Ten years ago, in a New Yorker essay entitled 'Smart Alecks', critic Daphne Merkin lambasted the Coen brothers for their arrested moral development. All their 'intelligence and skill,' she wrote, 'can't make up for the sense of vacancy in their movies. Until they find a way to let a little real life in [grown-up reality, that is], Joel and Ethan Coen will somehow seem stunted - no more than the brightest kids in the class.'
It was not a new criticism. People have been saying much the same about the writer-director-producer duo since Blood Simple, their startlingly precocious debut in 1984. That film, a taut homage to the double-cross dynamics of James M Cain's fiction, displayed an acute ear and a keen eye for the American vernacular. It was also slick, as dry as dust and engagingly ironic.
Those same qualities have come to define the Coen oeuvre, which is rooted in a film buff's appreciation of classic studio genres - the 1930s gangster (Miller's Crossing), screwball comedy (O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Intolerable Cruelty), and film noir (Blood Simple, The Big Lebowski). Their distinctive style has brought plaudits, two Oscars for Fargo (their most successful film) and a final-cut independence that is the envy of Hollywood. And yet the idea that the Coens are too clever for their own (and their audience's) good has grown to become a popular wisdom of film criticism.
Merkin found the brothers guilty of 'cynical disengagement'. She felt they demonstrated an adolescent indifference to the plight of their characters and took refuge from the real world in the safe pleasures of filmic reference. This was not exactly untrue, but it was a little unfair.
An undervalued achievement of the Coen brothers is their ability to match sharply drawn characters to inspired castings. There is more life in one of their stylised creations, for example, Gabriel Byrne's embittered romantic in Miller's Crossing, than any number of naturalistic Everymans grappling with mundane doubts and crises.
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All the same, Coen characters do tend to exist within a meaningless universe: as flies to wanton boys are, they to the fraternal film-makers - they kill them for our sport. If the same rule applies in their latest film, however, the game seems much darker and, for all the knowing humour, far more serious.
No Country for Old Men, which stars Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem and Javier Bardem's mesmerising moptop haircut and has been tipped for Academy awards, is an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's gritty novel of the same name. A contemporary western, it's also a beautifully realised meditation on fate, age and mortality. The Coens' trademark wit is still evident, though more retrained than it has been since Blood Simple, smothered by a tense atmosphere of gathering doom. There's nothing stunted here other than the sparse vegetation in the parched Texas landscape.
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So is it another 'return to form', of the sort the Coens are periodically adjudged to make, or something more mature and significant, a sobering intrusion of 'real life'?
The brothers, who live with their families in New York, still dress like bookish slackers. Joel, the taller, resembles an intellectual version of Howard Stern, while Ethan, with his red hair and glasses, looks like an overgrown swot. But they are no longer young men. They're old enough, that is, to see the shortening years ahead of them. Joel, nominally the director, is now 53 and Ethan, nominally the producer (in reality, they jointly write and direct), is 50.
In earlier films, death was usually treated as a neat cinematic device, an excuse for a gory and often funny set-piece. One thinks of Emmet Walsh's hand impaled on a windowsill by a hunting knife in Blood Simple, or Albert Finney letting rip with a machine gun to the rousing soundtrack of 'Danny Boy' in Miller's Crossing. And while there is no shortage of similarly dramatic killings in the new film, there is also a genuine sensibility of loss, an appreciation of the fragility and finality of life.
It may be that the reason death seems more consequential in No Country for Old Men has little to do with the Coens' midlife perspective and everything to do with McCarthy's timeless concerns. For in narrative terms, the Coens have remained pretty faithful to the author. Ethan joked about the method they used to adapt McCarthy's book: 'One of us types into the computer while the other holds the spine of the book open flat.'
It's a typical Coen remark designed to send up 'serious' analyses of their work, while maintaining the mystique that leaves their motives open to over-imaginative interpretation. They affect a contempt for the portentous cult of the director; when asked to make a 'director's cut' of Blood Simple, they cheerily bucked the fashion and made it shorter. And when the Village Voice's critic J Hoberman suggested that Miller's Crossing contained a Holocaust allegory, the brothers responded with head-shaking dismay.
