The Screengrab : joel coen

Coens Commercial Claims Clean Coal Campaign Is Claptrap

Phil Nugent — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 15:30:00 GMT

The next feature from the Coen brothers, A Serious Man, is set for release this fall, but in the meantime, the Coens have made time to direct a public service announcement for The Reality Coalition, a recently minted organization composed of five environmental groups, whose mission is to combat the idea that there is such a thing as "clean coal." The Coens didn't write the ad, but they must have decided that the script was a neat fit for them after it was sent to them by Crispin Porter + Bogusy, the ad firm representing the Coalition. The firm also put out the short making-of film above, apparently for the benefit of Coen brothers fans who might need such concepts as parody and irony explained to them in one-syllable words. (You also get the thrill of hearing Ethan instruct someone that their line reading should be "a little queased out.") Here's the spot itself:

Tilda Swinton & A Plate of Brownies

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 15:45:00 GMT

Tilda Swinton didn't get a reputation as being one of the quirkiest women in the movie business by doing things the easy way. She's almost always chosen the odd role, the unusal acting choice, the baffling if ever so charming interview: in the absence of Bjork actually making any more movies, which she has vowed not to do after having been traumatized by Lars Von Trier in Dancer in the Dark, Tilda Swinton fills the role of the Bjork of the motion picture industry.

So it stands to reason that when she dipped her toe into the overcrowded world of film festivals, it wouldn't be your typical red carpet affair. Next month, Swinton and her collaborator, Mark Cousins, will be debuting the Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams festival in her hometown of Nairn, Scotland. Admission will be three British pounds or a tray of baked goods (out of which an effigy of Michael Powell will be made); seating will be in beanbag chairs; and the theme of the festival, if it has one, is films with "highly colored, dreamlike elements." Cousins describes the festival as "having an element of punk about it", and says that the focus will be on mood and tone rather than celebrity-sighting and premiere-mania.

While the program for the Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams Festival has yet to be announced, it's known that Joel Coen will be selecting the films on two nights of its run, so it should, if nothing else, be a cinephile's dream come true. Additionally, prior ot a screening of All About Eve, there will be a screening of...a Bjork video. Well of course there will.

“Almost an Evening” with Ethan Coen

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

The smaller Coen Brother made his off-Broadway debut as a playwright this month, with a triptych of one-act plays called Almost an Evening. Here is how the plays are described on the show’s website:

Waiting: Someone waits somewhere for quite some time.

Four Benches: His voyage to self-discovery takes a British intelligence agent to steam baths in New York and Texas, and to park benches in the U.S. and U.K.

Debate: Cosmic questions are taken up. Not much is learned.

Sounds positively Coen-esque, no? The author spoke to the AP about his work, his methods and meaning, all in his usual forthcoming fashion. “Sometimes, you know, you write 'em with a kind of an idea of where it's going to, what you're doing; sometimes, you write something you have no idea – for the merry hell of it – and you kind of see what'll happen next.”

This isn’t the first time Coen the Younger has flown solo, as readers of his short story collection Gates of Eden are aware. As is the case with his movie work with big brother Joel, Coen is reluctant to get into an intellectual analysis of his work. “I dare you to try with these. I mean, they're pretty patently just comedies,” he says about his one-act plays. “They have fun with certain ideas ... but, you know, it's pretty clear that they're just there for the fun to be had from them. Isn't it? I mean, it's pretty clear.”

Clear enough, I guess. Almost an Evening runs Tuesday through Saturday at 8 pm, with weekend matinees, through June 1st at The Theaters at 45 Bleecker. Get your tickets here.

Top Five Oscar Moments

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 20:15:00 GMT

First, I must extend heartiest congratulations on behalf of the Screengrab to our colleague Paul Clark, who absolutely smoked the rest of us in the Oscar pool. Next year I’m giving my ballot to my dog (who didn’t much care for the bee montage, by the way).

