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Song
of the South
O BROTHER, WHERE ART
THOU?
At Last, a Coen Brothers Comedy That's Truly Funny.
With George Clooney, John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson
Written by Ethan Coen & Joel Coen
Based on the Odyssey by Homer
Directed by Joel Coen
FOR THEIR NEWEST FORAY into the black heart of Americana, the Coen brothers, late of Fargo and Blood Simple, turn back time to Mississippi of the 1930s and cast George Clooney as Ulysses Everett McGill, an escaped convict with a pencil-thin mustache, pomade-soaked hair and a voice that sounds suspiciously like Clark Gable.
Everett escapes from a rural rock quarry one bright afternoon chained to his two best friends: Pete Hogwallop (John Turturro), a buck-toothed simpleton and fatalist; and Delmar O’Donnel (Tim Blake Nelson), a little guy so dumb that he eventually comes to think three seductive singing sirens, washing their unmentionables by the riverside, turned Pete into a toad (played, in a brilliant casting move, by a frog).
Just after their escape, they encounter a blind old black man aimlessly pumping a hand cart down a deserted railroad track. They hop his vehicle for a ride, and the ponderous gentleman gives them his counsel: "You will find a fortune, though it will not be the fortune you seek." But that doesn’t set well too well with the boys, for they’re on their way to dig up $1.2 million from an armored car heist that Everett buried before he went to prison.
Needless to say their sojourn overflows with danger: A heavenly field of singing Baptists being born again by the river; a fat populist governor (Charles Durning) running for re-election; his "reformer" opponent, who stumps with a midget and a broom (he’s for "the little guy" and wants to "sweep up" government); a blind radio station owner (Stephen Root of News Radio) with a cocked head and bulging eyes; a young black man who plays guitar and sells his soul to the Devil; and the severely manic-depressive, Chicago-style bank robber George Nelson (Michael Badalucco of The Practice), who keeps repeating his full name over and over, and who does not like to be called by his nickname, "Baby Face."
All we really got out of the Coen brothers’ earlier freaky comedies, like Raising Arizona or The Big Lebowski, was an earache from a couple of strident college boys making fun of the outer classes. But O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a bona fide absurdist farce that traverses and dissects Homer, classic Hollywood, the Great Depression, the Ku Klux Klan, and America’s insipid notions about its own social and political history from mid-century to just last week.
O Brother has a few lingering touches of broad comedy that still don’t work for the Coens, except perhaps for a wickedly funny collision between a car and a cow. But way more often than not it’s outlandish and exhilarating, funny in bold ways but also in subtle ones, and satirically right on target, from the bloated politicians who work hard to fashion their phony images, to its mawkish platitudes about American religion, to its dreamy assertion of a "New South" that we’re arguably still waiting to see.
The Coens’ northern educated liberal bias has suffocated many of their earlier films, although some find their attitude to be more affectionate than cruel. But finally, in O Brother, they pointedly skewer a culture and a history of which they clearly disapprove. Their dialogue is quirky and tart, and their action glides along to a soundtrack filled with splendid old highwayman folk/blues and pop/gospel tunes, all of it played as an ironic undercurrent to the bankrupt lives we see portrayed. Even our three aimless escapees get in on the music: To earn a few bucks, they record a song that becomes a hit on the radio, although they don’t realize they’re celebrities until the very end.
This is Preston Sturgess - the sterling (and now-forgotten) Hollywood director of the ‘30s and ‘40s - and especially his film Sullivan’s Travels (1941), filtered with a satirical eye through classic literature, The Grapes of Wrath, The Three Stooges, gangster movies, Hollywood iconography and the persistent ironies of popular music and song. The casting is like Old Home Week for the Coens: John Goodman (Barton Fink) and Holly Hunter (Raising Arizona) return for small roles, and Turturro - who’s so exhilarating to watch that they should name an acting award after him - returns for a large one. Even Clooney, whom we tend to perceive as a look and a presence, does a crafty comic turn as a pseudo-edifying hustler wandering through the elegiac mysteries of life, searching for his personal happiness and eating flame-baked gopher off a stick.