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No doubt they would also dismiss the notion that they've reached an age at which they're able to deal with death as more than an amusing film scene. They have consistently resisted any reading of their lives in their art. The pair are renowned for giving playful interviews that reveal nothing about their interior selves.
Joel's wife is actress Frances McDormand (Ethan is married to film editor Tricia Cooke), who won an Oscar for her pregnant cop in Fargo and appeared in several other Coen films. They have an adopted boy from Paraguay. McDormand has said of her husband that he's 'a funny, intelligent decent person and he made me feel the same way'. But it doesn't get more personal than that with the Coens. In many respects, they are auteurs without an autobiography.
Nevertheless, the influences on their absurdist aesthetic are not hard to find. Raised in the Midwest town of Minneapolis, they gained outsider status early by virtue of their Jewishness. Going to Zionist summer camps, they stood out amid the provincial conformity. McDormand has said that it made her husband and Ethan feel like weirdos. And like another Jew from the Midwest, Steven Spielberg, they spent a lot of time indoors watching films on television.
The results, though, could not be more different, not least in their contrasting visions of the American melting pot. 'You've got two problems of Hollywood treatment of ethnicity,' Joel has observed. 'They're either reverential or they can't deal with it at all.' The Coens seem mischievously attracted to stereotypes, and the polar caricatures of the Jew as idealistic intellectual and cunning parasite have featured in Barton Fink and Miller's Crossing, each time played by John Turturro, a Roman Catholic. If you can attribute a moral interest to the Coens, it would be in the myths society produces, rather than society itself.
The Coens' parents were university lecturers who placed a premium on high art. Ethan has recalled being dragged to the theatre by his parents 'because it was supposed to be good for us'. The boys, instead, developed an interest in film and, having acquired a Super 8 camera, remade the stuff they were watching on television.
All that childhood imitation paid dividends in the ability to know what sounds right. One of the joys of their films is the dialogue, which is both coolly retro and, like all the best pastiches, utterly original. The Coens seem to get under the skin of language.
Joel went on to join the film course at New York University, later working as an assistant editor for Sam Raimi on his cult horror film The Evil Dead. Ethan took a degree in philosophy, writing a thesis on Wittgenstein. 'What can be said at all can be said clearly,' wrote the great philosopher, 'and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.' But then the Austrian never saw The Big Lebowski
It was that film, a kind of pothead's reworking of Chandler's The Big Sleep, that prompted Merkin's admonition. And she was not alone. Only The Hudsucker Proxy, the Coens' biggest critical and commercial flop, has garnered poorer reviews. Yet The Big Lebowski is now widely accepted as a cult classic.
It starred Jeff Bridges as a hapless hippie caught up in an impenetrable plot. It's packed with nods and winks to everything from Orthodox Jewish rituals to Creedence Clearwater Revival. When a bunch of paid thugs urinate on the carpet in his crumby apartment, he complains: 'That rug really tied the room together.'
It sounds throwaway, but in fact it invokes a whole lifestyle and mentality in seven perfectly selected words. And therein lies the beauty of the Coens. Their stories may be all over the place, but their language (both filmic and literal) ties the work together.
As one character says in their latest film, as he surveys the bloody aftermath of a drug-gang shoot-out: 'It's a mess, ain't it sheriff.' To which Lee Jones's sheriff replies: 'If it ain't, it'll do until the mess gets here.'
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If No Country for Old Men isn't a masterpiece, then it will certainly do until one gets here.
The Coen lowdown
Born Joel, 29 November 1954, and Ethan, 21 September 1957, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Their parents were academics, father an economist, mother an art historian. Joel studied film at New York University, Ethan philosophy at Princeton. Joel has been married to actress Frances McDormand since 1984; they have an adopted son, Pedro. Ethan is married to film editor Tricia Cooke.
Best of times Their debut, Blood Simple (1984), which announced their arrival as clever young film-makers. Two Oscars for Fargo in 1996 for best screenplay and best actress (Frances McDormand).
Worst of times The box-office disaster and critical mauling of The Hudsucker Proxy, their most expensive film, in 1994.
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