O' Brother Where Art Thou: Someone Asked Me To Be An Expert In Something Part 10

(Like All Someone Asked Me To Be An Expert In Somethings, this entry is written to be spoken aloud and with a much more general less film literate audience in mind [I dear reader know you know what Sullivan's Travels is. And if you don't...] In this case I think the result came out so different from my usual style that I considered not posting it. But I think it makes for an interesting experiment so there you have it.)


The name O’ Brother Where Art Thou comes from the Preston Sturges Golden Age comedy Sullivan’s Travels.

In the film Joel McCrea, plays a successful director of studio comedies who becomes obsessed with directing a serious film called “O’ Brother Where Art Thou” to prove he’s a serious artist. To research the film he goes on the road as a hobo, and ends up in prison, where after watching a cartoon and the affect it has on his fellow inmates, that comedy can be much just as important as drama and can end up doing much more practical good in the world, then simply reminding "The Common Man" of their misery.

This has never been a lesson The Coen Brothers have needed.

Far from being pigeonholed as comedic or serious, most people are baffled by the exceedingly thin line between comedy and drama, in every Coen Brothers film. Their darker films like Miller’s Crossing, Fargo, and A Serious Man all have moments of deep comic ludicrousness. In the meantime their comedies like Raising Arizona, Burn After Reading, or The Big Lebowski are filled with dark moments of mayhem, murder and other assorted acts of bad behavior and cruel fate.

Oddly enough both of these things, the darkness in their comic films, and the comedy in their dark films stem from the same place. There is a deep vein of comic almost cosmic absurdity running through each of The Coen Brother’s films. It’s why Larry Gopnick in the depths of his Book Of Job reenactment is forced to cry “I do not want Santana Abaraxas.” It’s why no one in Blood Simple ever really knows just what happened, why Leonard Smalls kills everything in his path in Raising Arizona, and why their lightest film, The Hudsucker Proxy opens with a suicide.

And it’s that vein that runs throughout the entirety of O’ Brother Where Art Thou, whether Ulysses Evert McGill cares to admit it or not.

O’ Brother Where Art Thou is loosely structured after The Odysessy, and The Coen’s use the events of the poem to through just one damn thing after another at their hapless central trio. There are encounters with Cyclops, Lotus Eaters and sirens as well as a few other distinctly Coenesque touches like The livestock hating Baby Faced Nelson, and a vengeful Woolworths.

Throughout all this are all the usual pleasures of The Coens. Their unparrelled screenplays, very few writers can get laughs from cadence alone. As well as the beautiful golden cinematography of long time collaborater Roger Deakins and the impeccable taste in music and cast.

The film has one of the Coen’s strongest, not just with the crucial trio of Clooney, Tim Blake Nelson and John Turturro, but John Goodman as well in what sadly turned out to be his last performance with The Coens, Holly Hunter, and my personal favorite, Charles Durning, more or less reprising his role from The Big Lebowski as the corrupt Pappy O’Daniel. One of the long line of corpulent venal men at the center of The Coen Brother’s movies. It was Roger Ebert who observed that perhaps the central image of The Coen Brother’s films is that of a venal powerful man behind a desk and from the moment Pappy introduces himself with a hearty “Thank God your mammy died givin' birth. If she'd have seen you, she'd have died o' shame.” Durning cements himself as one of the best.

The thing that truly sets O’ Brother Where Art Thou apart, is that for all of the disasters, or OB-STACK-ALLS that beset our heroes, everything more or less turns out well.

As I said before, so many of the Coen’s films are absurdist portraits of things spinning further out of control then it’s beleaguered characters can even comprehend. Fate is an indifferent, if not down right malicious force. The Message Of O’ Brother Where Art Thou is just the opposite. Sometimes, fate is kind, even in a film by the Coen Brothers.

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True Grit

The harshest critics of True Grit have accused the film of being the Coen’s in a minor key. After the existential demo derby that made up No Country For Old Men, Burn After Reading, and A Serious Man, I should feel a little worried if the Coen’s didn’t take a bit of a breather. The difference is, I don’t see a "lighter" tone as necessarily signifying a step down.

Though I love the Coen’s who brought us that extremely disquieting trilogy, I love to Coen’s who are prankster’s. The one’s who in Raising Arizona, The Man Who Wasn’t There, The Big Lebowski and even Fargo, more or less handed out a box of exploding cigar’s to the general public. All so they could see our faces when they went off.

