Tag: Coen brothers

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Coen Brothers Film Festival Brings Fargo, The Big Lebowski Back To Big Screen

The Big Lebowski

It’s hard to overstate the impact Joel and Ethan Coen have had on American film. Beginning with 1984’s Blood Simple, the two brothers from Minneapolis were a major influence on the indie revolution of the 1990s. 1987’s Raising Arizona made a star out of Nicolas Cage and proved that smart, surrealist comedy could attract an audience. Today, the TV series inspired by their Cannes- and Academy Award-winning 1996 film Fargo, keeps their legacy alive by being one of the consistently best things on the little screen.
With new film releases scarce because of the pandemic, Malco Theatres is celebrating the Coen brothers with a mini-film festival, which runs from November 20-26. The six titles represent a cross-section of the Coens’ work, from legendary comedy to existential drama. And the price is right, at $2 per ticket.

The twin crown jewels of the Coens’ filmography came out back to back in 1996 and 1998. Fargo is a crime thriller like no other. Frances McDormand, who happens to be Joel’s wife, won her first Oscar for her portrayal of Marge Gundersen, police chief of Brainard, Minnesota, who uncovers a plot by used car salesman Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) to fake the kidnapping of his wife Jean (Kristin Rudrud) that goes terribly wrong. Here’s McDormand delivering one of the greatest soliloquies in all of film history as she takes kidnapper Gaear (Peter Stormare) to face justice.

Coen Brothers Film Festival Brings Fargo, The Big Lebowski Back To Big Screen

Two years later, the Coens took a wild left turn and made one of the most beloved comedies of all time. The Big Lebowski forever associated Jeff Bridges with The Dude, an unreconstructed hippie turned amateur detective. Intended as a parody of Southern California noir classics like The Big Sleep, The Big Lebowski’s greatest strength is as a series of indelible character sketches. Just check out this legendary bowling alley scene with Bridges, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, and John Turturro.

Coen Brothers Film Festival Brings Fargo, The Big Lebowski Back To Big Screen (2)

2003’s Intolerable Cruelty is a rarity. It did not start out as a Coen script, but the brothers took over the production and rewrote it. It’s not one of their classics, but if anyone else had made it, it would have been the highlight of their career. It features remarkable comedic performances from George Clooney, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Cedric the Entertainer, and Billy Bob Thornton.

Coen Brothers Film Festival Brings Fargo, The Big Lebowski Back To Big Screen (3)

2007’s No Country for Old Men was the Coens’ adaptation of a late-period Cormac McCarthy novel which won Best Picture, Best Director(s), and Best Screenplay Oscars, as well as Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Javier Bardem as the killer Anton Chigurh.

Coen Brothers Film Festival Brings Fargo, The Big Lebowski Back To Big Screen (4)

2008’s Burn After Reading saw the Coens returning to Big Lebowski-style comedy, this time set in Washington DC. It features a powerhouse cast, including McDormand, John Malkovich, George Clooney, Tilda Swinton, and Brad Pitt. Here’s McDormand and Pitt trying to blackmail soon-to-be-former CIA agent Malkovich.

Coen Brothers Film Festival Brings Fargo, The Big Lebowski Back To Big Screen (5)

The next year, the Coens returned to their Midwestern Jewish roots with A Serious Man, which they describe as a Yiddish folk tale that never was.

Coen Brothers Film Festival Brings Fargo, The Big Lebowski Back To Big Screen (6)

You can review Malco’s COVID policies here and buy tickets for the Coen Brothers Film Festival here, on their website.

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Film Features Film/TV

The OGs: Chris Rock Shines in Fargo’s Brilliant Season 4

America is the great melting pot. Immigrants from all over the world come here to get their chance at a new life in the Land of Opportunity. They take on our ways — our belief in equality and liberty — and, eventually, a bit of their culture becomes a part of the mix. That’s how we got pizza, rock-and-roll, and the best organized crime in the world.

