Demerits:
The Coens have yet to make a bad movie, but they're at their least assured on those periodic occasions when they try to go Hollywood and make a film, "you know, for kids." 1994's The Hudsucker Proxy includes some of their finest touches—the brilliant hula-hoop montage, the note-perfect mimicry of '30s screwball dialogue, the heightened portrait of corporate-world drudgery and irrationality—but there's a hollowness to the whole enterprise that reverberates like a drum in the final third. Making that crucial shift from stylized pastiche to resonant romantic comedy isn't easy to do, so when Tim Robbins' naïve hick and Jennifer Jason Leigh's fast-talking sophisticate come together, the Coens can't get over the mechanized heartlessness that makes the rest of film harmonious. It's a big, splashy production—with Joel Silver as producer, it doesn't get any bigger—but one that doesn't rise above clever exercise.
The Coens stumbled further with the back-to-back comedies Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers in 2003 and 2004, respectively, though both are brighter than their relatively dismal reputations would suggest. Intolerable Cruelty opens with by far the worst sequence in the Coens' career, a grating confrontation over marital infidelity that's all cartoonish noise with none of the wit usually associated with them. Things smooth out considerably later, thanks to the typically peppery dialogue and George Clooney's easy charm in the lead role, but the film is still hampered by Catherine Zeta-Jones' tone-deaf line-readings, which tramples some good zingers and sabotages her chemistry with Clooney. The Ladykillers is a little better, thanks largely to Tom Hanks' indelible performance as a malevolent Colonel Sanders who orchestrates a hapless robbery scheme and Irma P. Hall as the old woman who stands in his way. The major question dogging the film is "why," as in why remake a beloved British comedy without bringing something new to the table? Other than the Deep South setting and a rich gospel soundtrack, courtesy of O Brother mastermind T-Bone Burnett, the Coens never answer that question sufficiently.
The Essentials:
1. No Country For Old Men (2007): In Cormac McCarthy's novel, the Coens have found the perfect vessel for themes that have run through their work since Blood Simple: Greed, human fallibility, and the incomprehensible horror of a world overrun by violence. The dialogue pops with dark humor and sly Southern colloquialisms, the three lead performances are perfectly balanced to where there's no anxiousness to get back to one of them in particular, and the film has a depth of feeling not often associated with the Coens' work. It makes for a stark morality play, not to mention the most gripping thriller in recent memory.
2. The Big Lebowski (1998): No Coen film has greater rewatch value than this shaggy-dog comedy, which continues to yield endless rewards with its gloriously profane dialogue, its lovingly daffy tribute to the "City Of Angels," and a dense, wayward plot that miraculously coheres about 10 viewings in. And then there's Jeff Bridges as "The Dude," the laziest man in Los Angeles County ("which would place him high in the runnin' for laziest worldwide"), who wants desperately to return to his layabout diet of weed and White Russians, but the rug-pissers, the Nihilists, and his belligerent 'Nam-addled buddy Walter (John Goodman), among many others, won't leave him alone.
3. The Man Who Wasn't There (2001): As the title implies, the second-chair barber played by Billy Bob Thornton isn't someone who makes his presence felt, which may explain why this bone-deep noir remains the most overlooked and underrated film in the Coen catalogue. For the most part, Thornton yields the floor to men (James Gandolfini, Jon Polito, Tony Shalhoub) who are full of hot gas, while he recedes to the background, quietly harboring his own unspoken desires. Remarkably, this scarily disciplined film doesn't give up the ghost until its heartbreaking final line.
4. Fargo (1996): In retrospect, this snowbound crime drama seems like a warm-up for No Country For Old Men in much the same way Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha laid the groundwork for Ran. Here's the thing: Kagemusha is still a great movie—and more intimate in it way than its epic follow-up—and so is Fargo, which may lack the mythic pull of No Country, but makes up for it with two unforgettable lead characters, played by William H. Macy and Frances McDormand, who together express the Coens' vision of the world. Both come from common Minnesota stock, but one is petty and small, acting out on a cowardly instinct to take control of his life, and the other is the embodiment of simple decency, forging a private paradise with her husband out of fricassee and three-cent stamps.
5. Barton Fink (1991): The life of the mind isn't easy to depict outside of the printed page, but here the Coens go deeper and deeper into the headspace of a frustrated writer until his world collapses into surreal chaos. It's a strange movie, with an ending that's impossible to fathom from the way it opens, but until that point, the pleasures are endless, from the lavish accommodations at the Hotel Earle to Michael Lerner's hot-tempered studio boss ("I'm not one of those guys who thinks poetic has got to be fruity. We're together on that, right?") to John Goodman as the booming voice of the common man. The film is like nothing else in the Coen oeuvre—it's got "that Barton Fink feeling," in spades.
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