And it’s those Coen’s, the one’s who act as funhouse mirrors, who show up in True Grit. They take Henry Hathaway’s gooey (though judging by most of the reviews I’ve read of the remake unfairly undervalued) slice of Americana and turn it into a gothic, shambling, stark, nightmare comedy. With Roger Deakin’s superlative cinematography the Coen’s get as far from the vision wide open spaces the original featured as they possibly can. The Innocent in True Grit is delivered to a grey land filled with dying scrub, where all the trees tall enough to be of any consequence seem to have eyeless corpses hanging from them. . It’s a stark strange world inhabited by stark strange people. Like the two children (?) We see poking a tied horse with a sharpened stick for want of any other entertainment, or the dentist in a bear suit willing to sell a corpse sans teeth. If Diane Arbus ever shot a western it’d look an awful lot like True Grit. It’s a vision of an Innocent Girl cast into hell. With only a drunken shambling wreck and a vainglorious ranger who is at least half talk for guardians.

And it’s pretty fucking funny.

If nothing else True Grit remains one of the most simply pleasurable films I’ve watched all year. If there are directors (or writers) other then the Coen’s who can score laughter strictly from Cadence they do not leap directly to mind. (You just watch the lines “It would be alright” “You are not ‘Le Beef’” and “I do not know this man” may not seem like laugh riots on the surface but just see if they don’t get to you.)

As to be expected there’s nothing in the film technically that is not top notch and filmed with skewed imagination. The cast included. Bridges Cogburn has been praised so much it is difficult to know were to begin. Suffice to say he manages every bit of a difficult multi faceted character, and is able to make him equally and separately iconic then Wayne’s. Damon seems to be getting the short end of the praise here, but he performs the role of La Boeuf with a kind of comic perfection. Hailee Stanfield of course stands at the center of the film, and the Coen’s gamble paid off. She takes to the Coen’s dialogue so well she almost seems a prodigy. Barry Pepper, all broke tooth menace and Josh Brolin, playing Chaney as a man all the more dangerous for being a half witted buck toothed Podunk moron.

True Grit is one of those films I find difficult to write about because of how much it does so awfully well. Funny, scary, exciting, genuinely heartfelt and pushed by the skewed vision of a couple of geniuses. The only fault I can find in the film comes with the shrug of an epilogue (though that last shot with that music is a doozy) and Carter Burnwell’s lacking score. Building the score around the motif of “The Everlasting Arms” is a good one (As well as being one of the film’s many nods to Night Of The Hunter. To which this film could easily be a spiritual sibling if that most singular of films can ever be said to have one. ) . But that ends up becoming almost the only cue we hear in the last third of the movie and it is unbelievably tedious.

I can only hope that the making of True Grit has not scratched the Coen’s western itch. They are too damn good at it. I recall when Burn came out Ethan Coen mentioning that they had written a Spaghetti Western, which Ethan promised “Had a scene with a Chicken you would never forget.” Perhaps there is no better compliment I can pay True Grit, then it desperately makes me want to see that scene with the chicken.

The Big Lebowsi: Dude Unto Others As You Would Have Them Dude Unto You

The Fremont in San Luis Obispo is a great old theater. An art deco monstrosity built in the thirties, its one of the last surviving movie palaces. The place is huge, it seats over a thousand people. And last night all of them where filled. Unsuspecting patrons ended up being turned away. That evenings late show of Avatar ended up canceled for an overflow showing.

What kind of film can bring out such an audience on a Tuesday Night in a sleepy small town?

The Big Lebowski of course.

Welcome to THE cult film of the new generation.

Now noting that The Big Lebowski has a cult following is more or less the definition of old news. But everytime I encounter it, I can’t help but be impressed how ground level it is and how fucking huge. People outside were dressed up and quoting lines, that’s not surprising. What is surprising is the level of minutia the average Lebowski head has. Usually not seen outside of hardcore cinephiles, people with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and the otherwise socially misaligned. People are not just dressed as the holy trinity of The Dude, Walter, and Donnie, but as the pin headed chorus girls from the film’s musical sequence and the red leotard clad nihlist. I think I even spot a Knox Harrington a character who appears in one scene in the movie and laughs abrasively through most of it. Who the fuck are these people? And Where Do they go when the movie's over?

The Big Lebowski isn’t a film it’s a virus. One that temporarily spreads cinephelia to the normals.

But why this film? I mean it’s a great film, unique in its structure, rich in detail, and drop dead hilarious. It’s a perfect distillation of the Coens, and never has the word “Meander” been meant in a more positive light.

