Primer is The A.V. Club's ongoing series of beginners' guides to pop culture's most notable subjects: filmmakers, music styles, literary genres, and whatever else interests us—and hopefully you.
Today: Who are the Coen Brothers? Arguably, they're the most controlled and technically proficient filmmakers of their time—peerless writers of stylized dialogue, efficient in pacing, ingenious in plotting, and brilliant in harmonizing every aspect of the craft (music, cinematography, editing, performances, et al.) to best service the whole. But here's the funny thing about the Coens: Their detractors are likely to agree with nearly every scrap of hyperbole in that last sentence and still hate them anyway. They'd be wrong-headed to do so, but there's a chilliness that goes along with the Coens' obsessive pursuit of perfection, even as all 12 of their features to date bristle with intelligence, snap, and the generosity of great entertainers. Many filmmakers could be called chroniclers of the human condition, but the Coens are even further removed from the rest of us—they're anthropologists and historians, looking at humanity from the other end of the microscope.
Coen Brothers 101
Usually, filmmakers need a couple of ragged efforts under their belt before they really come into their own, but the Coens' 1985 debut feature Blood Simple found them in command right from the start. It also firmly established their abiding affection for Old Hollywood, which would split off frequently into noir-inflected crime dramas and zany screwball comedies. Here, their love of film noir and the detective fiction of writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler figures into a potent contemporary tale of infidelity and murder. Right off the bat, the Coens indulge in the sort of show-offy cleverness that often rankles their critics, having the opening credits appear and disappear with the swoosh of windshield wiper blades. But stylistic flourishes like that do nothing to weaken the film's insistent pull; it's more deliberate than future Coen films—so deliberate, in fact, that the brothers tightened some scenes and cut out others in the DVD director's cut—but its moody, evocative tone was unlike anything in the barren landscape of independent cinema in the mid-'80s.
Blood Simple also set the table for many Coen movies to come: Though the amount may vary—it's $10,000 here, $80,000 in Fargo, and $2 million in No Country For Old Men—money makes the world go 'round in the Coens' eyes, with greed driving people to short-sighted decisions and appalling acts of violence. And once they've stepped over that line, the blood never washes away, which is a point made literal in Blood Simple's most memorable scene, when a pool creeps across a hardwood floor, resisting all efforts to absorb it and wipe the slate clean. The film also anticipated the genre pastiches that would come into fashion a decade later when Quentin Tarantino reconfigured trash for the arthouse set, proving that cinema's past could be effectively folded into its future.
The years haven't been quite as kind to Raising Arizona, the Coens' follow-up film, but it showed their willingness to go down zanier tributaries, and presaged the cartoonier elements of films like O Brother Where Art Thou?, The Hudsucker Proxy, The Ladykillers, and Intolerable Cruelty. The humor is surprisingly lowbrow and slapstick-y, which only serves to underline the superiority of the smart alecks behind the camera. Yet it's also undeniably hilarious, choked with lines and phrases ("My FI-antz left me," "way-homer," "Son, you've got a panty on your head") that are regurgitated in everyday life nearly as often as those in The Simpsons… or at least Fletch. In the figure of a bounty hunter in search of an abducted baby, it's also an early showcase of the surrealism that would flower in a more sophisticated way in later Coen films like Barton Fink and The Big Lebowski.
More than anything, though, Raising Arizona is a marvel of narrative energy, especially coming off the statelier Blood Simple. Having the credits arrive after the first reel is over—a good 20 minutes into the film—may seem as show-offy as the wiper blades in Blood Simple, but it was really the first pause in the action. Through voiceover, flashbacks, and wild digressions, the setup of the film is so absurdly long-winded and overstuffed that the credits are a payoff in themselves, a moment where the audience can catch its breath and giggle over how much movie has been squeezed into so small a timeframe.
Those who grew up with the Coen Brothers would naturally move on to Miller's Crossing next, but an entire generation of younger Coen fans met them first with 1998's The Big Lebowski, a shaggy-dog comedy that overcame a tepid critical and box-office reception to achieve major cult status. Hard to say why it failed out of the gate: Perhaps the same stoners who caught up with Dazed And Confused belatedly couldn't drag themselves off the couch or maybe the film's shambling, Chandler-inspired narrative takes more than one viewing to fully appreciate. Whatever the case, it's now rightly considered an oddball classic, held together by Jeff Bridges' iconic performance as "The Dude," a '60s burnout trying desperately to laze his way through life in early '90s Los Angeles, only to be yanked repeatedly out of his complacency. His exchanges with John Goodman's Walter Sobchak—the boorish 'Nam vet who does much of the yanking—are pricelessly aggravated, and the film's looseness allows for one unexpected and delightful detour after another. In fact, it's like a series of crazy detours that lead, improbably, to the right destination.
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