Me, my daughter and the Coen Brothers

Anyone who reads my daughter's blogs knows that she majored in film in college and is a sharply opinionated, highly critical movie consumer. We have had endless conversations about film in general, and in many places we are in agreement. There are, of course, places where we disagree and probably the strongest disagreement we have regarding film direction is the Coen Brothers.

Now I love the Coen Brother's body of work. I think that they approach each film using a different culture to stage their story in and with keen accuracy, peg that culture exactly every time. They have a very odd but dry sense of humor that entertains me a lot, and I'm not much of a tolerant comedy viewer. I want smart comedy, not slapstick or broad stroked sophomoric humor -- I have no patience for that. Their comedy rests in the decisions that their characters have to make throughout some admittedly absurd positions that they find themselves in. Their characters are broken people in many cases, making bad decisions that land them in the worst possible circumstances and then, when trying to rectify these things, force themselves into even worse situations.

The Coen Brothers' strength is in their choice of settings, their characterizations and in their direction of the actors; the characters carry the stories and do it well. The images that come into my mind when I think of the Coen Brothers always make me smile: Holly Hunter as the poor county detective who wants a baby so badly, in one of their early films, Raising Arizona. She falls in love with a criminal, Nicholas Cage, she is booking in the jailhouse. They devise a scheme to kidnap a baby that continues to fall into pieces with every ticking minute of the film. John Goodman, a frequent player for the Coen Brothers, climbing out of a hole in the ground after tunneling out of a prison to go visit Nicholas Cage. This enrages Holly Hunter, who sees him as a threat to the baby, when all he really wants to do is put his gang back together and get on with the business of his life of crime. John Goodman shines in the Coen Brothers films; I see him walking down the flaming hotel hallway in Barton Fink, the ruthless, matter of fact serial killer who befriends John Turturro, stuck in a fleabag hotel trying and failing to be a Hollywood writer in a time when all writers in Hollywood were scrambling to avoid being branded as a Communist. I can see the two of them again in O Brother Where Art Thou, a most amusing retelling of Odyssey, set in Mississippi in the early 1900's, where John Goodman, fronting as a bible salesman, lures George Clooney and and Tim Nelson into the woods and beats them silly and robs them of all their money. This movie was really well done, every element of the Odyssey was present in odd but interesting ways. And, of course, one cannot discuss this film without mentioning the brilliant performance by George Clooney, an actor from whom I think the Coen brothers have elicited some of his best performances. His dialogue in this film is just priceless and he plays his character in an understated but very approachable way. I actually saw this film two days in a row in the theater. After I watched it the first time, I came home, collected my boyfriend and his brother and said "you HAVE to watch this film" and I went and sat through a second showing. The soundtrack won numerous awards and was loaded with beautiful music from bluegrass to Alison Krause singing amazing spiritual songs that tied together everything from a baptism in a river to the Sirens singing on the Rocks, intentionally diverting Everett Ulysses MCGill from his quest. Every piece of this film ties back to the Odyssey, from the names of the characters to the places that they end up. If I want to connect to someone regarding this film, all we have to say is Dapper Dan, the pomade George Clooney obsessively put in his hair or "RUNNOFT", which was John Turturro's cousin's way of saying just what it sounds like when describing where his wife went and, of course, George Clooney looking nervously down at the sheriff hunting these chain gang escapees getting ready to set fire to a barn they are hiding in and saying "Boys, I think we're in a tight spot."

