Coen Brothers Films the Coen

Coen Brothers Films

The Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, have created a very unique place for themselves within the realm of American cinema. As a writing and directing team where they appear to be relatively interchangeable and complimentary, the Coen's have developed a particular style that generally results in a particular distinctness that can be identified as a "Coen" film. Speaking particularly to their comedies, Raising Arizona, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, what the Coens' achieve is a seemingly impossible mix of rich darkness in the action (kidnapping, murder, prison breaks, sexual assault, blackmail, deals with the devil, animal cruelty, and extortion) with an undeniable soul that allows us to genuinely root for the direction of the film and the deep humanity of it all. Including the Devil in O' Brother, every character in each of these films is someone whom we can understand and believe in from within their particular context. This, then, is perhaps the most significant achievement and idiosyncratic of the Coens' accomplishments -- the absolute insistence that, regardless of who they are, all players in their world are relatable and reflect the more basic and essentially silly or unreasonable parts of ourselves and our desires.

All three of the Coen brothers' films reflect the director's personal histories -- they spent long months in their childhood home in Minnesota locked away by the weather that forced them to see the world through the prism of television and movies. It can be no wonder then that they see the world in terms of Frank Capra and Raymond Chandler. To see the thread that weaves between all four of these movies, we have to look at their structure, dialogue, casting, and direction. As a team, Joel and Ethan Coen have written, directed and produced a total of fifteen movies. Among those films are four significant comedies both light and dark that epitomize the "Coen style": deeply human characters who show us parts of ourselves, a mimicry/version of a particular style or genre of film, a dedication to delivery of a particular place or time (or both), and an absolute consistency of construction from beginning to end.

Raising Arizona, set in "current" Arizona, seems dated now, but represents a visionary combination of deeply poetic and emotionally complex characters juxtaposed with a sparse physical setting. This is the American Dream movie; boy meets girl, they get married, get a house, and create a family -- even if they have to steal a baby to achieve their final goal. So much of this film is dedicated to the idea that both rich and poor can achieve satisfaction and happiness if they pursue the moral path of doing the right thing. H.I. is a good man, even though he kidnaps a baby, Edwina is a good woman even though she violates her professional code and participates in the kidnapping of the baby, and Nathan Arizona is a good man even though he is rich and hires a homicidal bunny-killing agent of Satan to track down his missing child. In this film, we are submerged in an alternative reality such that we know we are being told a story but it remains close enough to us that when H.I. goes on a very funny foot race with the police through houses and back-yards, with his full-leg stockings hanging off his head like a demented diaper-stealing rabbit (an image that takes us to the grenading of a bunny by Leonard Smalls (an inappropriately tamely named biker/hit man). H.I. And Ed do not commit violence or cruelty, they steal to survive because they see no other way out of their immediate predicament. Essentially, they are poorly formed adults who continue to respond to passion rather than reason and only through commission of a "wrong" do they finally understand how to live their lives "right."

O' Brother, Where Art Thou?, employs much of the same elements that are present in Arizona. There is a very specific immersion in a particular place, with the addition of time as well. There are deeply flawed but essentially good characters who want their lives to be better, but don't know how to make that happen without resorting to crime. There is a very clearly altered reality that is made evident from the very beginning of the film with the fortune-telling blind man moving his rail cart down the line. And, there is the sense that even the bad-guys are guided by more than just a temptation to be bad -- they are antagonists because of their role, not because of who they are. This is also another example of a film in which the Coen's explore the nature of good and evil in man within the religious parable. Leonard Smalls, Big Dan Teague (played by John Goodman in his third role in a Coen brothers' film), and Sheriff Cooley are representations of hell and of evil while being absolutely true to themselves -- they are the counterpoint in their absolute clarity of purpose to the muddle that the rest of the characters who are on the "good" side of things experience. What the Coen's continue to say here, as they did in Arizona, is that good people trying to live their lives do so with great complexity while the world around them seems to be filled with absolutes that they cannot control and that the true human struggle is in doing what is good and right -- absolutes prevent us from growing or changing. Emmett is clearly an insecure, semi-intellectual bully who couldn't truly hurt a fly, his crimes are that of convenience that have little forethought or complex planning -- just as is the kidnapping of Nathan Jr.

In O Brother, the world is both real and absolutely fake; it's familiar from our collective imagination as created by screwball comedies of the 1940's and 50's, the laws of nature are ignored and the people are over-simplified into caricatures, but the whole is an absolutely perfectly orchestrated chaos of personalities all showing us that when we are true to ourselves, we achieve peace. In both films, this is the parable that is woven. Fargo, set again in a stark yet surprisingly rich North Dakota populated by the same kind of denizens from Arizona and O Brother, takes a turn toward earlier Coen work like Blood Simple and Barton Fink, in which crime of a violent and jarring nature takes center stage as the catalyst for all action. But, what we find in Fargo, is that there is an unwavering stability in the form of Marge Gunderson -- the terribly pregnant Sheriff with the stamp-painting house-keeping husband who absolutely epitomizes the economy of speech, the odd Midwestern lilt with its "you betcha's" coupled with an absolutely razor sharp assessment of the world around her. Marge is our anchor when every single other character, with the exception of Gaear Grismrud (who is absolutely always true to his quite evil self, and is played by another of the Coens' core of players, Peter Stormare), is struggling to find peace. Again, we have a stylized environment, caricatures of people, an altered reality, but we also have a new take on the crime film hero -- a small, pregnant woman who is both absolutely in command and yet absolutely feminine too (within the context of the frozen wasteland of North Dakota).