The immigrant experience in the Midwest is a prime example of how the melting pot works. At the turn of the 20th century, Jews ran the crime syndicates of Kansas City. Then, after World War I and an influenza pandemic shook up the country, a new, tight-knit, ethnically based group versed in extortion, racketeering, and violence arrived to challenge “The Hebrews.” The dominance of the Irish mob in the “Paris of the Plains” lasted only 14 years until the Cosa Nostra arrived.

You’re darn tootin’ — (above, center) Jason Schwartzman leads Fargo’s Fadda family.

Thanks to The Godfather, the Italian mafia are the popular face of organized crime. The Fadda family ruled the Midwestern rackets until 1949, when their dominance was challenged by the Cannons, a Black gang. They, too, were an ethnic crime organization who banded together for mutual protection and economic advancement while fleeing Jim Crow persecution in their own country.

Thus begins season four of Fargo, showrunner Noah Hawley’s sprawling anthology series inspired by the Coen Brothers’ 1996 film masterpiece. The original Fargo remains an unassuming tour de force of unhinged violence and Midwest manners. Frances McDormand’s portrayal of Marge Gunderson, the pregnant, small-town police chief who unravels a clumsy tangle of kidnapping and murder, earned her the first of two Academy Awards. Her husband, Joel Coen, received his half of the Best Screenplay Oscar for the film. They are responsible for the tonal tightrope act that makes Fargo unique. When Marge’s combination of decency and empathy comes up against Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) and his half-baked plan to kidnap his wife, which leads to multiple homicides, she calmly unravels the crime. Only at the end, after five people are dead and she’s taking the murderers to justice, does she contemplate the big picture. “All for what? For a little bit of money? There’s more to life than a little money, you know.”

The three seasons of Fargo FX has produced so far have dispelled any skepticism I might have had as to whether Hawley and company can recapture Fargo‘s lightning in a bottle. Each season has told an independent story of crime and dubious punishment set in the upper Midwest, with the second season, which saw Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons trying to cover up a hit-and-run while being stalked by a North Dakota crime family — and sheriff Ted Danson — being the best. For season four, Chris Rock stars as Loy Cannon, the upstart head of the Black crime syndicate that is moving into the KC territory with more smarts and subtlety than the Italian powers-that-be.

Chris Rock runs a rival crime syndicate moving in on the Faddas’ territory.

When the balance of criminal power is threatened, the crime families have a tradition that’s intended to build trust between them. The syndicate leaders trade youngest sons, raising them in rival families — as hostages and as real-life examples of the melting pot. It’s a bold plan that, judging from the lengthy opening sequence, has never worked. At best, it only delays the inevitable betrayal.

Still, the uneasy alliance is holding until, in true Fargo fashion, random fate intervenes. The Fadda patriarch (Tommaso Ragno) is killed in a freak accident, leaving his less-experienced son Josto (Jason Schwartzman) in charge, and setting up power plays both between and within the rival gangs.

Hawley, who wrote and directed the first two episodes, spends most of the initial two hours introducing a massive cast of characters. The most impressive is Jessie Buckley, recently seen in I’m Thinking of Ending Things, who slowly reveals the depths of Nurse Mayflower’s psychosis. E’myri Crutchfield is mesmerizing as Ethelrida Smutny, a 16-year-old savant who sees her parents being drawn into the coming conflagration. Rock devotes his considerable gifts toward summoning the gravitas expected of a crime boss; his scenes with consigliere Doctor Senator (Glynn Turman) recall Brando and Duvall in The Godfather.

Fargo has been one of the best-looking shows on television throughout its run. Season four continues that tradition with leaf-swept scenes of idyllic Midwestern autumn. As does Lovecraft Country, one of Hawley’s ambitions is to tackle racism through the lens of genre stories. So far, Fargo is neat and focused where Lovecraft Country is scattered and visceral. If I can find flaw in Fargo, it’s that it is taking its sweet time to get to the meat of the story. But there’s plenty of pleasure to be had watching Hawley set up the pieces on his game board, and I’ll be coming back for more.

