Every character is ugly and repulsive except the shiksa next door. What does this say about the Coen Brothers?

You will leave A SERIOUS MAN and think: “The Coen Brothers are self-hating Jews.” Why is every character ugly and repulsive except the naked shiksa next door?

I’m not only confused, I’m troubled.

The movie opens with a mini-horror tale about a Jewish peasant who is helped by an old man. He invites the man to his home. As soon as he tells his wife, she says they are now cursed. The man died a few years ago, so now a dybbuk (in Jewish folklore, a dybbuk is a malicious possessing spirit, believed to be the dislocated soul of a dead person) is coming for soup! Confronting their guest, the wife promptly stabs the man (or dybbuk) in the chest.

Never go to 1967. It was ugly. In a Jewish neighborhood in the Midwest, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is a college mathematics professor on the verge of tenure with a wife, Judith (Sari Lennick), who is having an “affair of the heart” with repulsive friend Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed); a son, Danny (Aaron Wolff), who is preparing for his bar mitzvah while stoned on pot; and a shrieking daughter, Sarah (Jessica McManus), who is stealing money from him for a nose job.

As if this sadistic look at middle-class Jewish life has any philosophical context, Larry struggles to explain the famous thought experiment, the classic Schrödinger’s cat*, to his class. So, let’s be clear: Larry knows nothing.

Staying with the Stuhlbargs is Larry’s loser of a brother Arthur (Richard Kind), who has a repulsive disease he must tend to every few hours by extracting tons of pus from a cyst on his neck. He is staying on their couch. He has other anti-social, humiliating problems as well.

When Judith and Sy announce they are planning to get married in the faith, they insist Larry move to a nearby motel with Arthur. Larry goes to a series of rabbis who are clueless and offer absolutely no spiritual advice or comfort. Faced with mounting legal bills, Larry’s tenure is jeopardized by harassing letters to the college’s committee. A Korean exchange student aggressively refuses to accept his failing grade from Larry. He offers Larry a bribe.

I was appalled by the cruel, cartoon depiction of Jews!

So now I know where the Coen Brothers came up with Anton Chigurh’s hairdo. Their parents made them get that haircut.

Every person in Larry’s world – his Jewish community – is vile. Every stereotype is lovingly represented: Spitting Jews, Jews without teeth, obese Jewish women with male voices, ancient rabbis who do not care about their people – this shocking portrayal of Jewish people goes on and on.

The entire story is dressed with so much vulgarity that whatever “message” the Coen Brothers are saying is buried beneath a pile of anti-Semitic feces. The Coens even disrespect Jewish customs and religion. Danny goes to his bar mitzvah stoned. The rabbis have absolutely no interest in helping Larry save his marriage. There is no community support.

Larry lives in a vicious, loathsome, ugly world.

How in the world did both Coen brothers and their entire production staff and crew agree to this mean-spirited depiction of Jewish life and morality?

* Schrödinger’s Cat: A cat, along with a flask containing a poison, is placed in a sealed box shielded against environmentally induced quantum decoherence. If an internal Geiger counter detects radiation, the flask is shattered, releasing the poison that kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when we look in the box, we see the cat either alive or dead, not a mixture of alive and dead.

Victoria Alexander lives in Las Vegas, Nevada and answers every email. You can contact Victoria directly at masauu@aol.com.

I have to lead with a gripe. Remember laser discs? On laser disc covers you could read all the information easily. On DVDs, it was much harder. Often finding the running time was like doing one of those visual puzzles where you have to find seven barnyard animals that have been hidden in a drawing. On BluRay covers, the small print is virtually impossible to decipher without a loop. And they don’t make it easier by choosing a dark typeface and laying it against a dark background, as is the case with NO COUNTRY.

That said, BluRay has been acknowledged as the final step in outdoing theatrical projection. Some recent releases are closer in quality to the DVD release than older films, in which the BR differences are retina-melting. NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN certainly looks smashing on DVD, but the Coens are into ultra-sharp cinematography, and the BluRay has the edge in this area. Distance details are clearly sharper than on the DVD. Blacks are perhaps a little darker, with a little less shadow detail. But the sharpness is profound.

The film has won many best film awards – among them the NBR Award and the Academy Award. At the NBR ceremony, Josh Brolin took the stage and immediately led with “What was up with Act Three?” Very clever. It’s the tilting point between people who love the film and those who think the third act killed it. I guess it’s sorta nice having a split camp on that aspect.

I’m in the negative camp myself. I think the film very intentionally undercuts all it has been building towards, even if, as has been said in its defense, it was practically the same in McCarthy’s book. But it’s a compelling decision to make for yourself. Yes or no on the unfulfilled promises and ambiguities… There’s so much good acting, good directing, and good cinematography along the way, it’s worth taking the ride.

As for the supplements, much has been said of the Coens finally being on display. They’re barely, although you do see them a bit, and hear them talk, and there’s a sense of what it’s like to work with them. Then we get an extra supplement, which isn’t on the DVD, of Josh Brolin’s mini-doc about the shoot, and suddenly things get very mysterious about the Coens again. I like that obfuscation between the docs – it’s so ‘them’.

