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What’s So Great about the Coen Brothers?

By Norbert Brown

Joel and Ethan Coen: Ready to get all film school on your ass.

When Joel and Ethan Coen stepped up to the stage to collect their Best Director Oscars last week, I was reminded of the first time I ever heard of the brothers. It was in some art-house theater in Greenwich Village back in the early 80s, and I was sitting slack-jawed in the dark, watching those two names appear in the closing credits of Blood Simple.

I am one of those people who sits and watches credits, sometimes till the last “Best Boy” line has topped the screen and passed into oblivion. But on this occasion, it was not so much that I wanted to watch the names as it was that I simply couldn’t move – the film was so astonishing, so beautiful and smart and shocking, that I just needed a few minutes to collect myself. And in one way or another, through 25 years and a dozen movies, the Coen brothers continue to amaze.

I could just keep gushing about these filmmakers for another 500 words or so, but that would bore even me. Besides, I think we’ve heard the Coen brothers praised to everyone’s satisfaction lately. So rather than just throw them a love fest, I thought it would be worthwhile to take a look at the body of work and ask the question: just what is it that makes the Coen brothers’ movies so good?

There’s a good deal of legend attached to the Coens, and there are aspects of their legend that give us a glimpse into what makes them so successful. For one thing, they are known to be among the most meticulous moviemakers in the business: every moment of every scene is carefully planned and storyboarded, and Coen brothers’ movies are famous for arriving on screen exactly as written in the screenplay. According to the production notes on the Blood Simple DVD, this was a formula for success that they more or less stumbled into: Blood Simple was their first movie and money was so tight that they carefully planned in order to minimize waste. The funding for that film came from small investors, most of them from the Coen’s native Minneapolis. With local doctors, businessmen and family friends as backers, the Coens were careful with their funds and got the most out of every dollar (in fact, that was the reason they set Blood Simple in Texas: as a right-to-work state Texas was one place where they could shoot and avoid the burden of union wages). But there is nothing stingy about the movie, no cut corners that show up in the final product. So although their penchant for careful planning may have begun as an economic imperative, it ends up being one of the reasons they make great movies.

Next: they cast brilliantly, and they get spectacular performances from their actors. There are, of course, actors we’ve grown accustomed to seeing in Coen brothers movies: John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Frances McDormand and John Turturro to name a few. But even though they have their regular ensemble players, they don’t hesitate to mix it up, and they manage to create a winning ensemble in each movie they make. Think about the great chemistry between Holly Hunter and Nicholas Cage in Raising Arizona or Tony Shalhoub’s jaded Hollywood producer in Barton Fink. And let’s not forget: even though he’d made dozens of movie and TV appearances before Fargo, most of us only knew William H. Macy as “that guy from ER” before the Coens got hold of him. These are career-making performances, not least because of the scripts the Coens write and the subtlety and nuance of their direction.

Great scripts and great ensembles – and the ability to pull all the pieces together. Each Coen Brothers movie is a complete, individual work: each has its own palette, its own pace, look and feel. Action and dialogue and music play off each other, and great moments are created. Look at The Big Lebowski: a movie that finds not just humor but poetry in bowling. Or O Brother, Where Art Thou:  a twentieth century retelling of The Odyssey that feels like it’s actually in the colors of the great depression.

But while each of the Coens’ films is an individual, they bear a striking family resemblance. In fact, one thing that makes the Coen brothers so good is that they have a recognizable film “vocabulary” – recurring images or similar scenes that connect the movies to each other. The lazy fan, spinning endlessly in Blood Simple becomes the close-up of the spinning bowling ball in The Big Lebowski  and later the Pomade tin lazily rolling through the flood waters in O Brother Where Art Thou. The roadside murder in Fargo is a near perfect visual quote from Blood Simple. And Fargo’s flat, desolate north is oddly recalled in the wide dusty Texas landscapes of No Country for Old Men.

Joel and Ethan at the 2008 Academy Awards.

And there’s more than style or a desire to create a “signature” in this vocabulary. This may be the greatest thing about the Coen Brothers’ films: although each movie stands on its own, as a body of work there is a thematic continuity to their movies that says something important about the human condition. In each Coen brothers movie, you can pinpoint a single moment of decision, a point in time when the film’s hero makes a choice that changes his life from that very second forward. Sometimes these are big, monumental decisions (Jerry’s choice to get out of debt by having his wife kidnapped in Fargo, Ray’s decision to cover up the murder in Blood Simple), other times they are impulsive, not giving away that they are life-altering moments (The Dude’s choice to ask Lebowski to have his rug cleaned in The Big Lebowski). What makes these moments so interesting is that once the decision is made, the hero has no way to turn back. And even if we, as the audience think he does, in his mind the die is cast and changing course is not an option. This is the fate of Llewellyn in No Country for Old Men when he decides to keep the money, and of H.I. in Raising Arizona when he decides to kidnap little Nathan.

So what does this say about life, about being human? Well, we all know that not every choice is irrevocable and that not every decision will resonate through the subsequent moments of our lives. But it is true that each decision we make changes us, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. So in a sense, each decision is life-changing. And as Robert Frost told us back in 8^th grade English, every road taken suggests a road not taken, and the Coen brothers are the masters of showing us what can happen when you choose one road over another. The results can be invigorating, or they can be disastrous, or they lead us back to where we started. But life goes on: babies are born, drawings of mallards appear on three cent stamps, and the Dude abides.

Copyright C. 2008 Norbert Brown

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 at 12:41 am and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.