Introducing: The Coen Brothers Canon
A New Series
When I was eleven or twelve—maybe younger—my father decided it was time for me to learn about film. A modest movie buff, he briefly worked in the industry as a young man, notably as crew on The Deer Hunter. At that point my movie knowledge amounted to Star Wars and The Lion King and little else. Of the incomplete list I can call to mind, I remember he showed me Goodfellas, The Jerk, Used Cars, Magnolia, The Godfather (pausing to make sure I was following), The Matrix (he fast-forwarded through the rave scene at the beginning of Reloaded lol), and Traffic, along with a lot of other Soderbergh, if memory serves. This was the aughts and we went to the theater constantly over my teen years, willing to watch just about anything, from Inglourious Basterds to throwaway Harrison Ford thrillers (Firewall, anyone?).12
Above all the others though, when my dad wanted to impress on me the sheer possibilities of what film could do and be, he showed me the Coen Brothers. When he wanted to prove a movie could be dramatic and hilarious at the same time, bloody and tender, grounded and psychedelic, he showed me the work of Joel and Ethan Coen, two Jewish boys from Minneapolis.
There are so many scenes or single images forever seared into my memory from these early viewings. In the same way I can’t remember a time before I experienced the “Luke I am your father” twist in Empire Strikes Back, there doesn’t feel like there was a time before I had seen that shot in Fargo when Steve Buscemi drives out of the parking garage covered in blood and snarls at the attendant to open the gate. I’d seen Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? long before I had heard the name Odysseus. The hallucinatory flashes to the biker wreathed in flames in Raising Arizona might have been the first time a movie made me sit up a little straighter as it challenged me back, saying, “You thought you knew what I was, but I’m something more, something far stranger than you bargained for.”
I’ve always considered The Big Lebowski mine in some special way. The internet has drained many cult classics of their cult status, and Lebowski is the poster-child for this cheapening. For years it was every guy’s ready-at-hand prop for proving their taste was sophisticated but fun and unconventional. Every one of its great lines has been quoted to death. But I’m one of the real ones. My dad had it on DVD early and must have shown it to me in about 2003, when I was twelve, because I so clearly remember him lamenting that it had come out “five years ago” and flopped, which he couldn’t fathom. Lebowski had not yet been rehabilitated; it was still an unsung masterpiece—a secret shared only among those who knew.
All that is to say, the Coen Brothers hold a very special place in my heart. As my knowledge of film history has expanded and my taste evolved, my appreciation of them has never wavered but only deepened as their influences and fascination with defunct genres like noir and screwball comedy has become more apparent.
Maybe this will sound bizarre to say about a pair that have won Academy Awards for Best Picture, Director, and Screenplay, but I consider the Coens to be the most underrated, underappreciated master filmmakers working today. Since they took home their trophies for No Country for Old Men they’ve continued putting out great film after great film to positive but rather dismissive praise. They have done such good work so consistently for so long that audiences and critics alike take them for granted.
No recent film of theirs illustrates this better than Hail, Caesar! from 2016. Back then I was reading a lot of movie reviews and film criticism; a consistent drumbeat from critics was a line that went “They don’t make smart, fun movies for adults anymore.” This is true. There was that movie Focus in 2015, starring Will Smith and Margot Robbie, that critics fell over themselves to praise on these grounds—maybe it’s fine, I don’t know, you would have to tie me down to get me to watch a Will Smith rom-com at this point. And yet, when Hail, Caesar! came out: crickets. I mean, it got positive reviews but perfunctory ones. I couldn’t believe it. A movie about old Hollywood through which the Coens are reflecting on faith, god, and filmmaking? Where’s the standing ovation?
Hail, Caesar! is another miracle screenplay in the Coens’ long line of them, one in which every line of dialogue is advancing one of the film’s themes without ever stating them outright. The film works by juxtaposition and asks the audience to draw the comparisons themselves. One small example: throughout the film, we see three different cases of the act of movie-watching. The first is Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), the studio fixer; he sits alone in a private viewing room to watch a rough cut of Hail, Caesar: A Tale of the Christ, intent on spotting problems, calculating costs, and assessing how to keep the production on schedule; he’s a supervisor overlooking a production line. The second audience is at the premiere for Lazy Old Moon, Hobie Doyle’s (Alden Ehrenreich) cowboy picture. It’s a broad comedy and the crowd brays like hogs at each pratfall. I wrote in my notes, “Do the Coens hate their audience?” The final act of watching is on the set of Hail, Caesar at the end of the film. Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), having been retrieved from his kidnapping, delivers the capping speech of the film-within-the-film, which involves his Roman centurion character recognizing the divinity of Jesus and proclaiming his faith. As Whitlock’s oratory rises, the Coens begin cutting around the set to the faces of the director, screenwriter, and other crew, all becoming misty-eyed by Whitlock/Clooney’s rapturous delivery. It’s a tiny moment of montage that says clearly, “This is what it’s about, this is why we do this. The true audience is on-set, in the moment. Everything else is secondary.”
And also, how could I not love a movie that features Herbert Marcuse lecturing a dim-bulb actor about the essence of the historical dialectic?
For ages now I’ve been kicking around an idea for an article along the lines of “It’s time to appreciate the Coen Brothers’ last decade,” which would have made the case for their work from 2009’s A Serious Man through 2018’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. But as I’ve learned more about the proper way to go about newslettering (and uhh maybe inspired by a similar series on Sofia Coppola—sorry Barbara please don’t be mad!) I now plan to make this a full series.
It’s a great time to look back on the remarkable career they have had. Their first film, Blood Simple, turns 40 next year. It’s been five years since they made a film together—Joel directed his Tragedy of Macbeth alone and Ethan’s first solo directing credit, Drive Away Dolls, comes out in February. If they don’t work together again, it will be the end of an era, one of the longest-lasting and most fruitful partnerships in film history. I’ll say it again, the Coen Brothers’ filmography represents one of the richest sources of American filmmaking over the past four decades and is criminally undervalued and under-examined.
Despite my love of their work, there are terrible gaps in my knowledge. Can you believe I’ve never seen Barton Fink? People say The Man Who Wasn’t There is the skeleton key to their whole corpus. I’ll be watching and rewatching their movies to write standalone critical essays about each. We’ll cover some of the Coens’ most important collaborators, like cinematographer Roger Deakins and long-time players like Frances McDormand and John Goodman. And lots else—I can’t give it all away here! This will be a long-running series. I am so excited to dive into all of it and I hope you will be too.
Up first: Beginning at the end: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
There are only two movies I can remember wanting to see that my dad refused to take me to: League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and The Life Aquatic. In retrospect, good call on the first but what the hell on the second.
I also have a great memory of making him take me to see The Two Towers, which he was decidedly not excited about. He fell in love with the Ents and walked out of the theater singing their praises and how cool it was when they released the river and flooded Isengard. He also thought the Theoden de-aging shot was the coolest effect he’d ever seen.