The pressures are very visible and very legitimate
Vibe checking the Coen brothers’ career at the 10-year mark
Previously on the Coen Brothers: series intro, Buster Scruggs, Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, and Hudsucker Proxy
ANNOUNCEMENT: This Tuesday, June 10, I am presenting Fargo at CCA for our monthly Closer Looks series. I’ll be giving a short talk introducing the film, and maybe Q&A after? If you are a reader in Santa Fe NM, please come out!! Info and tickets here.
It’s a danger of a retrospective series like this to treat everything as preordained. Of course the Coens were going to make it big in Hollywood. Of course they would be given more chances after a movie underperformed. Of course audiences would appreciate what they were going for. This danger extends to the way I write about these films. Even as I find some better than others, I’m writing appreciatively. I sit down to watch already granting them a certain grace because even the worst ones are part of a venerable body of work that has earned the right to careful and generous consideration.
Contemporary critics were under no such obligations of generosity. Neither were the studio executives holding the purse strings. When Blood Simple was released Joel was 30 years old and Ethan only 27. When they sat in meetings, hoping to secure serious funding while retaining complete creative control, the bigwigs weren’t operating from some aura of destiny surrounding the brothers. Fox easily could have dismissed Raising Arizona as too weird and that could have been the end of it for them. Pauline Kael was going to tell the world exactly what she thought of their movies.
I have not paid much attention to box office numbers or contemporary critical response to the Coens’ work up to this point, because it’s not really what I’m interested in. I’m interested in the movies themselves and the Coens’ development as artists. But those films and that artistic development are situated within a career in the industry whose health needs to be managed if one is going to continue being allowed to make movies. So today we’ll put a little precarity back into the mix by looking at the health of that career through their first five films and first ten years as filmmakers.
Joel went to film school at NYU. Ethan studied philosophy at Princeton.1 Joel found work as an assistant editor on The Evil Dead. The brothers became close with director Sam Raimi and all three lived together for a time. With the script for Blood Simple in hand, the brothers shot a dummy trailer to show to potential investors, which they and their collaborators always characterize as a bunch of dentists. One investor was the guy who invented the pump for Windex bottles, according to Barry Sonnenfeld. That dummy trailer is a first glimpse of Blood Simple’s centerpiece highway scene, with Evil Dead star Bruce Campbell in the Julian Marty role.
With $800,000 in hand (according to Joel in interviews in 1985), they shot it in eight weeks in 1982 and spent a year editing and assembling it before its release in 1984. It won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1985. The response from critics was positive, mostly. Roger Ebert gave it a rave:
It tells a story in which every individual detail seems to make sense, and every individual choice seems logical, but the choices and details form a bewildering labyrinth in which there are times when even the murderers themselves don’t know who they are… the movie does something interesting with its timing, too. It begins to feel inexorable, characters think they know what has happened; they turn out to be wrong; they pay the consequences, and it all happens while the movie is marching from scene to scene like an implacable professor of logic, demonstrating one fatal error after another.
Pauline Kael (my cinema queen and critical lodestar), on the other hand, tore it to shreds. Her review is fascinating because with just this first film she correctly identifies so many aspects of the Coens’ signature style. It’s just that she thinks all these things are bad rather than precisely what make their films unique and entertaining. Check it out:
Blood Simple has no sense of what we normally think of as “reality,” and it has no connections with “experience.” It’s not a great exercise in style, either. It derives from pop sources—from movies such as Diabolique and grubby B-pictures and hardboiled steamy fiction such as that of James M. Cain. It’s so derivative that it isn’t a thriller—it’s a crude, ghoulish comedy on thriller themes…
The one real novelty in the conception is that the audience has a God’s-eye view of who is doing what to whom, while the characters have a blinkered view and, misinterpreting what they see, sometimes take totally inexpedient action. Blood Simple gets almost all its limited charge from sticking to this device, which gives the movie the pattern of farce—it works best when someone misinterprets who the enemy is but has the right response anyway…
Coen’s style is deadpan and klutzy, and he uses the klutziness as his trump card. It’s how he gets his laughs. The audience responds (as it did at Halloween) to the crudeness of the hyperbole, and enjoys not having to take things seriously. The cinematographer, Barry Sonnenfeld, works in ghouls’ colors—thick, dirty greens, magentas, and sulfurous yellows. The film looks grimy and lurid; it seems to take its visual cues from the neon signs in the bar and a string of fish putrefying in Marty’s office. What’s at work here is a visually sophisticated form of gross-out humor.
