I’m nearly out of Coen Brothers movies in my collection, and that means my deliberately incomplete cross-section of their work is nearly done. I’ve covered some of their early breakthroughs and their first really big peak, now it’s time to cover their second peak from the mid-2000s.
No Country For Old Men
One day whilst hunting in a remote spot in West Texas, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) encounters a bizarre sight – a circle of pickup trucks, with corpses scattered around them. Investigating, it becomes apparent that he’s stumbled across the sight of some sort of organised crime rendezvous gone horribly wrong; the slain men died clutching their weapons in the midst of a hideous firefight. Tracking down the one that got away, Moss finds him having bled out under a tree where he’d sought shelter, along with the thing he fled with – a thick briefcase stuffed with cash.
Moss thinks he’s got it made – just leave with the suitcase and there’s nothing to connect him to the incident, at least as far as any law enforcement investigation is concerned. Yet his conscience tickles him – for there was one survivor left at the crime scene, too wounded and incoherent to walk or drive away, begging him for water. Moss makes the fatal error of returning to the scene with water – only to find that the survivor is dead, and to get himself spotted at the scene by some interested parties. The backers of that deal want their money back – and to get it they hire Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a hitman who unleashes all the hideous violence he is capable of for the sake of finishing the job – beginning by killing his employers so he can ultimately keep the cash for himself. Is Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) equal to the task of taking down Chigurh? Has the modern world become too depraved for Bell’s folksy values? Or is it the case that the American West has been haunted by generations of cyclical violence, that facing it is a young man’s game, and this is No Country For Old Men?
If Fargo was the Coen’s commercial and critical high water mark of the 1990s, No Country For Old Men – based on the Cormac McCarthy novel – was their peak of the 2000s, and whilst there’s plenty to enjoy here, what really pushed it to the next level was Bardem’s instantly captivating performance as Chigurh, about as chilling a depiction of conscienceless evil as has ever appeared on the big screen. Chigurh is not, by any stretch of the imagination, without emotion – sure, in conversations with others he tends to lack affect, but watch his facial expressions in the first murder we see him commit – that of a Texas police officer who arrests him for some unseen atrocity. Despite the cynicism of the philosophy he expresses later in the movie, in that moment it’s evident that for him killing, especially a visceral kill like that one, is a gateway to a level of ecstasy and passion we don’t see him experience in any other context. This is reiterated by the weirdly intimate nature of the killing – he’s looped the handcuffs he’s been bound with around his victim’s neck and is lying on the floor with his victim writhing on top of him.
Perhaps their darkest and least comedic effort since Blood Simple, No Country is set in 1980, so it shares a general zeitgeist with the Coens’ other 1980s-set thrillers like Fargo and Blood Simple and Raising Arizona. Structurally, it’s kind of similar to Fargo, in that you have this crime and mayhem happening for a good chunk of time before the police officer who’s going to be central to investigating it comes onscreen, only the ending’s nowhere near so hopeful. We get narration from Bell at the start set against gorgeous shots of the West Texas landscape, but he doesn’t actually become involved in the story until about half an hour in, we don’t delve quite as deep into his life as we do Marge’s, and he is not able to be as effective as she was in that.
Admittedly, in that story Gunderson manages to catch one of the perpetrators through sheer luck – but she’s more or less pieced the entire thing together through detective work prior to that, or at least advanced the case to the point where follow-up queries will tease everything out. By contrast, Bell never comes face to face with Chigurh, and really his arc is about his slow, dawning realisation that he does not want to, and that in fact he wants to retire from law enforcement because he does not want to spend his last years immersed in the evils of the world. Apparently, compared to the novel his presence is scaled back – I’ve not read it myself, but I think the surprisingly sparse use of Bell makes a ton of sense, since it sells the idea that here’s this guy who is expected to delve into this situation to untangle it and realises that he’s lost the nerve necessary to tackle it.
What saves this from a tediously social conservative message is Bell’s visit to his uncle Ellis (Barry Corbin), who reminds him that his great-uncle was shot dead on his own porch in 1909, and that violence has been a fact of life in the region for generations. The implication is that the nature and origin of that violence which evolves over time, and so if it now seems unacceptable to Bell, it’s probably because violence of the type Bell is accustomed to has been displaced by violence of a type he isn’t.
