Look at a list of award-winning movies, and it’s easy to conclude that great art has to be serious. Important stories, told sincerely, tend to get critics salivating. Even avant-garde works can be overly straight-faced and self-important. Anything funny or fun gets dismissed as disposable.
This sounds like a slight on reviewers and audiences, but it’s not. It’s a reflection of how difficult it is to make films that are strange, surreal, silly, and still narratively satisfying. Only a handful of directors can create off-kilter cinematic art without being alienating. The Coen brothers are part of this elite group.
With over four decades of filmmaking under their belts, few directors have earned as much consistent acclaim. Like their most accomplished peers, they straddle genres, blur lines between them, and toy with expectations to surprise and shock. What sets them apart is dark humor and an appetite for the uncanny. Here’s a look at how they make weird and wonderful movies that can be harsh, heartfelt, and hilarious.
Early Excellence
The first ten years of the Coen’s career produced five movies, each dabbling in genres they’d revisit later. Like all auteurs, cohesive creative choices cement their filmography together.
The neo-noir griminess of Blood Simple (1984) was their first effort, living up to its name with an unfussy plot. A combination of creative camerawork and exaggerated characters that still feel authentic elevates it above average 80s thrillers.
We also witness the birth of the Coen trope, which uses strong regional accents to make unsavory individuals more sympathetic. Dark words uttered in a Southern drawl become endearing. This makes it easier to accept that unpleasant, out-of-the-ordinary events can involve normal people. The uncanny and the everyday exist side by side in Coenland.
Raising Arizona (1987) dials up the quirkiness significantly, although it balances this by making violence and death a perpetual possibility. What we get is a knockabout crime comedy that focuses on child abduction, armed robbery, and fatal explosions.
Again, accents make otherwise reprehensible characters appealing, while kinetic camerawork and editing make key sequences cartoonish. Joel Coen had a hand in editing Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981), and the influence is evident here. Dolly zooms, uncomfortable close-ups, and low camera angles create comic moments. They also pervade Raising Arizona with a hyper-real, hectic atmosphere close to that of a fever dream. It’s a vibe that Baz Luhrmann turned into an entire career.
Growing Confidence
Miller’s Crossing (1990) and Barton Fink (1991) share a period setting, and their writing was actually intertwined. Stumped by their intricate gangster story, the Coens churned out Barton Fink’s script in under a month to break the writer’s block. There’s an existential bleakness and sense of isolation found in both, with characters trapped by circumstances beyond their control.
A lighter tone returns in The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), which takes the Coen’s interest in naive characters up a notch. Tim Robbins’ unassuming business wannabe attains a position of power through a twist of fate, not his own merits. His savant-like ability to develop super-successful products that are simple circles drawn on paper is an astute satire of capitalism.
It’s a movie with adult themes and focal points but presented in the style of a festive family film. The Coens flex their scriptwriting muscles here, making serious arguments in a knock-about way. Simple circles drawn by the protagonist seem childlike, but they feed the film’s circular visual motifs and the wrap-around plot. There’s this depth of meaning and intricacy of thought in every word written and frame captured by the Coens.
Establishing Authority
Starting with Fargo (1996), the Coens repeated the pattering of moving from dark to light over a series of films. This late-90s period also marks a move to mainstream recognition. They managed this without compromising what makes them artistically interesting. That’s a sign of true greatness.
Fargo is arguably the definitive Coen brothers picture. It shares elements of the kidnapping and murder that catalyze the plot in Blood Simple and Raising Arizona. In addition to this, it has normal people pushed to extraordinary acts by jealousy, self-interest, and greed. It uses strong regional accents to give disarming naivety to characters who are more capable or cruel than they appear. And although it is unflinchingly violent at points, it’s also fundamentally a farce. One of the secrets is not just the writing and direction but the meticulous casting process the Coens use.
Making Modern Myths
Next came The Big Lebowski (1998), arguably the ultimate cult movie in the best and worst senses. It has quotable lines, over-the-top characters, a deliberately meandering plot, and a protagonist whose slacker lifestyle is (almost) aspirational. He’s also naive, albeit in a different way to Fargo’s Jerry Lundegaard or The Hudsucker Proxy’s Norville Barnes. The Dude’s naivety comes from his unwillingness to engage with society. He wants to be left alone and can’t function when forced to engage with the outside world.