Fargo Season 4 is on FX and Hulu.

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Film Features Film/TV

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

The image of the cowboy emerged at roughly the same time as America entered the 20th century. Although his stories are usually set in the late 1800s, the first fictional cowboy was the eponymous star of Owen Wister’s 1902 novel The Virginian. In the first chapters, the Virginian is called a son of a bitch by two different men. He shares a laugh with one and threatens the second one with a drawn pistol in the midst of a poker game. “When you call me that, SMILE!”

The genre The Virginian inspired, the Western, has had a huge influence on the American self-image. No matter how woke we believe ourselves to be, inside each of us are fragments of the self-sufficient, rugged individualist, gregarious to his friends but given to sudden flashes of murderous temper when challenged. For better or worse, the cowboy is at the core of the stories Americans tell about ourselves.

Zoe Kazan (left) and Bill Heck star in “The Girl Who Got Rattled” in the Coens’ send-up of the Western genre, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

You will never see a trope exploded with more elan than the Coen Brothers bring to the screen in the first, eponymous segment of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. At some point during Tim Blake Nelson’s (initially) consequence-free, musical murder spree, it will occur to you that the whole singing cowboy thing has always been kinda messed up. Nelson’s aw-shucks deadpan, which holds while he’s singing on horseback and delivering blistering rounds of ultraviolence is a wonder to behold.
The image of a face with a single bullet hole to the forehead, like a third eye opening, recurs during the six segments of this anthology. The short sketches written by Joel and Ethan Coen are presented like chapters in a Virginian-era book of Western stories. The Coens, who have never seen a genre they didn’t want to tear down and rebuild from first principles, want to go back to the source of the American self-image and ask some questions.

After puncturing Gene Autry’s balloon, the Coens go full Ambrose Bierce in “Near Algodones.” James Franco is a hapless, would-be bandit whose convoluted comeuppance makes a mockery of the notion that we are in any way in charge of our own fate.

In “Meal Ticket,” the Brothers take on the perverse incentives and human cost imposed by buccaneer capitalism. Harry Melling plays an actor with no arms or legs who flawlessly delivers lines from Coleridge, Shakespeare, and Lincoln, while Liam Neeson, in a nearly wordless performance, is the sideshow impresario who both supports and exploits him.

The film’s best casting choice is reserved for “All Gold Canyon,” an adaptation of a Jack London short story starring musician Tom Waits. Has no one ever thought to cast the sandpaper-voiced Waits as a a grizzled old prospector before, or was he just holding out for the right directors? Either way, it was worth the wait.

From the literature, it looks like taming the Old West was a pretty masculine affair. We’ve all seen Brokeback Mountain. The plight of the women in the wagon trains is the focus of “The Girl Who Got Rattled.” Alice Longabaugh (Zoe Kazan) is an unwilling traveler on the Oregon Trail, dragged along by her elder brother Gilbert (Jefferson Mays) to be married off to an orchard owner at their Western destination. She finds an unexpected romantic opportunity in the person of trail rider Billy Knapp (Bill Heck) and reels when her constrained world is suddenly freed by the possibility of free will and happiness.
In the final segment, “The Mortal Remains,” a pious lady (Tyne Daly), a Frenchman (Saul Rubinek), and a talkative trapper (Chelcie Ross) share a long stagecoach ride with a pair of mysterious bad men (Jonjo O’Neill and Brendan Gleeson). It is a troubling thesis statement for the film, that owes a visual debt to The Hateful Eight while underlining the Coens’ existentialism.

The Coens, who have been among the greatest American filmmakers for almost three decades now, want to look at the Western in a new way, and they’re choosing a new way of filmmaking. It’s the Coens’ first all-digital production, so longtime cinematographer Roger Deakins is replaced by Inside Llewyn Davis lenser Bruno Delbonnel.