Amazing, a live look at Kael discovering the idea of black comedy. That middle section blows my mind—it is one of the most enduring facets of the Coen brothers’ films that characters act as if they had full understanding even when they have very little. I mentioned it in my discussion of certainty in the Buster Scruggs piece that led off this series—that she clocks it so clearly after just one film is truly incredible to me. And the idea of klutziness! I disagree slightly, in that I think Joel and Ethan’s filmmaking is very elegant itself, but she is right that they are attracted to botched attempts and thwarted schemes and the klutzy disconnect between how we imagine things will play out and how they actually do.
Blood Simple made $2.7 million at the box office—not much by conventional standards, but pretty great for a film privately financed and made entirely outside the studio system. It was enough to pay out their backers handsomely and suggest to the powers that be that with the right support and distribution these guys could be moneymakers.
The Coens next wrote a screenplay called The XYZ Murders for Raimi to direct. The film was taken out of his hands and mangled by studio meddling. It was eventually released as Crimewave. I keep meaning to watch it. It was a learning experience for the brothers and made them aware of what could go wrong working with a major studio. “We’ve always let Sam make those mistakes for us,” Joel told David Edelstein on the set of Raising Arizona. “‘Sam,’ we tell him, ‘you go do a movie at a studio and tell us what happens.’”
Raising Arizona was produced by Circle Films (the distributor of Blood Simple) for $5 million and distributed by 20th Century Fox. After making the point repeatedly and emphatically in interviews for Blood Simple that they preferred to remain independent, this was a bit of an about-face. Speaking to Michel Ciment and Hubert Niogret at Positif, Joel explained, “There was a path of least resistance. We could’ve sought the money elsewhere, perhaps from a studio. Because of Blood Simple we knew Circle Films. We trusted them, it was natural to work with them. There was no ideology behind those choices. As long as we could maintain the type of control we want, we could accept the financing of a studio.”
The critical reception to the film was somewhat mixed. This time it was Kael who was positive (scroll down), writing that the brothers
have a knack for hick-suburban dialogue. The characters speak a stilted slang to the accompaniment of banjos and, sometimes, a yodeller. The film has a galumphing tempo; storyboarded like a comic strip, it races from one sight gag to the next, from punch lines to double whammies… Raising Arizona should probably be a little shorter, and a few scenes (such as Hi’s hanging around the quints’ nursery trying to decide on the pick of the litter) aren’t precise enough. Others (such as the jailbreak, with the brothers emerging from their tunnel during a rainstorm, as if coming to life out of primeval ooze) are of a likably silly too-muchness. The Coens are going with their strengths. They’re making a contraption, and they’re good at it because they know how to make the camera behave mechanically, which is just right here—it mirrors the mechanics of farce. Raising Arizona is no big deal, but it has a rambunctious charm. The sunsets look marvellously ultra-vivid; the paint doesn’t seem to be dry—it’s like opening day at a miniature-golf course.
I need to single out that line that it’s “no big deal, but it has a rambunctious charm.” This is another line that will be used to dismiss the Coens for years that she hits on early. It’s just a trifle, critics will say. It’s sure a lot of fun, I had a hell of a good time watching it, but so what? I think that the sheer enjoyability of the Coens’ work has often worked against their critical reputation.
Ebert, on the other hand, hated it. In lieu of a block quote, here’s the segment from Siskel & Ebert. I find their insistence that the Coens are mocking their characters—a criticism that will plague them forever—so baffling.
Raising Arizona is the movie that first jumps to mind for most people when I mention this series. There is still so much goodwill for it. It was a hit with audiences at the time. On a $5 million budget it made $22 million domestic and $6 million international, in 1987 dollars remember. The financial success of Raising Arizona would keep the brothers’ careers alive through the lean years to come.
Next came Miller’s Crossing. Ebert gave it three stars out of four, writing, “The pleasures of the film are largely technical. It is likely to be most appreciated by movie lovers who will enjoy its resonance with films of the past. What it doesn’t have is a narrative magnet to pull us through — a story line that makes us really care what happens, aside from the elegant but mechanical manipulations of the plot.” I basically agree with this assessment. Miller’s Crossing is impressive but so, so cold. It’s a hard one to love.
I couldn’t find a full Kael review but digging in the archives yielded a front-of-book capsule review written by the other New Yorker movie critic at the time, Terrence Rafferty. He called it “an academic exercise, a pastiche of the intricately plotted, morally ambiguous crime fiction of Dashiell Hammett…The Coens have certainly done their homework: their movie is a brilliant reading of Hammett. But that’s all it is. The picture seems to have no life of its own… This is not so much a gangster movie as an extended, elaborate allusion to one.” I can’t imagine how frustrating this line of criticism must have been—film critics supposedly live for references to old movies but when they’re finally confronted by a movie with genuine love for defunct genres and an interest in breathing new life into the tropes they reject it as nothing but homage.