Secondly, who agrees with me that the Oscars are ten times more enjoyable here in the DVR age? The ceremony clocked in at about an hour and fifteen minutes for me, after zapping through the commercials, Enchanted musical numbers and acceptance speeches in languages I couldn’t understand. The purists may frown on my methods, but I know the Academy Awards well enough by now to take matters into my own hands. Herewith, the top five moments:

1. Although technically not part of the Oscar ceremony itself, the nine hours of red carpet nonsense preceding the telecast is always good for at least one squirm-inducing, soul-shriveling moment, and who better than former actor and current crazy person Gary Busey to deliver it? And it’s always fun to see Ryan Seacrest’s smug façade dissolve into sheer terror. After watching this clip, picture Ben Affleck fuming at the Spago after-party, telling a sympathetic Seth Rogen how he’s gonna kick Busey’s ass.

2. Jon Stewart’s monologue wasn’t a nonstop rollicking roller coaster of laughter, but it got the job done. Sure, it’s a little disappointing that the writer’s strike ended and we weren’t able to see the full 12-minute version of the “waking up from a dream” montage, but two magic words make it all worthwhile. And those words are, of course, Gaydolf Titler.

3. Tilda Swinton’s win for Best Supporting Actress was my first clue that I wouldn’t be taking home the new Cadillac in the Screengrab pool, but it did provide one of the night’s best acceptance speeches. It’s not just any respected British actress who can work both her agent’s buttocks and George Clooney’s bat-nipples into her speech.

4. If you aren’t happy for Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, then…well, you probably wrote the songs from Enchanted. Hansard’s heartfelt exhortation “Make art! Make art!” sounded like the most subversive words ever spoken on the Oscar stage, and Stewart’s intervention to allow Irglova to make her speech after the orchestra rudely played her off was a clear victory for the good guys.

5. Most of us probably never thought we’d see the day that Joel and Ethan Coen would be anointed Hollywood royalty, but they took the honors with typical deadpan good humor. We still want to see Henry Kissinger: Man on the Go.

“Freaky Little People”: The Coens Burn On

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 21:30:00 GMT

The red carpet continues to roll out for Joel and Ethan Coen en route to Oscar night. On January 27th, the brothers convened in Hollywood for a three-part Q &A on the crafts of No Country for Old Men, moderated by Spike Jonze. On the first panel, dedicated to cinematography, the Coens were joined by Roger Deakins, who has lensed all of their movies since 1991’s Barton Fink. They discuss the Coens’ detailed storyboards, their shorthand manner of communication, and the difficulty of shooting the early morning sequence in which Josh Brolin's Moss is discovered at the crime scene and chased into the Rio Grande, which was pieced together from footage that could only be shot within a few minutes of dawn and dusk. The second panel shifts focus to sound editing and mixing, with Oscar nominees Skip Lievsay, Craig Berkey, Greg Orloff and Peter Kurland sitting in, and the third covers production design with Jess Gonchor. Although moderator Jonze often comes off like a character from a Saturday Night Live sketch about a nervous high school AV club president, it’s a fascinating glimpse into the Coens’ working methods, and all of it can be viewed on the No Country website.

Not content to rest on their laurels, however, the brothers are already looking ahead. In an interview with the L.A. Times, the Coens dismiss the idea that an Oscar coronation will turn them into the grand old men of cinema. “Our movies are too outside of the mainstream," says Joel. “This is the biggest-grossing movie we've ever had. [No Country has grossed over $50 million at the box office, the first Coen movie to cross that mark.] And even at that, it doesn't approach the kind of business and influence, in terms of people's perception of American culture, that big, Hollywood studio movies do.” Or as Ethan puts it, “We ain't leadin' anything, buddy.”

Next up for the brothers is Burn After Reading, a sort of spy tale written specifically for a ground of actors the Coens wanted to work with, including George Clooney, Brad Pitt and John Malkovitch. “All the characters in Burn After Reading are numskulls,” says Joel, “which Malkovich had no problem with; Clooney has never had a problem with…Brad was initially taken aback. He's very funny in the movie. He grew to love it as much as George does. Each character is dumber than the next. But they're all lovable.”

Other irons in the fire include Hail, Caesar!, described by Joel as the third part of the George Clooney “Numskull Trilogy," and A Serious Man, “about a Jewish community in the Midwest in 1967.” Joel describes the latter as “a domestic drama.” Sure. And Fargo was a true story.

