Coenpalooza! Reconsidering the Coens

I spent a long while grousing and bitching about the Coen brothers, calling them misanthropes, sniggerers, maybe even (thanks to Jonathan Rosenbaum's essay on Barton Fink - a must-read, if you haven't encountered it) Jewish anti-Semites (something Rosenbaum himself does not say, though he comes close enough that it caused me to squint at some of their other films and wonder, over the years...). Their first film, Blood Simple, I held for decades as their finest - a solid, creepy, brilliantly plotted noir about mistrust and misperception and a singularly convoluted murder or three. Of their subsequent works, I admired Miller's Crossing the most, only to discover (when I first read The Glass Key) that much of the plot of that film is lifted straight from Dashiell Hammett, which discovery - since postmodern irony and the whole theft-as-homage thing popularized by Tarantino weren't as prevalent back in the late 1980's and early 1990s - disappointed me immensely; it probably would have been okay had they given a nod to Hammett in the credits, or had I not originally taken the film for being their original story, but for awhile, I accused them of plagiarism, to boot. (Strangely, never did it bother me that bits of the plot of The Big Lebowski  were lifted from Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep; and I positively loved The Hudsucker Proxy, their overt tribute to Frank Capra, though I knew they were riffing on Capra from the gitgo. I guess I can retroactively forgive Miller's Crossing now, too, since its "borrowings" are no more egregious than those films').

My irritation with the Coens peaked for me in 2007, with No Country for Old Men, which I wrote a very bitchy, "notice-me" blogpost about, here, though this in no way reflects how I currently feel about the film - the things that I hated about it were less glaringly irritating on second and third viewing, while the things I admired, I came to admire more. I still get irritated by some of what they do - the half of Fargo that is brilliant grates fiercely against the half that is annoying as all hell, and I have no interest in ever rewatching some of their films - that Billy Bob Thornton noir, for instance, or Intolerable Cruelty, or... 

But generally I've mellowed where it comes to the Coens - maybe just because so few (relatively) mainstream movies made these days have an ounce of their craft, their respect for cinema, their love of the image, their wit, their complexity. I'm less inclined to take the Coens for granted and snipe from my margin, and more inclined to be grateful they're around - because they make solidly entertaining, interesting, provocative, funny, and gorgeously-crafted films, and have been doing so for a very long time now, without much in the way of compromise, and no flat-out bad movies (I even have some liking for their version of The Ladykillers).  Much as I admire some of the works of their fellow travellers in American cinema - Jarmusch or Tarantino, say - the Coens have produced a much larger, much more consistently interesting body of films, which accomplishment deserves respect and comment. Besides, I've bitched about them enough.

In any event... the idea of an all-day Coen brothers marathon, such as the Vancity Theatre is hosting on December 21st, seems like a stroke of brilliance - particularly since there are doubtlessly many moviegoers who have not seen their early features. The only one I plan to skip for sure is Raising Arizona - a film that has never really agreed with me, though it's brilliantly cinematic. Note that for those who have not seen Blood Simple, it's a terrific, terrific film (though it is annoying that it's only available in their perversely shortened director's cut!); it screens on Friday the 20th, the night before the marathon. The Big Lebowski, meanwhile, will repeat on New Year's Eve...