Miller’s Crossing was made for $11 million according to Joel and grossed only $5 million. Asked about its commercial failure, Ethan said, “It’s always difficult to speculate. Maybe the story is too complicated to follow.” Added Joel, “After all, the plot of The Big Sleep was pretty hard to understand, too! It’s difficult to analyze why it failed, but it was still a disappointment to us.”
We can start to see a change in the Coens’ attitudes around this point. Where before they were defiant hardliners about their independence and willingness to go it alone if the studios didn’t want to play ball, after Miller’s Crossing they start to acknowledge how fortunate they have been. “We’ve been remarkably lucky in that we’ve been free to make the movies we’ve wanted to make the way we’ve wanted to make them,” Joel told Jim Emerson during press for Barton Fink. “They’ve all been made for a price. They’ve all been low-budget by Hollywood standards. But that’s part of why we’ve been able to do it that way—or mostly why.”
Speaking of Barton Fink, it’s up next. Ebert gave it 3.5 stars in a review that’s weirdly withholding in its praise, calling it only “an assured piece of comic filmmaking.” He does however identify another favorite image/character of the Coens: the big man behind the desk. Here it’s Lipnick the studio boss but this type is all over their oeuvre—the titular Big Lebowski, JK Simmons in Burn After Reading, F. Murray Abraham sneering that he “doesn’t see a lot of money” in Llewyn’s music. Part of the fascination of Hail, Caesar! is that they finally make this figure the main character.
In a review titled “Showoffs” from the September 9, 1991 issue of the New Yorker, Rafferty ripped into Barton Fink and the Coens. He wrote
Barton Fink is just a fancy metaphysical splatter movie, and it’s unsatisfying in every way. There’s nothing at stake in the filmmakers’ systematic dismantling of their hero and he stands for—except, perhaps, their desire to demonstrate their superiority to the ethics and aesthetics of an earlier time… the movie makes its argument, proceeds from its hypothesis to its conclusion, with the polished, haughty manner of a professor delivering a lecture that he’s been trotting out for years. In effect, the Coens, whose interests are purely academic, take it upon themselves to convict and sentence their protagonist for the crime of isolation from the real world. Or perhaps Barton Fink deserves his comeuppance solely on the basis of taste: it’s gauche to proclaim belief, in anything.
Ah yes, the cynicism line. Another albatross the brothers will struggle to get off from around their necks for years. Here is not the space to mount a full defense but I’ll just say that the Coens often aspire to bleakness and I don’t think bleakness can emerge from cynicism—things have to matter in the first place for grimness to mean anything.2
Here’s what Pauline Kael had to say about Miller’s Crossing and Barton Fink in an interview in 1992: “I was quite shocked at Miller's Crossing and even more shocked by Barton Fink. It seems to me a misconception at almost every level. It’s a terrible picture. The Coen brothers’ sense of style is so limiting too. Very strange, arrogant conception of the past. An appalling movie.”
On a budget of $9 million, Barton Fink would earn only $6.2 million. Two losers in a row.
On to Hudsucker Proxy. It was somewhat inexplicably financed by mega-producer Joel Silver, whose company Silver Pictures was a meathead action blockbuster factory, producing, among others, Die Hard, Predator, Lethal Weapon, and Road House. Silver gave Joel and Ethan $25 million to make Hudsucker, their biggest budget by a long shot.
Silver has a telling quote in Tad Friend’s 1994 Vogue article about the movie. He says, “I don’t think [Fink] made $5 million, and it cost $9 million to make. They’ve had a reputation for being weird, off-center, inaccessible. They were having trouble getting the money for this $25 million script—people were stymied by the fact that Joel and Ethan’s name was on it.” After two films that failed to break even, the moneymen were getting skittish. Silver put the stakes bluntly: “If they intend to continue making mainstream, higher-budget films, this film is going to have to deliver asses on seats.”
Hudsucker received mixed reviews from critics—here’s Ebert’s annoying inside-you-are-two-wolves assessment. Off that $25 million budget, the film grossed less than $3 million in North America, their biggest bomb yet.
The story of the Coens’ first decade is a relentless drive to do more. With each film they pushed themselves for more visual inventiveness, more complex dialogue delivered more quickly. Why not a dream sequence three-quarters of the way through Hudsucker? But this approach had proven to be a dead end with audiences. The public ws not buying what they’re selling. This is where we leave them for now.
How will they adjust? How will they get their careers back on track and re-assure themselves of their funding and their coveted creative control?
Next time: Fargo
Getting a copy of Ethan’s dissertation on Wittgenstein is long-term goal for this series.
We might read the nihilists in Big Lebowski as a conscious response to this line of attack.