On The Eve Of 'A Serious Man,' The St...

On The Eve Of 'A Serious Man,' The Strange Appeal Of The Brothers Coen

Category: Film/Movie
Posted 3 months ago by wdweditorial
Credit: http://moviesblog.mtv.com/2009/09/30/on-the-eve-of-a
By rights, Ethan and Joel Coen should not be the massively successful filmmakers they are. I’m not impugning their talent, skill or artistry with that statement; it's more that their movies are very, very strange. Weird by any standard, which makes it occasionally shocking to sit back and look at their success in popular culture. Their movies, especially those made in the past ten years, are sold as mainstream motion pictures when they their tone and content should really sentence them to a boutique indie theater existence. When people gravitate towards entertainment that is easy to understand and comfortable to watch, how is it that guys who make something as densely surreal as “Barton Fink” or as willfully grim and ambiguous as “No Country For Old Men” are two of America’s favorite moviemakers? Were movies like “Raising Arizona” and “O Brother, Where Art Thou” the brothers’ only output, the easy answer would be the tangible warmth and affection they have for their characters. Strangeness permeates their films; in the dialogue between characters, in the almost cartoonish quality of the plots and even in the actual cinematography. The surreality is cut by painting even the most freakish characters as likable. If The Dude (Jeff Bridges) or Walter Sobchak (John Goodman) were real people, you probably wouldn’t want anything to do with them. One of them doesn’t shower and the other is a violent lunatic. That's the magic of the Coens; they shape their stories in a way that makes us not only sympathize with, but genuinely like their characters. The brothers have a knack for creating likable losers, but the majority of their films don’t exhibit much warmth. The Coens’ genre-defying movies are generally dark parables about the nature of humanity, serious explorations hidden behind absurdity. “Fargo” and “Burn After Reading,” among others, actually paint their characters as detestably flawed, people to be ridiculed rather than adored. They pace their stories with expert precision, building to powerful, often violent, climaxes (the killing of the kidnappers in “Fargo,” the fire in “Barton Fink.”) Still, we don't have an adequate explanation for the Coen brothers' continuing mainstream success however. Twenty years after “Raising Arizona,” the truth is that the stylistic sensibilities of these two filmmakers are familiar to moviegoers. Their movies are strange in comparison to other mainstream movies, but they’ve become a known quantity to mainstream audiences at this point. Oddity is their calling card, their oeuvre defined.
Related Links: Joel Coen, A Serious Man (2009), mtv.com
On The Eve Of 'A Serious Man,' The Strange Appeal Of The Brothers Coen
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Tags: Commentary :: Coen Brothers :: A Serious Man :: Ehtan Coen
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