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THE BIG
LEBOWSKI
With Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, John Turturro
Written by Ethan Coen & Joel Coen
Directed by Joel Coen
WHEN JOEL AND ETHAN COEN ridicule the characters in their movies as they almost always do, it's usually hard to tell if they do it with farcical affection or well-schooled smugness. As the poet Bion said: The boys throw stones at the frogs in jest, but the frogs die in earnest.
The Coen brothers' new movie, The Big Lebowski, is a postmodern tall tale of Americana, a sendup of southern California, and a paean to all the losers of the world, with a grizzled cowboy narrator (Sam Elliott) and a faux melancholy ending in case we didn't get it (please don't ask what "it" is). The movie has a dozen good jokes, dozens of others that just sit there, and more styles than a second-hand store. It's cinema as performance art--the kind of highly contrived pop-cult pastiche you either go with or you don't, but not one that yields many organic rewards.
The Big Lebowski feels like a transitional film for the Coens--a sort of summing up before they move on to something else. It opens with moody narration (like Blood Simple), has doses of painful slapstick (like Raising Arizona), some stretches of surreal fantasy (like Barton Fink), a few bits of grotesque violence (like Fargo), and an actress (Julianne Moore) doing a mannered '40s-style leading-lady accent vaguely like the one Jennifer Jason Leigh did in The Hudsucker Proxy. Even the cast--John Goodman, John Turturro, Peter Stormare, Steve Buscemi, Jon Polito--rounds up the usual Coen suspects.
The plot of The Big Lebowski is egregiously convoluted--or "complex" as we like to say, when we're talking about a "real" mystery.
It starts with a mixup: There's this '60s ex-hippie college dropout named Lebowski (Jeff Bridges), who prefers to be called The Dude, who mostly sits around his ratty LA apartment all day in his underwear drinking White Russians, whom two thugs mistake for a rich guy of the same name. So when The Dude can't cough up the money that the rich Lebowski owes, the thugs pee on The Dude's rug and leave.
When The Dude tells this to his bowling buddies--an intellectual but volatile Catholic Vietnam vet (Goodman) who observes the Jewish Sabbath, and a dim-witted little weasel (Buscemi, of course) who misses just about everything--they figure that the real rich Lebowski owes The Dude a new rug. So The Dude goes to the rich man's mansion to get satisfaction, and thus gets caught up in what appears to be a plot to kidnap the man's porn star nymphet wife.
As the adventure goes on, we meet the Coens' gallery of oddballs and lunatics: The rich man's daughter (Moore), a self-consumed avant garde painter who thinks people should get more comfortable with the word vagina; a trio of German nihilists (Flea among them) who want a piece of the million-dollar kidnap plot; a giggly British video artist (David Thewlis); a porno movie producer (Ben Gazzara, in the movie's most jarring cameo); and a Hispanic ex-con child molester/bowler (Turturro, way over the top) who dances in a purple jump suit to a Spanish cover of "Hotel California."
The acting serves the concept, with Bridges suitably lopey as the pothead Dude and Moore amusing once or twice as the womyn artist. Turturro seems to be there just for the hell of it, and Goodman still feels like too much of a TV actor to carry his weight in the movies.
What this all means is anyone's guess--and probably someone's dissertation. The central emotion of most Coen brothers films is contempt, which they pull off well enough when they pick reasonable targets (like Hollywood in Hudsucker), but which just seems arrogant and cruel when they don't. Lebowski falls somewhere in between: Their target is largely the rich and lazy in a dreamlike LA, but the jokes are either so obvious or so overstated that the whole thing feels rather sophomoric (which, I fear, it's supposed to be).
You're left with the Coens' most unlikable work since Barton Fink, the sort of movie that would damage the reputation of any other filmmaker, except we've learned to expect uneven stuff from them. So now we can just wait to see if their next one is any better.
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THE MAN
WHO WASN'T THERE
With Billy Bob Thornton, Frances McDormand, James Gandolfini, Jon
Polito, Michael Badalucco, Tony Shalhoub
Written by Ethan Coen & Joel Coen
Directed by Joel Coen
AFTER ALL THEY’VE DONE to stay brothers for so long, whispering to themselves (as we eavesdrop) in their sibling idioglossia, it’s heartening to know that Joel and Ethan Coen have grown up. Last year they made the masterly O Brother, Where Art Thou?, an oddball musical/comedy, "based" on Homer’s Odyssey, in which all their potshots about hicks and hypocrites finally hit the mark. And now - twice in a row - they’ve done it again: The Man Who Wasn’t There is sterling American cinema and prime Coen Brothers, savvy and droll, brainy and fun, and clearly a part of their sophisticated canon.