Kelly Macdonald: "I Am Always Waiting To Be Found Out"

Leonard Pierce — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

One of the most appealing characters in Joel & Ethan Coen's brilliantly realized No Country for Old Men is Llewellyn Moss' young bride, Carla Jean, and the psychotic criminal Anton Chigurh's determination to hold her responsible for her husband's actions provides some of the movie's most tense and compelling moments. So fully does actress Kelly Macdonald inhabit the role — projecting youthful innocence, patience, confusion and understanding, and a near-perfect west Texas accent — that it took me some time to realize that she is, in fact, that Kelly Macdonald, a Glaswegian actress whose own broad burr couldn't be further than the high-plains drawl of her charcter in the film. Macdonald first came to fame after being cast, more or less on a fluke, as Ewan McGregor's ill-fated girlfriend in Trainspotting, a character as far removed from Carla Jean psychologically and emotionally as she is physically.

In a lengthy and engaging interview in the London Telegraph, Macdonald discusses her hardscrabble working-class background, the struggles she's faced as someone whose every role has been difficult to win, and her own doubts and misgivings about her talent and the occasions on which she's thought herself a fraud based on her lack of any formal training or experience as an actress. "After Trainspotting," she confesses, "because I wasn't trained, I was sure I would never act in another film again. Even though I've now done many films, the idea that I've just happened on this career has never really gone away."

Many Animals Were Harmed In The Production Of This Film

Leonard Pierce — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The previously publicity-shy Coen Brothers are practially media darlings with the release of No Country for Old Men, but one of the most enjoyable interviews they've done as part of the blitz is this one, with the Guardian's always-reliable John Patterson. The boys seem downright gleeful -- giddy, even -- discussing the ultraviolence they bring to the screen in the Cormac McCarthy adaptation; likewise, they seem well aware of the inevitable comparisons to the works of Sam Peckinpah that the western setting and over-the-top bloodshed is likely to draw. Ethan says "We were aware of the basic link just by virtue of the setting, the southwest, and this very male aspect of the story. Hard men in the south-west shooting each other - that's definitely Sam Peckinpah's thing...you show a hard-on guy in a western-cut suit and it already looks like a Peckinpah movie. Same kind of shorthand." Over the course of the interview, they also provide insight into Javier Bardem's inhuman haircut, why they're not likely to ever take on a science fiction movie despite dabbling in almost every other genre, and the surprisingly high death toll of animals (cows, lizards, rabbits, dogs) in their films. In fact, it's that thread of the conversation that leads to a surprising preview of their next, and still unnamed, film project: "It's a proper western, a real western," Ethan explains, "set in the 1870s. It's got a scene that no one will ever forget because of one particular chicken."

Top 10 of 2007: Scott Von Doviak

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 19:30:00 GMT

People say I’m a weenie for thinking this, but I feel these year-end top ten lists should be handled like the Hall of Fame: there should be a five-year waiting period in order to avoid any embarrassing blunders. Believe me, I have a record of top tens dating back to 1999 preserved forever on the Internet, and never fail to experience twinges of regret, shivers of shame and head-scratching moments of pure bewilderment when I look back at them. I’d feel much better right now if I were compiling my favorites of 2002, but rules are rules, so here are 10 movies I hope I won’t feel terrible about praising when 2012 rolls around:

10. Zodiac

For about three-quarters of its running time, David Fincher’s serial killer procedural is about as engrossing, stylish and smartly assembled as mainstream cinema gets, expertly evoking the 1970s (Mark Ruffalo, in particular, transforms himself into a broody ’70s actor in the De Niro/Pacino mode) and humanizing a story that could have been run-of-the-mill exploitation. It’s penalized a few notches here for running out of gas in the final reels: those scenes between the obsessed investigator and his long-suffering wife were already old and tired in the ’70s.

9. Juno

The first five minutes of Juno are so overloaded with quirkiness, it’s as if director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody are desperate enough to make an immediate impression that they’ll settle for making a bad one. That the movie is able to not only recover but go on to become an affecting (and very funny) story about real people making difficult choices is a tribute to their talent, and especially that of Ellen Page in a star-making performance as the titular pregnant teen.

