MY COEN KICK: PART ONE

Sometimes you get a cinematic itch.  

Sometimes it’s just a single movie, other’s it’s a Director.  It’s more the individual style or flavour a Director or Auteur brings to a movie.  And I for what ever reason or what ever Movie Podcast I was listening to that week, I got the Coen Brothers Itch.  So I started from the beginning. I am working my way through all eighteen movies, Blood Simple to The Ballard of Buster Scruggs.  Some of these movies I watching again,  they are old friends, some are new to me.  It’s going to be an Odyssey of quirky humour, classic characters, folksy music and a deep mythology that Joel and Ethan Coen keep returning to again and again.   

 

Blood Simple (1984)

When I watch The Coen’s debut, all I wanted to do is yell ‘I Quit’ to my unimpressed cat and stalk out of the room in pure frustrated envy.  Blood Simple is still one of my favourite Coen Joints, it’s lean mean, and sleazy; well to be fair the sleaze comes purely from M Emmet Walsh in a legendary slimy and grimy performance.  Blood Simple the oft told story of the Man (Dan Hedaya) who hires a Hitman (Walsh) to kill his wire (Frances McDormand) because of her infidelity with John Getz.  However, this is not how it plays out.  The twists are from the individual choices made in the moment depending on their motivations or mood at any given moment.  

M Emmet Walsh

The Coen’s take a very simple structure and really play around with it, and you get some really amazing sequences because of it.    Like a lot of first movies, Blood Simple is a calling card, a low budget crime drama to show what the Coen’s are capable of.  They got their friends together, composer Carter Burrwell, cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld, and Joel’s brilliant wife Frances McDormand to make a movie.  Blood Simple is now the template on how you make your first movie, well if you are cinematic geniuses.  Blood Simple is simple, yet brilliant. 

Raising Arizona (1987)

Directors sophomore efforts tend to be messier or less complete.  After all you have your whole life to make your first movie and much less to make your second.  In Raising Arizona, it really does feel that Joel, Ethan and Barry Sonnenfeld are really playing around with where they can put the camera, how they can block a certain scene, how many times can they use friend, Sam Raimi’s Deadite camera move.  For me Raising Arizona is an easy movie to love, it’s got this pulsing energy, once we have the opening genius short film, Turn to the Left! it never stops moving, the camera, the dialogue the characters.

Raising Arizona with all that chaotic energy, it never loses it’s sweetness.  Not something you can usually say about a kidnapping story.  But it’s about people who want to be a family, love is a cornerstone to growing up and becoming an adult.  A simplistic idea, but effective.  Every time someone lays eyes on little Nathan Jr they fall in love.  My favourite moments in this watch had a lot to do with Nicolas Cage’s old Prison buddies played by John Goodman and William Forsythe, though terrible parents really do care when they leave Nathan Jr on the top of their car.  As I said it’s an easy movie to love.

Miller’s Crossing (1990)

Jon Polito

    I love Miller’s Crossing.  It’s a perfect gorgeous Irish Ballard with the best use of ‘Danny Boy’ I’ve come across.  Carter Burrell’s score is at this stage my favourite of his, there are some Barry Sonnenfeld shots that he would use in his own movies, and John Turturro saying She’s a sick twist all right, always gives me a shiver up my spine.  Albert Finney’s assassination attempt is just the best kind of fun filmmaking.  In this respect, Millers Crossing feels like a true collaboration.  Miller’s Crossing feels like a original Gangster movie, in a year that also saw the likes of Goodfellas, The Godfather III and King of New York all released the same year.  1990 was one hell of a year at the movies.  All these movies are trying to in different degrees trying to deal with a specific moral code.  Miller’s Crossing looks at Gabriel Byrne’s Tom Reagan a man with no moral code and is often trying to mimic or is genuinely confused by people who do, and when he does make a moral decision it comes back to bite him.  I love Miller’s Crossing.   

Barton Fink (1991)

The fourth Coen Brother’s movie and they won the Palme d’or.  Barton Fink is a slightly phenomenal movie.  Watching through the Coen’s filmography I’ve really noticed how much they lean into a primal mythology and urban legend.  Barton Fink, after writing a hit Broadway play finds himself in Hollywood trying to write the Great American Wrestling Picture.  I’m a sucker about movies about movies, the scandal, the process of creating the Urban Legend.  With Roger Deakins’ sublime, almost magical cinematography (I have a secret suspicion that Deakins is a wizard), Barton Fink leans into the nightmarish quality of the Hollywood Urban Legend.  

Usually The Coen’s cinematic touchstones are commonly from the 1930s, but in Barton Fink you can see The Shining all through the hotel that our hero is staying at.  It's the perfect canvas to create what this movie is trying to do.  Barton Fink is on the surface is a simple movie about writers block in the classic Hollywood System, filled with some really sublime performances, everyone across the board is freaken amazing.  But the more you dig into it, the more dream like and dense it becomes, it's the closest the Coen’s have come to making a Horror movie.

The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)

Speaking of 1930s influences, The Hudsucker Proxy has them all.  This was my first of my new to me Coen Movies.  A first time Coen Brother’s watch usually fall into two camps; you are either sitting there throwing all your spare awards at the screen, or just sitting there biting your lips saying ‘huh’ a lot.  Hudsucker had a lot of ‘huhs’, whether I start throwing awards at the screen after further screenings, time will tell.  In saying that, there’s a lot of like in Hudsucker Proxy, about a Man (Tim Robbins) with an idea – you know for kids ( If you’ve seen Hudsucker, you will giggle every time that line comes up) and the corporation or it’s personification, Paul Newman, who want to exploit him. 

Tim Robbins 

The Hudsucker Proxy is a straight up 1930s Screwball Comedy, only problem is The Coen’s want to try and use all the Screwball Comedies.  The likes of Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, Preston Struges and some Fritz Lang Metropolis stylizations to mix it up a little.  Even though The Hudsucker Proxy is set in the 1950s.  Okay yes, these film makers are a sizable chunk of the Hollywood landscape and at times did work in a similar genre, but they don’t blend well.  Hudsucker feels like it has too many filmic full stops as we switch from one moment to the next.  There’s are a lot of great individual moments, but they feel like stylistically does not always feel like the moment that came before.  A lot like my writing style.

 FARGO (1996)

Fargo is a straight up Masterpiece.  Maybe one of the great movies ever made.  It should have won all the Awards.  It should keep winning all the awards.  

This is a True Story.  The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987.   At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed.  Out of respect for the dead the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.  

Frances McDormand

 

    This is how Urban Legends start.  Adding to this is the simple fact title, Fargo, refers to the place where William H Macy meets Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare meet for the first time and set off the chain of events of the movie.  This might be obvious, but it did take multiple watches for this to click.  There’s a beautiful melancholy to Fargo, even in it’s humour and in it’s violence, and it really heightens the poignancy of Frances McDormand's Marge Gunderson's essential goodness.  I know it's not a popular scene, but I love her sitting in the car chewing on a hamburger pondering her interactions with both snively Macy's Jerry Lundegaard and her old School Friend Mike Yanagita.  For me it always shows that being a Police Officer is a job for her, she has other and more important things in her life, like her husband and her expected child.  Going back to question Lundegaard is almost an afterthought.  It perfectly sets her apart from the greed and ambition of the other characters.  Yes, this might be obvious but again it took me a couple of watches to think of this.  Which, is why I love Joel and Ethan Coen, there are so many things you can enjoy in a big chunk of their movies you can find something else under the quirk.