comedy Sullivan might have made when he got back. It's a rambling, zany screwball tale of three convicts, played by Clooney, John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson, who escape a Depression-era Mississippi chain gang in search of a buried "fortune," which it turns out Clooney has concocted to get his fellow convicts to help him stop his wife (Holly Hunter) from marrying another "suitor." Wacky misadventures ensue.
Quietly, the movie has become the brothers' biggest hit without garnering any real acclaim. Critically, the movie has been lightly regarded, perhaps properly so (it's a lightweight movie). The high-brows tip their caps to the allusions and credit Clooney for his game, if slightly ragged, performance. Elsewhere, the movie has been panned; Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman called it the worst of the year.
He must have only seen it once. At first glance, the movie does seem to be a bit of a self-conscious vanity project. It's dominated by its bluegrass/country soundtrack, first of all, which offends the cineasts, and just the idea of releasing a Depression-era chain gang comedy in 2001 (or any other year) must have struck more than a few folks as precious. And all those layers — Clooney as Gable as McRae as Preston Sturges! The head swims, and one feels the annoyance of being led endlessly through the twists and turns of a very small joke.
Watch it again.
The perfect performance — there is one of those, too, in every Coen brothers movie, usually a supporting role — of Tim Blake Nelson as the rusticated naïf Delmar. The comic moments of philosophizing among the unwashed. ("Mrs. Hogwallop up and R-U-N-N-O-F-T," Wash Hogwallop announces, spelling in front of his young son. "She must have been looking for answers," Clooney's know-it-all opines. "Possibly," Wash responds knowingly.) The dialogue, as ever crisp, allusive and self-referential, folding back in on itself in a writerly way (if a bit broadly at times). The cinematography, typically stunning (the underwater-dog shot is one of the film's crowning moments). And the redemptions, a menu of them, from God's to the law's to the wife's (which of course is the most elusive, as in any good human comedy), presented in layers like a Russian doll.