So incredibly much has been made of Brolin’s screen-test for the film, shot by Robert Rogriguez and directed by Quentin Tarantino, that it is sorely missed as a supplemental.

Buena Vista Pictures
Touchstone Pictures presents a Tom Jacobson production
Running time — 104 minutes / MPAA rating: R

How many of us can recall the 1955 original starring Alec Guinness? Okay, so no need to judge this by that. Screenwriter-directors Joel Coen and Ethan Coen’s remake must stand on it’s own.

Somewhere in the South, deep inside Baptist Bible Belt country, blowhard Professor G.H. Dorr (Tom Hanks) turns up and rents a room from Marva Munson (Irma P. Hall), a devout widow and churchgoer. What Dorr wants is momentarily interrupted as we are given quick glimpses into the lives of several other men: Gawain MacSam (Marlon Wayans), a foulmouthed riverboat casino laborer, Garth Pancake (J.K. Simmons), an explosives expert, The General (Tzi Ma), an archetypal Asian killer now the owner of a convenience store, and Lump (Ryan Hurst), a very dumb, inarticulate football player. Dorr introduces the men to Marva as his Renaissance music troupe. They will use her basement to practice.
What they really intend to do is tunnel from Marva’s basement straight to the storage office of the gambling casino and steal a lot of cash.

It takes quite some time to figure out this is a modern day tale, what with Dorr wearing Sherlock Holmes clothes and using a flowery, decadent speech pattern resplendent with an inappropriate giggle. Only MacSam’s constant vulgarity clues us it’s a present day piece. Everything else seems trapped in a time warp. Soon the characters converge and we watch Dorr’s plans twist and turn, mainly due to the temperaments of his volatile team and Marva’s no-nonsense morality.

With Dorr’s insistence on quoting Edgar Allen Poe’s poetry and speeches that slow the pace, THE LADYKILLERS lumbers as a muddy, light-hearted mess. Hanks takes obvious pleasure in his relaxed, flung-to-the-wind character while Hall’s Marva nearly sideswipes Hanks. For a con to work, you have to be sincere. All the players except Dorr are invested and committed. Besides money, what is he about?

There is an underlying sense that the Coens’ approach to the material is condescending. They do not like their buffoon characters. We like buffoons who think they are smart and then get their comeuppance.

Credits:
Screenwriter-directors: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Based on “The Ladykillers” by: William Rose
Producers: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, Tom Jacobson, Barry Sonnenfeld, Barry Josephson
Director of photography: Roger Deakins
Production designer: Dennis Glassner
Music: Carter Burwell
Costume designer: Mary Zophres
Editor: Roderick Jaynes

Cast:
Professor G.H. Dorr: Tom Hanks
Marva Munson: Irma P. Hall
Gawain MacSam: Marlon Wayans
Garth Pancake: J.K. Simmons
General: Tzi Ma
Lump: Ryan Hurst
Mountain Girl: Diane Delano

Considering what a Coen brothers fanatic I am, it took me a long time to catch up with O Brother Where Art Thou?, but I’m glad I finally did. This movie has been titillating me since I first heard the title, itself a kind of meta in-joke. (For non-film buffs out there, “O Brother . . .” is the serious, meaningful, good-for-you movie that lightweight comedy film director John L. Sullivan, played by Joel McCrea, wants to make in the 1941 Preston Sturges romp Sullivan’s Travels).

Nobody’s better at meta in-jokes than the Coen brothers, those merry pranksters who began as Hitchcock hommageurs (Blood Simple), with stops at kooky-with-a-capital-K comedy (Raising Arizona), period weirdness (Barton Fink), beautiful-looking but dramatically inert ‘satire’ (The Hudsucker Proxy) and the most unlikely comedy of the 1990s, Fargo. Whatever else they are, these guys are not consistent – and that’s a good thing.

Even more than their recent shaggy-dog story The Big Lebowski, O Brother only flirts with the conventions of ‘regular’ moviemaking – plot, coherence, believability – but unlike the annoying Lebowski, O Brother is actually quite enjoyable.

It features a dazzlingly comic performance by George Clooney, and I’m as surprised to be typing those words as you are to be reading them. More than ever I’m convinced that Clooney is a comedian in a leading man’s body, a belief reconfirmed after seeing the unintentionally funny Perfect Storm on a recent flight after suffering through it in the theater. He was kidding, right?

But I digress – as does O Brother at least a dozen times. Clooney, along with perpetually pissed-off John Turturro and saintly-stupid Tim Blake Nelson, play escapees from a chain gang, seeking a hidden fortune across the flat, sun-baked landscape of Depression-era Mississippi. (Roger Deakins’ cinematography has been nominated for an Oscar).