8. Knocked Up

Why settle for one unplanned pregnancy comedy when 2007 was fertile enough to produce twins? You could quibble about gender politics, but then you’d miss out on some of the year’s biggest laughs courtesy of the ever-expanding Apatow Comedy Empire. (Honorable mention: Superbad. Not so much: Walk Hard.)

7. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead

Speaking of movies that recover from the opening five minutes, here’s one that treats you to the sight of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s heaving, flabby buttocks obscuring some delightful Marisa Tomei nudity (don’t worry, though – there’s plenty of that later). In what is not so much a comeback as a rejuvenation, octogenarian Sidney Lumet has crafted a twisty tale of familial betrayal enlived by a Hoffman performance so vivid, you can smell the desperation.

6. Breach

Billy Ray makes his own special brand of what one friend of the Screengrab refers to as “guys in suits” movies. Like Ray’s debut Shattered Glass, Breach is a low-key yet subtly gripping thriller about a man whose life of lies crumbles within the institution that has defined him. In this case, that man is contradictory CIA agent Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper, never better), a deeply religious, sexually kinky traitor to his country. No 007-style glamour and action here; the suspense emerges from the mundane but meticulously detailed life of a Cold War spy trying to stay one step ahead of his colleagues.

5. Deep Water

Sure, having too much money and free time sounds like fun, but that way of life is not without its pitfalls. This fascinating, disquieting documentary details a 1968 solo sailboat race around the world, and the amateur sailor, Donald Crowhurst, who pinned his family’s future on the whim of winning it. Pieced together from newsreels, Crowhurst’s original 16mm film and contemporary interviews, what begins as a bracing tale of men against the sea becomes a full-blown descent into madness.

4. Killer of Sheep

I am assured by publicists that Charles Burnett’s 1977 thesis film counts as a 2007 release, so there’s no reason not to include it here. This stark slice of inner city life finds drama in the smallest moments; even the routine purchase of a used motor becomes an exercise in heartbreaking futility. Never stooping to heavy-handed message-making, Sheep packs an emotional wallop in the end.

3. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

Don’t wait for the inevitable scripted remake of this simple tale of two men vying for the world’s record high score in Donkey Kong. It won’t begin to capture the wit, drama and humanity of Seth Gordon’s outrageously entertaining documentary. Pitting an ’80s relic coasting on past glories against a regular guy with a history of failures in life, overseen by an indelible gallery of game-geeks and marked with unexpected developments and reversals of fate, it’s the most purely joyful movie experience of the year.

2. No Country for Old Men

For much of the decade Joel and Ethan Coen looked like they were heading down the long road of diminishing returns, but they came all the way back with this transcendent thriller set on the Texas border. The most faithful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel imaginable, it still couldn’t be anything other than a Coen Brothers movie. The brilliant suspense sequences and Javier Bardem’s chilling turn as a malevolent killer are the obvious attractions, but it’s the final lyrical moments that linger when the lights come up.

1. I’m Not There

Less perfect in every way than No Country, this fractured Bob Dylan biopic is nonetheless my pick for movie of the year. Scrambling the singer-songwriter’s legend and bouncing it off a series of funhouse mirrors, director Todd Haynes delights in the ever-more distorted reflections that result. Six different actors embody various aspects of the Bard, none more memorably than Cate Blanchett, who virtually channels Dylan’s hipster-dandy incarnation. It’s a dazzling mind-fuck for hardcore Dylan fans and perhaps a complete trainwreck for anyone else, but as a biography of an artistic sensibility – warts and all – it can’t be topped.

Top Ten of 2007: Leonard Pierce

Leonard Pierce — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Unlike many of my fellow bloggers here at the Screengrab, who live in urbane, sophisticated metropoli, I make my home in San Antonio, Texas. We have a ratio of approximately one movie theatre for every million people here, and "art house" is just what the locals call a museum. I hear if we play our cards right, we might be getting a one-week screening next year of that movie The Graduate all the cool kids are talking about, but until then, it's pretty much Transformers on nineteen of the twenty-four screens down at Huebner Oaks. So you'll forgive me if my list leans pretty heavily on stuff that's already available on Netflix; at least half the movies on my list were ones that I had to drive an hour up to Austin to even have a chance of seeing before their DVD release, and there's more than a few movies that likely would have a chance of appearing here (I think specifically of There Will Be Blood and Syndromes and a Century) that there was simply no way for me to see before the year was up. Still, I'll be happy to go along with the prevailing wisdom that 2007 was an especially rich year for film; there was plenty to see, even if you had to go out of your way to see it.