If there was any doubt that Bell is central to the story, the fact that the final scene consists largely of him giving a monologue at his kitchen table before an abrupt cut to the credits ought to get the point across. The ending of the movie is much-debated, and it’s hard to argue that it doesn’t just kind of peter out without much in the way of a conventionally satisfying conclusion. That said, the Coens went for a very loyal adaptation of the novel, so they tied their own hands somewhat in this respect, and it does add a slice-of-life sense to proceedings that lends a certain realism to proceedings.
In fact, let me give an analogy: for as long as Moss is active in the story, it feels like things are running along according to narrative logic – there’s run-ins, scrapes, and difficulties, but it feels like this is a story where sooner or later we’ll see Moss and Chigurh confront one another and there’ll be a conventional payoff. Then, when Moss is gone, it’s as though narrative logic ceases to apply and the logic of real life, where we don’t get to know how the story begins and won’t see how it ends, reasserts itself. Even higurh being left shaken and bloodied after a car accident at the conclusion of his plotline is a reminder that he was not the agent of fate, destiny, and random chance he liked to pose as, but as much subject to outside forces as anyone else.
Burn After Reading
When senior analyst Osbourne Cox (John Malkovitch) quits the CIA rather than accept an insulting demotion (due to his alleged drinking problem), he decides to occupy himself by writing his memoirs. His wife Katie (Tilda Swinton), dissatisfied in the marriage already and having an affair with US Marshal Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney), plans to divorce him, and is encouraged by her attorney to swipe as many household financial records as possible before broaching the subject of divorce so he can’t squirrel away money beyond the reach of a financial settlement.
Meanwhile, gym manager Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) is having glum, discouraging results in the online dating scene. When meathead trainer Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) finds a mystery CD-ROM in one of the locker rooms, it turns out to be a rip of all of Osbourne’s personal files that Katie made when she was researching his finances, left there by mistake by her lawyer’s secretary. When Linda and Chad decide to phone Osbourne and offer to give the stuff back and maybe get a little reward, the call goes south in a big way. And since Harry is sleeping around on Katie, using the same dating site as Linda to meet people, the two of them end up entangled. As bit by bit sheer chance and deliberate chicanery sees the stakes rising higher and higher, Osbourne, Linda, Chad, and Harry all find that the pressure’s getting to them – leading to an absolute clusterf*ck that not even the CIA can unravel…
As well as being a classic Coen farce, this is a spoof of the US surveillance state with the sensibilities of an old-school screwball comedy, like if Dr. Strangelove didn’t have a nuclear crisis and spent its running time depicting the disintegrating personal lives of the military officers in that. Just as Intolerable Cruelty was all about very wealthy Beverley Hills types being horrid, this revolves around Federal government bureaucrats and people in their social penumbra being petty little sh*theads to each other. Unlike Intolerable Cruelty, I don’t feel like the movie asks me to get invested in the happiness of a swathe of people who don’t deserve it, mind – everything augurs towards disaster, and I am 100% here for that schadenfreude.
It’s hard to understate what a tonal shift this is after No Country For Old Men. It’s not just down to it being vastly funnier than that dark and dour story – it also comes down to the basic storytelling approach. No Country For Old Men offered a fairly simple story replete with dark ambiguities; in contrast, this tells a complex story with great clarity, not least because if it didn’t keep you in the loop on its twists and turns and made each character’s motivations very clear you’d rapidly get lost. Like I said, it’s way less dark – but not completely light-hearted; its first hour or so is pretty gentle but then there’s a scene which plays out like the end of Blue Velvet gone wrong and suddenly the story has a body count.
All this benefits from a great set of performances from the cast. McDormand is wonderful as Linda, who comes across like a parallel universe version of Marge from Fargo if she hadn’t been lucky in love, got bitter about it, and picked up a mean streak along the way. Brad Pitt’s performance as Chad is absolutely hilarious – he’s just the most boneheaded bro who ever bro’d, it would merely require a scene of him walking in a boisterous fashion behind a glum virgin and he’d become the archetypal Chad. George Clooney is working his usual persona, skewed towards the most sleazy and objectionable version of that, and hey, Joel Coen: don’t think we didn’t spot you working in some love scenes between your wife and Clooney. (Any director’s chair can be a cuck chair with the right people in front of the camera, after all.)