But that doesn’t explain why it’s just so transmutable. It’s a film I’ve seen dozens of times, and never tire of rewatching. One that is indeed so richly laired that I literally notice something new every time I see it (last night’s new detail Donnie’s shirts never have his name on them). Its not just details, there are jokes planted like Under Sea mines, you sail over them a couple times and then on your seventeenth watch they just detonate (It took the big screen for me to appreciate the sublimely wasted expression on Uli’s face in the pool, and the starkness of the Knudson’s farm. Like If Diane Arbus took landscapes) If there’s an easier film to rewatch then The Big Lebowski I don’t know what it is.

I like to think that the reason for the films popularity, as well as its grace and ease, comes from the fact that the film plays like a giant cinematic Rorschach blot. What is The Big Lebowski? Its whatever you want it to be. If your sitting in the theater surrounded by a thousand screaming fans and you happen to be a little bit high, and you notice The Dude is holding a carton of half and half, and that sets you off wondering if the movie is just one big parable about The Dude as Jesus trying his best to keep Walter the vengeful and only partially rational Old Testament God in line, (And is there a better Satan/ Anti Christ combo then Jesus and Jackie Treehorn) the movie is down with that.

Or maybe its just a Chandler parody, or a just the ultimate stoner shaggy dog story. Maybe slackers and hipsters just like watching a movie whose message is basically, “Fuck It” Maybe there’s absolutely no greater meaning to the movie and its popularity. Maybe it’s just kind of amazing. Well shoot, as The Stranger says, “Now I’ve gone and lost my train of thought.”

But we do know The Dude is out there taking er easy for all us sinners. The Dude Abides, and maybe the reason the film gets such a passionate following, its just damn comforting knowing that he’s just a DVD or ticket stub away. See you all at the next screening.

“Shoosh, I hope he makes The Finals.”

A Serious Man

Don’t you want somebody to love?



Look at the poster. Larry on top of his roof, surveying all he sees, hands on his hips, unaware that he's completely dwarfed by the sky above.

A Serious Man is as you may have heard 90 minutes of unrelenting soul violence. It’s the Coen Brother’s bleakest movie, making No Country For Old Men seem like The Sound Of Music. It also happens to be the funniest movie The Coen’s have made since O’ Brother Where Art Thou.

When I watched the trailer which is practically a mini movie to itself (and which I liked so much I wrote a whole article on Coen Trailers). I was expecting something akin to The Man Who Wasn’t There.



A shaggy dog story basically, a private joke that happened to be shared with the world. And while there is a little bit of that here, the film that this really reminds me of is Barton Fink. The main difference being, that while Barton was a little twerp who was due for some karmic realignment, Larry Gopnick is a decent, albietly befuddled man. He’s not Barton convinced he’s the master of the universe, he’s not even Ed who made the mistake of showing a modicum of ambition in a Noir film. He’s just a normal guy who has the wrath of God poured on him for little apparent reason. Diddling in front of the giant blackboards that dwarf him, simply trying to prove that nothing can be proved. He just wants to live an uneventful life and suddenly there he is, his brother in handcuffs infront of the neighbors, having to explain to his son what Sodomy is.

I’ve never taken much truck with the view of The Coen’s as nihilists (Or their supposed condescension either but that’s another essay). They’re absurdists undoubtably, but no one who wrote Marge Gundersoon’s final monologue (Or dreamed up Uli and his crew for that matter) can be written off as something as simple minded and incurious as a Nihlist. Still Larry’s trials seem so meaningless.

The film is a tough one to analyze at least in part because it’s about the futility of analysis. The film’s kind enough to give you some keys in a prologue and a seemingly unconnected vignette a Rabbi tells about a Jewish dentist who finds a message written in Hebraic in a Goy’s teeth. In the opening Larry’s ancestor either stabs a helpless old man to death or slays a demon. In the vignette the dentist either receives and ignores a message from God, or perfectly sanely shrugs off a coincidence. Like Schroedinger’s cat who also makes an appearance, there’s really no way to be sure. Does Larry’s suffering have greater meaning? Is it all some sort of test? Or is it just absurd chance of a Godless universe taking its toll. In either case how dare anyone label themselves “Serious”.

But I’m making the movie sound like such a slog. Not doing justice to the magnificent prank that it is. The comic perfection of Larry’s son’s stoned Bar Mitzvah. Or the way that a simple oft repeated “Fucker” had the theater I was in in gales of laughter each time it was uttered. “He’s Thinking.” And the parking lot. Oh the glories of the parking lot.