#10: THE LIVES OF OTHERS (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, dir.)

Although it was released in 2006, this masterful film from Germany didn't receive an American audience outside of the Telluride Film Festival until February. It was well worth the wait. Far too many movies that pick up Best Foreign Film Oscars are the international doppelgangers of Best Picture winners -- overblown, overpraised, middlebrow 'prestige' pictures lacking in resonance, depth and any particular qualities that will result in their being remembered far down the line. But The Lives of Others -- best thought of as a brilliant reworking of The Conversation against the dreadful backdrop of Soviet East Germany -- deserved every bit of praise heaped on it by critics both here and abroad. It's a stunning, terrifying film, brilliantly illustrating Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil' in the person of the astonishing Ulrich Mühe.

#9: SWEENEY TODD, THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET (Tim Burton, dir.)

One of the few of a year-end spate of high-profile films that I actually got a chance to see, Sweeney Todd is Tim Burton's adaptation of the notoriously blood-soaked and difficult Stephen Sondheim musical. I've never been especially fond of Tim Burton as a director, but the qualities of his filmmaking that usually work against him -- the broad emotional strokes, the barely-held-together plots, the characters as caricatures, and the meticulous set design at the expense of believability -- are turned into such strengths that it's hard to believe no one ever had the idea of having him do a musical before this. The result is certainly the best film he's ever done and likely the best film he'll ever do, an absolutely gorgeous thing to look at, and with some surprisingly fine performances. One of the best musicals I've ever seen.

#8: EASTERN PROMISES (David Cronenberg, dir.)

Conversely, I've long been a staunch defender of David Cronenberg's, even with films like Crash and Spider, which met with widespread revulsion from a lot of my fellow critics. Unfortunately, I found his most celebrated film -- 2005's A History of Violence -- sadly lacking, a formulaic and uninspiring drama that bore so little of his unique imprint as a filmmaker that it could have been directed by almost anyone. If the Russian mob drama Eastern Promises isn't strong enough to stand alongside his greatest works, though, it's at least a return to form and a revisiting of some of the themes -- muddled self-identity, the grace and brutality of violence, and a simultaneous revulsion at and fascination with the human body -- that have made him one of the signature talents of the day. Plus, naked Viggo Mortensen, ladies!

#7: BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU'RE DEAD (Sidney Lumet, dir.)

If you'd have told me last year -- hell, if you'd told me twenty years ago -- that one of the best film of 2007 would be by ancient journeyman Sidney Lumet, I'd likely have scoffed. But damned if the old trooper doesn't turn in a remarkably swift and sure-handed job behind the helm here, presenting a neo-noir thriller about a simple caper gone disastrously wrong that wouldn't be entirely out of place in the early 1960s and yet never loses a fresh sense of modernity. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead isn't a groundbreaking piece of cinema art; it's simply an assured, highly professional piece of moviemaking of the sort we rarely see anymore, and which Lumet is eminently qualified to give us. It's further bolstered by a dynamite performance from Philip Seymour Hoffman, who has simply owned 2007 on screen.

#6: LUST, CAUTION (Ang Lee, dir.)

Ang Lee continues to be the most versatile moviemaker in the business with his best work since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; if he is absolute master of no genre, he at least never ceases to amaze with his ability to dive confidently into all genres. Bouyed by astonishing performances so tightly controlled and confidently directed that they seem drawn from lost Wong Kar-Wei footage, Lust, Caution maintains a killing pace throughout and doesn't fail to deliver on its near-constant sense of tension and frustration. The much-discussed sex scenes are indeed intense and scarily erotic, but they also accomplish something that's so rarely done that it's become an industry joke: they're not arbitrary, but essential, not only to the plot, but also to the slow but inexorable revelation of the nature of the characters.

