[For my annual
Valentine’s follow-up, I wanted to keep the FilmStudying going and
highlight some non-favorite filmmakers and films. Share your own non-favorites,
film or otherwise, for what is always the most fun crowd-sourced
post of the year!]
On three
contrasts that illuminate the shortcomings of the unique and talented filmmaking
duo.
1)
Fargo
(1996) and A Simple Plan (1998): The Coens had been making
movies for more than a decade by 1996, but I would argue that the multi-Oscar winning Fargo nonetheless elevated them to a
new level of cinematic attention and acclaim. Fargo is a smart and entertaining crime and mystery thriller with a
dark sense of humor, but for my money it’s inferior to
A Simple Plan, another film about
crime and punishment amidst a wintry landscape. As I wrote in that last
hyperlinked post, Plan is incredibly thematically
rich, with threads about class and poverty, multi-generational family inheritances
and legacies, the American Dream and its dark undersides, and more. But it also
has something that I didn’t quite find in Fargo
(or, if I’m honest, in most Coen films I’ve had the chance to see): a beating
human heart and a deep sense of sympathy for its characters, even (maybe especially)
when they’re at their worst.
2)
O Brother,
Where Art Thou? (2000) and Mudbound
(2017): This is a closer and tougher one, as O Brother is a very engaging and likable film, with a marvelous turn by George Clooney
at its heart, and it even manages to adapt The Odyssey in the Depression-era
American South quite successfully. But I would also argue that it has a central
weakness, one shared by too
many films about the white South: that it takes histories of race and
racial violence (including a prominent role for the Ku Klux Klan) and turns
them into plot developments for its mostly white protagonists. For that reason,
I would always make the case for the rare films that tell those stories of race
and the South with more breadth, depth, and nuance, and found 2017’s Netflix original film Mudbound to be much stronger in that
regard. It’s not a perfect film, and as usual with the Coens Brother is far more sophisticatedly and
entertainingly made; but I think the historical and cultural questions are
dealt with much more successfully in Mudbound,
making it an important complement to Brother
at least.
3)
No Country
for Old Men (2007) and Hell or High
Water (2016): This one is far easier for me, as I think No Country, despite wonderful
performances by Josh Brolin and Tommy Lee Jones, is a
deeply limited and flawed film. Indeed, I think it succeeds mostly as a sort of
high-brow
slasher film, with Javier Bardem’s unkillable, single-minded killing
machine with a strange
but rigid personal code echoing the Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees of the
world quite closely. Which is fine as far as it goes, but to my mind not nearly
deserving of the praise I’ve seen heaped upon it. And to elucidate my point, I
would point to Hell or High Water,
a much less acclaimed film that does a much better job capturing its Texas
settings and communities, its small-time criminal protagonists and their
individual and family identities, and its themes of class and poverty, crime
and punishment, and family legacies and changes. Plus it features Jeff Bridges as
a Texas Ranger in a performance worthy of putting in conversation with Jones’s,
if not even slightly more lived-in and compelling. Which I suppose is my point
in this whole post: there’s room to see lots and lots of movies, so by all
means let’s keep seeing Coens Brothers’ films; but there are other, and to my
mind, better films to see and share as well, is all.
Next
non-favorite tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Responses to this post or other non-favorites you’d share?
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