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) was another step toward mass-market success and critical recognition. It turns classical Greek literature into a 20th-century satire and features escaped convicts defined by their wide-eyed innocence. Again, the Coens put unsophisticated characters on a pedestal while giving silliness equal billing with sincerity. Death, torture, and the Ku Klux Klan are made palatable by the lens of farce. All of this springs from two men who are, by all accounts, very normal. It clearly takes a grounded perspective on the world to subvert it with weirdness.
Pivoting to Seriousness
It’s a little disappointing that the Coen’s most acclaimed film is also the one that’s most grounded in reality. No Country for Old Men (2007) reins in their love of larger-than-life characterization, replacing it with stoic lead performances. As a result, it’s the set pieces that do the talking, building tension without over-the-top performances or an intrusive score. Even hitman Anton Chigurh, the film’s main boogieman, plays second fiddle to the real villains: random chance and bad luck.
There are a couple of cameos for naive characters, so it’s not totally devoid of this Coen trademark. Kelly Macdonald’s trailer park resident and Gene Jones’ gas station owner anchor us by being out of their depth. Meanwhile, Tommy Lee Jones’ soon-to-retire sheriff is the closest the film comes to satire. His monologues that bookend it have a Southern drawl that should soften the content’s harsh edges. The bleakness of the source material (Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name) prevents this.
Why the Change?
Such a career pivot is perhaps a direct response to the two films that immediately preceded No Country For Old Men. Intolerable Cruelty (2003) and The Ladykillers (2004) were neither critical darlings nor commercial smashes. Ditching the lightweight comedies in favor of a truly dark tale returned the brothers to their Blood Simple roots. Their collaboration with Roger Deakins, one of the leading cinematographers, is also key to the success of No Country For Old Men. Close working relationships like this allow auteurs to get their visions across consistently.
Just a year later, we got Burn After Reading (2007), the blackest of the Coen’s comedies to date. Its farcical plot and cartoony characters are familiar hallmarks of their work. The most memorable moment is Brad Pitt’s ditzy gym employee grinning cheesily immediately before being shot in the face. Botched blackmail and the poisonous influence of money on otherwise good, honest people are once again at the center of the plot. It pushes naivety to the point of being grotesque.
Introspection and Ageing
It wasn’t until A Serious Man (2009) that the Coen brothers made a truly personal movie. Echoing their upbringing in an academic household, it’s about a professor losing his job, family, and religion. Money’s corrupting power creeps into the plot again, and while characters like Sy Ableman are somewhat stylized, there are no caricatures. So it shares themes with its precursors, while also showing how the Coens have matured as directors and come into their own as great screenwriters.
True Grit (2010) and Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) continue this maturity, featuring bitter main characters taunted by faded glory. The naive optimism of The Hudsucker Proxy and O Brother, Where Art Thou?’s protagonists is nowhere to be seen. In its place, there’s nothing but snuffed hope and bad blood.
In True Grit, the 14-year-old Mattie Ross is not allowed to behave like the child she is. It starkly contrasts The Dude’s perpetual adolescence in The Big Lebowski. Meanwhile, Llewyn Davis is a man who has committed his life to his art and got almost nothing in return. This is the opposite of Norville Barnes failing upwards. The wheel of fate spins in two directions, and from No Country For Old Men onwards, the Coens became more interested in darker rotations.
Brothers Grimm and Brothers Grin
Essentially, the Coen brothers keep cinema weird in both senses. They’ve made fun movies with zany characters and farcical plots, as well as bleak films dripping with unsettling and uncanny events. Their ability to blend the two is breathtaking. They’ve given us iconic scenes like Fargo’s woodchipper climax and The Big Lebowski’s ill-fated ash-spreading attempt. Even their most recent and least talked-about films, Hail, Ceasar! (2016) and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) are rich with detail and unapologetically unordinary. The only real tragedy in an illustrious career is that they now seem to be directing separate projects rather than working together.