#5: THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY (Julian Schnabel, dir.)

I was never fond of Julian Schnabel, the visual artist, and while I thought that his debut film, Basquiat, showed promise, I tended to agree with the New York art critic Robert Hughes, who called it a movie about the worst painter of the 1980s made by the second worst. I'm not sure what Hughes has to say about The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, but I think it's an amazing film by a director who's finally come into full posession of the tools of his craft. Schnabel has said that he still considers himself an artist first and a director second, but this visually rewarding, complex and beautiful movie is better than anything he ever put to canvas, and even without the tremendous lead performance by Mathieu Amalric, it would be a film worth watching for its mastery of internal landscapes far richer than Schabel's art ever suggested.

#4: MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES (Jennifer Baichwal, dir.)

In what is widely regarded as a banner year for documentaries, the finest one I saw had nothing to do with the war in Iraq, the peccadilloes of the president, or the politics of personality. Instead, it was a little-seen film about a little-known photographer named Edward Burtynsky. His photographs -- and the like-minded film by Jennifer Baichwal -- document the vastness and power of man-made constructs, and convey the awe and the terror one feels at observing objects, from China's Three Gorges Dam to American junkyards, that are made by the hand of humans but can dwarf or even overwhelm the natural surroundings in which they appear. A slow-paced, deliberate, and provocative film made as a collaboration between two artists who understand each other in an perfectly asynchronous way.

#3: ZODIAC (David Fincher, dir.)

Much has been made of the fact that David Fincher, best known for his visual pyrotechnics, allegedly made his most successful film without them. That's not entirely true; among other scenes, the opening drive-by tracking shot, the first murders, and the construction montage of the San Francisco skyline can stand next to some of the most stylish set-pieces in his other films. But it's undeniable that his best film to date, and one of the best films of the year, is at its best when he simply stands back and lets the audience become spellbound with the absorbing interplay of his characters. A fascinating treatment of the nature of obsession and a subtle treatise on the way we become ensnared in the grotesque and the perverse, Zodiac is revelatory in the way it defies expectations of what a serial-killer drama should be.

#2: BRAND UPON THE BRAIN! (Guy Maddin, dir.)

Guy Maddin has been quietly establishing himself as one of the finest, most idiosyncratic directors in the world for several years now, and Brand Upon the Brain! is both his most autobiographical film to date (the lead character in the film is, well, Guy Maddin, ably and amusingly played by young Sullivan Brown) and his best. There was some fear amongst critics who had a chance to see it in its 'touring edition' -- a live extravaganza featuring on-site music, celebrity voice-overs and sound effects composed right there in the theater -- that the film wouldn't hold up without all the show-stopping theatrical gimmicks, but they needn't have worried: this is the purest distilliation of Maddin's unique sensibilities as a filmmaker: sexual obsession, throwback surrealism, fantastic dreamscapes, and madness as part of the everyday.

#1: NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (Joel & Ethan Coen, dirs.)

There are plenty of filmmakers who would trade their favorite limb for a track record like Joel and Ethan Coen -- from 1984 to 2001, they didn't make a bad film, and the 9 features they put in the can over those 17 years add up to the most robust corpus by any living American filmmaker you can name. Things started to go awry with Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers; many placed the blame on the fact that, for the first time, the Coens were filming material they didn't write. That's not a problem with No Country for Old Men, a triumphant masterpiece of genre filmmaking based on a minor Cormac McCarthy novel that once again places the brothers (credited, for the first time ever, as co-directors) where they belong: at the very pinnacle of American moviemaking. An astonishing comeback that will be discussed for decades.