In their travels, the trio run across a smorgasbord of hustlers, charlatans, con men, criminals, greasy politicians and dirt-poor relations. (Another little Coen in-joke is that they run a credit saying the movie is based on ‘The Odyssey’ by Homer, and Clooney’s character is called Ulysses Everett McGill. Although some people don’t get the joke – the Coens got an Academy Award nomination in the category of best adapted screenplay. I doubt Homer is a member of the Writer’s Guild.)

But there I go again, off on a tangent. It’s that kind of movie – one where both terrible and wonderful things happen in rapid succession, where oracles, seers and sirens are constantly rubbing up against the reductive rationality of Clooney’s character. Clooney is made up to look like Clark Gable, and he has the same wised-up wise guy persona Gable had in many actual 1930s movies. But while Clooney does seem smarter and more verbally adept than his two companions, the joke is often on him as he ís really much more of an innocent than an Odysseus-like trickster.

His Penelope in Homer, the faithful wife waiting at home through the hero’s 20 years of travel is transformed (in the person of the stubborn, practical Holly Hunter) into the biggest mystery Clooney has to solve and the one he’s least equipped to deal with. When this Ulysses returns and tries to assert his rights as the paterfamilias of his children, six or seven angelic-looking little girls, they inform him that not only is Hunter about to marry another man, but that he’s not their father because their father was hit by a train. When Clooney protests that he hasn’t been hit by a train, Hunter coolly puts him in his place by saying ‘You could have been. Lots of respectable people get hit by trains.’

The movie’s fairy-tale atmosphere is helped tremendously by its music, a delicious concoction of gospel, soul, blues and bluegrass by a variety of artists. The music carries so much feeling that the Coens can stay on the smart, sassy surface and still not seem too heartless.

And they certainly do seem to like pushing the audience’s buttons with their own brand of heartlessness. In Fargo they mixed shocking violence with loopy humor in ways that sometimes made you feel a bit ashamed for laughing. Here they push the envelope of taste by staging a Ku Klux Klan rally as a Busby Berkeley-style musical number, complete with long shots of hooded Klansmen moving in artfully choreographed geometric patterns. Funny, but . . .

As with a lot of Coen Brothers movies, O Brother is a love-it-or-hate-it experience. If you can get into their ‘it’s only a movie’ groove, you’ll probably enjoy O Brother as much as I did.

Credits:
Directed by Joel Coen
Written by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen

Cast:
George Clooney,
John Turturro,
Tim Blake Nelson,
Charles Durning,
Michael Badalucco,
John Goodman,
Holly Hunter

blood-simple (Amer. slang, first used by Dashiell Hammett) 1. State of fear and confusion that follows the confusion of murder; “He’s gone blood simple.”

Usually, when final release prints of a movie are made it is the cinematic equivalent of being set in stone. All the mistakes, shortcuts, and bad decisions made by the filmmakers are forever immortalized. When Joel and Ethan Coen were asked to re-release their debut feature Blood Simple, they used their subsequent success to gain the opportunity to “fix” the film in a new Director’s Cut. They have scrubbed it clean, restored music cues that were lost to rights problems, and in their own words “cut out the boring parts.” Most of the pre-release publicity has focused on the edits that make the Director’s Cut shorter than the original version. However, this is mostly an example of the Coens’ ironic perversity. The edits are minimal to the point of being imperceptible, and are far less important to the new version than the music changes and brand new 35mm prints. Indeed, despite the Coen’s tinkering, both the merits and faults of Blood Simple remain essentially unchanged.

The movie is a darkly humorous tale of passion, infidelity and murder in the tradition of James M Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice. Trapped in an unhappy marriage to Marty (Dan Hedaya), a miserable Texas bar owner, Abby (Frances McDormand) embarks on an affair with friendly bartender Ray. Unfortunately for them, Marty is the jealous type and has hired a private detective to keep an eye on his pretty wife. When Marty asks the detective to kill the lovers, it is the spark that sets off an emotional and violent conflagration that consumes them all.

Joel and Ethan Coen jazz up this somewhat cliched tale with their now-familiar trademarks: hyperbolic camerawork, deliciously twisty plotting, and some very funny writing. Like several of their early works, Blood Simple sometimes suffers from an excessively mannered quality; a defect that would vanish as they brought out the humanity of their characters.

Even if it is far from the Coen brothers’ best work, Blood Simple is still an amazing debut. The perspective of hindsight has only confirmed Joel and Ethan’s savvy in choosing collaborators. Veteran character actors Dan Hedaya and M. Emmet Walsh were obvious choices but it is amazing how many of the people involved were working on their first feature, including star Frances McDormand, cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld (director of Men in Black, Wild Wild West, and Get Shorty) and composer Carter Burwell (Being John Malkovich, Gods and Monsters, High Fidelity, Hamlet, and The Three Kings). Even the voice on one character’s answer turns out to be the then unknown but now unmistakable voice of Holly Hunter.

Seize the opportunity to see this beautifully restored film, especially if you live in one of the cities where it is playing in theaters. As an extra added attraction, the Coens have tacked on a hilarious introduction with a pompous film preservationist named Mortimer Young babbling on about “the early days of independent film.”