The film got an enthusiastic reception at the Venice Film Festival this year, where it won Best Screenplay, but outside of a limited release to qualify for Oscar competition, it’s available solely on Netflix. Whether it would have been a financial success in theaters, we’ll never know — though True Grit, the Coens’ last western adventure, made a wagon train full of money. On an artistic level, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is an unreserved success.

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Film Features Film/TV

On the Hunt

Early in No Country for Old Men, Joel and Ethan Coen’s acclaimed adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel, Vietnam vet Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) puts his wife Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald) on a bus to send her away from potential violence. Moss has recently made off with a satchel of cash left over from a drug deal gone bad, and he warns his wife that she isn’t used to the kind of trouble they may be facing. Carla Jean’s response: “I’m used to lots of things — I worked at Wal-Mart.”

In print, this exchange is typical Coens — a telegraphed laugh-line delivered for the audience at the expense of the character. But, on film, it doesn’t play that way. Macdonald withholds the effect. She says the line but in a flat murmur, like she’s hoping no one will notice. She seems to be protecting her character from a mistake in the script. She also saves the Coens from perhaps the only potentially bad moment in what is otherwise their best film.

The Coens are working with an entirely new group of actors here after utilizing an extended company of familiar faces for most of their career. The result is that no one acts like they’re in a Coen Brothers movie. Each actor stays true to character rather than pandering to the perceived superiority of the audience, and the Coens themselves follow suit (or perhaps lead the way), overcoming the smug, cold snarkiness that animates most of their work (or ruins it, depending on your perspective). The result is the duo’s most measured film ever, a tense, virtuoso thriller where violence is undercut by legitimate sadness.

Intricately designed and richly photographed by Roger Deakins, the film is basically a three-way chase film. It’s set in 1980, in a West in which the wide-open landscapes are more likely to be a home to drug trafficking than cattle drives. The plot is set in motion when Moss, while hunting in the West Texas prairies, comes upon the aftermath of a massacre, a botched exchange with heroin and cash left behind amid unspeakable carnage — even a dog has been shot.

Moss leaves the dope but takes the cash and is soon being hunted by Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a psychopathic hitman trailing the money. Following behind them both is Sheriff Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), a third-generation lawman troubled by the shifting nature of the crime he’s forced to confront.

All three leads are terrific in roles that are relatively solitary and less talky than the Coen norm. Brolin is vivid as a man on the run, about to find out if he’s as capable as he thinks he is. Bardem makes for one of the most compelling and frightening screen villains ever, a calm, implacable killer whose glazed hint of a grin and Prince Valiant hairdo make him an unsettling presence even before he acts. And Jones plays effectively to type as a tart, unsentimental observer of a world gone mad.

No Country for Old Men is a strikingly violent film: Chigurh is introduced in the process of being apprehended, soon strangling the arresting officer with his handcuffs, turning a small-town police-station floor into a Jackson Pollock of blood and scuff marks. Soon after, the Coens film a gripping scene where a pit bull charges across a shallow river after Moss, only to meet her doom. The novel yet realistic staging of these moments of violence is enhanced by terrific thriller mechanics involving the hunt for Moss and his hiding of the purloined loot. But most impressive is the discipline that the Coens show in eliding Chigurh’s killings as the film develops.

Like any other Coen movie, No Country for Old Men is more about their cultural source material (McCarthy’s novel, film thrillers from ’40s noir to Sam Peckinpah) than about real life. But here, unlike most of their work, they treat their influences right. It’s Blood Simple sans bullshit. As a lean, self-contained thriller about a human monster, it lies somewhere between the pure poetry of The Night of the Hunter and the grim waking nightmare of (the original) Cape Fear. And it’s more worthy of those comparisons than any modern movie I can think of.

No Country for Old Men

Opens Wednesday, November 21st

Studio on the Square