It’s a companion piece to Blood Simple - their inscrutably self-assured debut film that might be their Citizen Kane - with so many links between the two films that surely there’s a dissertation waiting to be written. Of course, that would ruin the pleasure of watching The Man Who Wasn’t There, which makes you laugh enough to qualify it as a black comedy, but which, like Blood Simple, has a sullen protagonist and a malevolent air that turns it into a tragic thriller.
The dispirited anti-hero of The Man Who Wasn’t There is Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton), a 1940s film noir anachronism living in a perky 1950s Levittown world. His wife Doris (Frances McDormand) loves perfume, clothing and church on Tuesdays because it’s bingo night. His brother-in-law and boss Frank (Michael Badalucco) is a barber who never stops talking in the shop where they work side by side, giving slicked-back business cuts to men and a variety of crewcuts to button-nosed boys who relax in the chair reading Dead-Eye Western comics. Ed’s pal Dave (James Gandolfini) owns a department store and plans to expand his thriving business. That mean Doris - who’s having an affair with Dave - will earn a high-profile job as the big new store’s business manager.
Ah yes, an affair: the second requisite of foul play. The first is money, which drops into Ed’s barber chair in the porcine form of Creighton Tolliver (Jon Polito), a uncouth pansy with a bad toupee who has an invention that could make Ed rich: It’s dry cleaning, and if Ed invests $10,000 in Tolliver’s dream, he’ll be a 50-50 silent partner in a gold mine.
And so Ed decides to steal his stake by anonymously threatening to reveal Dave’s affair to his unsuspecting wife. It’s the perfect plan - a way to score and to punish Dave for his traitorous peccadillo. But Ed’s no larcenist, and things naturally go wrong. There’s a gory death, a mistaken arrest, an expensive attorney (Tony Shalhoub), a pretty young teen-age pianist named Birdy (Scarlett Johansson), and the immutable hand of fate, without which we’re nothing.
To get to the best of the Coens and their wily wisdom, you have to cut through all the cacophony (Raising Arizona) and obscurity (Barton Fink) and college-boy smugness (Fargo). For two guys with such a skewed vision of the world, it’s hard to believe that they care so much about sin and retribution (but not redemption). And they probably don’t really care, which makes Blood Simple and The Man Who Wasn’t There a duet of sardonic fables about how only movie plots achieve justice in the grandly screwed-up moral scheme of things.
The Coens visualize Ed’s world in low-contrast black and white and score it to somber Beethoven sonatas. Ed is so taciturn and disconnected because there’s nothing left to say, and yet he finds himself surrounded by fat men who won’t shut up. (Girth always represents evil to the Coens, although they’ve never made a movie with quite so much combined meat on its bones). And because Ed can’t join their post-war, post-Depression cornucopia of happiness and materialism, he’s doomed to his own personal waterloo.
Joel Coen directs The Man Who Wasn’t There with a clockwork elegance that captures faces and milieus, and he’s especially good at taking his most absurd set pieces just to the edge without falling off. A swing dance, a crowded street, even a shot of a murderer’s bloodless hands: These details show a thrilling sensitivity to the visual magic of cinema. His dialogue, too, is equally fine, at times profound and resonant, but more often eerily post-modern and pregnant with emptiness. So many people say such meaningless things in The Man Who Wasn’t There that you begin to empathize with Ed, who has mastered the sound of silence.
The actor are sterling, and with one exception perfectly cast: Shalhoub is such a stagy actor that you simply have to choose to like him as the canny lawyer who spins a defense out of silence and lies. So just revel in Thornton, who pulls you inside Ed’s desolation with little gestures and wan inflections. And as Doris, the glorious McDormand is a scream. Watch her face when Doris wins at bingo, or when she chuckles through a vapid anecdote at the dinner table. You can hardly concentrate on the rest of the movie because you can’t take your eyes off her immaculate comic genius.