Whilst some may find Burn After Reading dismayingly bleak in its own way, I found it an absolute hoot – a meditation on how toxic social circles like the one the Coxes occupy can be and how they can destroy those who stray into them unprepared or rip apart their own arbitrarily, bound up with an utterly hilarious comedy of errors. I love it.
A Serious Man
This one opens in a bizarre fashion, with an Eastern European Jewish couple some time in the 19th Century apparently having a run-in with a dybbuk in the guise of an innocent rabbi – or maybe the wife just murdered the rabbi under the impression he was a dybbuk. We then jump to the late 1960s in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, where the Coens themselves grew up; Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is a physics professor whose life is about to fall apart. Clive (David Kang), a student of his with a wealthy father, fumblingly attempts to bribe him to raise his grades, and when Larry attempts to decline the bribe Clive’s father threatens him with lawsuits. Larry’s wife Judith (Sari Lennick) is seeking to divorce him in favour of Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), Larry’s brother Arthur (Richard Kind) is mooching off the family and seems to be in a spiral of mental health troubles, and Larry’s son Danny (Aaron Wolff) is running into problems with teachers and fellow kids alike as he studies for his bar mitzvah. Can this modern-day Job find consolation in his faith in the face of these troubles, or are they just the prelude of worse disasters to come?
A Serious Man engages deeper with the Coens’ personal heritage than any prior work of theirs, set as it is in their home town among a Midwestern Jewish community at around the time they’d have been around Bar Mitzvah age, and I imagine that if that’s something you yourself are familiar with, there’s a layer of comedy here which lands differently depending on how close you are to the Coens’ own background. This isn’t a deal-breaker by any means – after all, the art of this sort of thing hinges on pitching it in a way which will be eminently recognisable to people from the sort of little world it depicts whilst at the same time opening it up to offer insights which will be understandable and amusing to people from a different background.
The whole setup here is of a sad nebbishy guy who gets severely dumped on by everyone around him – his family, his students and their rich dipsh*t parents, his health, his so-called friends – and who has a terrible time of it as a result, with the movie ending on portents of doom and even worse to come; it’s a slice of life sourced from a life that’s spiralling into utter misery. If it’s teaching me anything about Jewish culture, it’s giving me a good long look at the Yiddish archetype of the “nebbish” – I think I’ve got that right – which is territory Barton Fink already covered. (Indeed, I wonder if some of the ideas here might have been recycled from Old Fink – the Coens’ proposed sequel to Barton Fink in which Barton, having shopped lots of his old friends to the House Un-American Affairs Committee, ends up a professor at some college somewhere; swap out quantum physics here and replace it with literary theory and you’re most of the way there.)
It’s been compared to the Biblical story of Job, and there’s probably something to that; Larry is faced with all manner of misfortunes for reasons which are basically not his fault, with the otherwise-unconnected prologue story widely interpreted as suggesting he’s cursed. That’s interesting in concept, though it can create a story which is rather gruelling to sit through in practice; Larry’s a likeable guy who essentially does nothing wrong beyond briefly peeping at a neighbour who’s sunbathing naked, and whilst in your typical Coen farce misfortune is fairly widely distributed, in this the movie’s supply of bad luck seems to primarily fall upon Larry to the near-exclusion of everyone else, bar from Sy having a nasty accident midway through and Arthur facing sodomy charges. At the very end it’s suggested the whole community is about to face bigger problems in the form of a devastating spate of tornados – apocalypse comes for us all, after all.
This ended up being too much for me – I really wanted to see Larry turn the tables on someone, or at least for another person to treat him with a shred of decency, but I just didn’t get enough of that to keep me engaged. The bit which broke me is probably the part where Larry has to sleep on a camp bed in the living room – where Arthur is already sleeping on the couch – which hits one of my bugbears. f*ck chivalry: unless there’s physical disabilities involved, a person who unilaterally initiates a divorce ought to be the one who moves out of the marital bed until separate living arrangements can be ironed out, it’s the least you can do.
For that matter, this is the second Coen movie in a row where “a wife intent on divorcing her husband absolutely empties all of his bank accounts” is a plot point, which is starting to feel like a bit like an axe being ground – a particularly weird on, since neither Joel nor Ethan have been divorced. Buds, dudes, Intolerable Cruelty is done and dusted, maybe get over the divorce thing already?