The Coen Brothers have used some of the best actors in the business and simply put then in outrageous positions and coaxed them along the journey to extricate themselves from increasingly more complex situations. Gabriel Byrne, the brooding and mysterious Tom Reagan, in the noir stylized mob film, Miller's Crossing; the man who you wonder whether he has any soul until the final moments of the film. Jeff Bridges, the Dude, in the Big Lebowski; a stoner who is just trying to get his rug back. I see him laying in his bathtub, smoking a joint, when he is invaded by a team of "nihilists" who drop a ferret in the tub with him. As he is thrashing around, protecting his "Johnson", the "nihilists" threaten to come back and cut it off if he doesn't produce their cash, which is in his car in the police impound lot, sans the cash, of course. Tom Hanks, in an outrageously over the top, yet convincing performance of a Southern con man in the remake of The Ladykillers. He is seeking, with a motley team of reprobates, to tunnel from an elderly African American woman's home, strongly portrayed by Marva Munson with grace and integrity, into a casino repository. Bottom line in this film, almost everybody dies. And what can I say about Tommy Lee Jones in the stark and riveting version of Cormac McCarthy's novel, No Country for Old Men. His powerful portrayal of the county sherriff, who faces some of the most harrowing situations he has ever experienced, calmly moving forward to resolve the issues, is unforgettable. This film was so absorbing, that I can honestly say, I cannot remember breathing for the entire duration of the movie.

Well, I wrote this a little backwards here, but I have to talk about the Coen Brothers use of setting. The first time I watched Fargo, I thought I would die laughing at how accurate they portrayed the upper Midwestern culture. Now, to be fair, this is where they are from, however I am a New Englander who has familiarity with this culture from a 5 year sojourn in the Minneapolis area. The image that will never leave my mind from this film is Frances McDormand, a wonderful actress who frequently works with the Coen Brothers, standing staunchly in her Sorels and parka. A heavily pregnant policewoman, calmly leveling a gun at Peter Stormare who is intently shoving Steve Buscemi's dismembered leg into a wood chipper, just doing her job. Everything from the way people interacted with one another to the types of food they were eating all spoke clearly of the place this story unfolds. The Hudsucker Proxy, set in the 50's in New York City, tells the tale of stock manipulation, conscienceless corporate machinations and a merciless plot to take advantage of a naive young mail room employee, played in a very endearing manner by Tim Robbins. The look and feel of the city was very believable, once again the attention to detail, from the clothes they wore to the places the characters went as the plot unfolds, struck me as cleanly accurate. I grew up very close to NYC; it is the city I know best and, once again, they had it nailed. My favorite quote from this film is Tim Robbins, now the company's CEO, selling the board on his invention, the hula hoop, by saying: "you know,for the kids". Their films in California settings, all set in different time periods, from The Man Who Wasn't There to Barton Fink to Intolerable Cruelty, all pick up some of the superficiality of Southern California culture in an accurate manner. Everything from the costumes to the characterizations of the people in the stories just smack of the laid back yet shallow California stereotypical behaviors.

So the question remains, why does my daughter so intensely dislike this body of work that I love so very dearly? She would tell you that all the Coen Brothers' movies are the same; that they tell the same story over and over in the same way. Of course, I always beg to differ and disagree with this assessment. We are both strong minded, stubborn people with hard held opinions,and I simply cannot get her to see the fun in the quirky characters, the incredibly bad decisions they make and the complete disasters they create for themselves. The unexpected twists and turns in the plots and the amazing strength in the portrayal of the settings are always entertaining to me, but, alas, not to my daughter. It is odd to me, because there certainly are directors whose work we both love, that also always create quirky characters in odd situations that can make one squirm while watching them extricate themselves from their situations. John Waters and David Lynch come to mind as two examples of directors whose films we both adore and bear some similarity to the oddities at hand here.

It is a debate that I have long since ceased having with her, although it continues to occupy my mind as a disconnect that just shouldn't be. We each have our likes and dislikes when it comes to the subject of film, and rarely is the time when we can move each other off dead center regarding our opinions of these works. I have quite a few people who always willingly want to come and view the latest offering of the Coen Brothers with me, but, alas, my daughter is never one of those people. I can never share with her my delight in their latest work or even broach the subject of a discussion on this topic. I could argue the point that many directors bear a similar style in each of their pieces, whether they be suspense, horror, drama, mystery or comedy, but this argument seems to carry little weight with her. Not wanting to have an ongoing argument with my progeny, I have stopped attempting to draw her into the Coen Brothers fold and accept that this is something we will never share together.