Sure maybe the universe is Godless chaos, punctuated only by random horribleness. Maybe at the end of the day the wise Rabbi and the pop song contain the same amount of truth. But as long as they’re filmmakers like the Coen’s around, I believe I’ll stick around anyway.

What Kind Of Man Are You: The Man Who Wasn't There

“I’m going to take this hair and mix it with the dirt. Common household dirt.”

The Man Who Wasn’t ThereThe Man Who Wasn't There goes on the very short list of Coen Brothers films I’ve seen less then a dozen time. It’s been a long while since I revisited it, I was inspired to by the lunatic trailer for A Serious Man, and I’m glad I did. It’s maybe the Coen’s most troubling film, but it’s well worth seeing. There’s a lot to like even if there’s little to love.

It’s not hard to see why The Man Who Wasn’t There isn’t exactly a fan favorite. It’s an intensely uncomfortable film. Stylized and arch even for the Coens, full of their warped vision, but undercut by an uncomfortable existential hum, even in it’s most straightforwardly funny scenes (Like the trip to Frances McDormand’s “Wop” family wedding) that undercuts the enjoyment that visiting the Coen’s fractured world provides. In a lot of ways it’s darker then No Country For Old Men. It’s a decidedly almost purposefully minor film. And I can’t help but think it’s sort of brilliant.

In The Man Who Wasn’t There, Billy Bob Thorton plays a barber who so deadpan that he surely has reached a stage of zen. In a weird way he’s like The Dude’s evil Doppleganger, a man so laid back, one who abides much that nothing, not Tony Soprano fucking his wife, not a trip to the electric chair, a visit from Aliens, or even a blow job from Scarlett Johanson can get much of a rise out of him. The only thing that does knock him off his even keel is the opportunity to invest in Dry Cleaning, the wave of the future. To do so , he blackmails Gandolfini who’s having an affair with his wife, not that he minds that much, basically threatening to tell himself. And for that little show of ambition he ends up doomed in the best of Noir fashion.

The film is so laconic it can barely be said to have a pulse. It’s not like we care all that much what happens to Ed, how could we? He doesn’t care what happens to himself. For those who accuse the Coen’s of elitism this film has to drive them bugnuts. It’s practically anthropological, noir with all the passion surgically removed. This is the film people who hate The Coen brothers see every time they watch a Coen Brothers movie.

The film doesn’t involve us in a traditional way it just passes by like a fever dream. There are some stunning moments, Frances McDormand shot with genuine (though albeit, bizarre) eroticism for the first time since Blood Simple, the moment where the pane of safety glass fissures right in the middle of Gandolfini’s rage filled face. Dream logic, dialogue that doubles and Coens, pervaded with a sense of unease that’s down right Lynchian. Maybe the aliens who show up later in the film (surely the most unexpected since the ones who turned up to berate Woody Allen in Stardust Memories) are a message, because I don’t know if there’s ever been a film which seemed so much like the product of non human intelligence.

The Coen Brothers: We're Going To Be Fine

Do you know who kicks ass at making trailers?

The Coen Brothers.

Now yes this is just another of the many many things the Coen’s kick ass at. But it’s worth noting. It’s not an understatement to say that the Coen brother’s trailers are works of art in an of themselves. Little mini movies that capture the spirit of the films rather then just crassly pushing them.

I guess I’ve always known that but the trailer for their new one, A Serious Man, which I’ve been watching compulsively all morning. If you haven’t seen it go to apple trailers now. Seriously. Threw that into sharp relief. It’s hypnotic, and the punchline is perfect. I get more satisfaction from that trailer then I get from most movies.

Oddly enough the first time I ever heard of the Coen Brothers it was through one of their trailers. An anecdote in a Sam Raimi book I was reading which mentioned that the brothers had used Bruce Campbell to shoot a faux trailer for Blood Simple as a fundraiser.

The trailer itself is a nasty piece of work, dialogue free and letting you know right up front what a nasty piece of work you’re getting into.



Or the Raising Arizona trailer which somehow manages to catch the films charm and lunacy. Casio music aside.



Even at there most standard the trailers are still insane. I’ve always loved The Burn After Reading One. How anyone could not want to see this one after that shot of Malchovich in his ratty boxers wifebeater and bathrobe clutching a hatchet is beyond me.



Then there are the ones that don’t even try to disguise their lunacy.



And those that are simply… Art.