That Guy!: Stephen Root

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 19:30:00 GMT

Okay, that's enough of the artsy-fartsy European creeps. Let's get back to America! And they don't come much American-er than Big Steve Root, one of the most prolific character actors in the business today. For a guy whose first film role featured him unseen in a toilet (although, considering the movie was Crocodile Dundee II, maybe it's just as well), Stephen Root has a rather highbrow acting background: for years prior to the kick-off of a remarkably rich film and television career, he was a respected member of the National Shakespeare Company. His first major recognition as an actor came when he portrayed the flighty, meddling billionaire Jimmy James as part of the high-powered cast of NewsRadio, and even with dozens of film roles to his credit, he's probably best-known -- and best-paid -- for that role and his voice-over work on King of the Hill, where he plays, among other roles, the hapless Bill Dauterive. A number of directors have enjoyed his work enough to make him a regular member of their repertory companies, particularly Mike Judge, Kevin Smith, and the Coen Brothers; Root's ability to play extremely eccentric roles while never giving the same characterization twice makes him especially sought-after by directors who specialize in character roles, and Root admitted in a recent interview that being killed by the Coens (as he, or at least his character, is in No Country for Old Men) has been the high point of his career to date. Having just celebrated his 56th birthday, Root -- who, to be perfectly honest, looks like he's been playing a 56-year-old for the lion's share of his career -- no doubt has plenty of years ahead of him both on the big screen, playing his specialty of suit-wearing middlemen who have something extremely wrong with them, and in voice-over, where he's proven to have exceptional talent. And with most of his comedic work for television widely available on DVD, a case can be made for Stephen Root as the preeminent comic character actor of the 1990s.

Where to see Stephen Root at his best:

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER (1992)

There are two kinds of Buffy fans in the world: those who liked the movie and wondered why the subsequent TV show took itself so damn seriously, and those who hated the movie and look at it as an embarrassing shell from whence the brilliant television series emerged. Unfortunately for those of us in the former camp, Joss Whedon -- who created both -- is in the latter camp and all but disowns the movie. But one thing cannot be disputed: the series would have been much improved if Whedon had seen fit to include Stephen Root as the rambling, hilariously clueless Principal Gary Murray, who made the end credits of the film so enjoyable.

OFFICE SPACE (1999)

Outside of NewsRadio and King of the Hill, Office Space forms the third jewel in Stephen Root's crown of 1990s comedy dominance. No performance of his is more memorable, more purely distilled, more quintessentially Root -- in fact, Mike Judge built the entire movie around Root's performance from a series of animated shorts he did years earlier for MTV. While there's plenty to love about this subversive take on the deadening grind of white-collar work, nothing holds the movie together like a single red stapler, and no character is more central to the plot, from beginning to end, than the psychotically ineffectual Milton Waddams. An all-time great comic role.

O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU? (2000)

We hate to keep bringing up members of the Coen Brothers Touring Company in this space, but what can we tell you? The boys know a good character actor when they see one. Stephen Root, in his first film with the Coens, has a small but unforgettable role: edging away from comedy and into (literal) tragedy, playing a variant on Tiresius as the recording studio operator and radio station man who first discovers the hidden genius of the Soggy Bottom Boys. Although Root has some funny lines in his scenes, it's his nearly-wordless performance in responding in a transport of bliss to "Man of Constant Sorrow" that is so astounding here.

Face/Off: Fargo

Peter Smith — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

LEONARD PIERCE: Unlike our last Face/Off, when we discussed Children of Men (a film which you will be marrying next summer in a small private ceremony at the Film Forum, whereas I view it simply as the most overrated movie by one of the Three Amigos prior to the release of Pan's Labyrinth), today, we're going to talk about a movie we both really liked, albeit possibly for different reasons — Fargo by the Coen Brothers.

Specifically, we're going to talk about how the movie feels about Marge Gunderson, its main character and moral center. One of the most common critiques of the Coen Brothers as filmmakers is that, while they're technically gifted and skilled synthesists, they lack heart, soul and feeling — the humanistic qualities of the directors they choose to ape. I don't believe this is true, necessarily; while I don't think the Coens will ever be accused of Capraesque oversincerity, I think they believe, more or less, in the message as well as the medium. But I do think that the Coens are very cynical filmmakers, not calculating or phony, but with a pretty jaundiced view of humanity. I don't, in short, think they really like their characters very much.

I won't go as far as to say they hate Marge Gunderson; she is clearly a decent human being for the most part, and they don't reserve for her the contempt with which they treat Jerry Lundegaard, who doesn't even have the courage to be a bad man, or Wade Gustafson, who treats the kidnapping of his daughter like a business deal only he is competent enough to close on. But I think Marge is meant to be yet another manifestation of the dull, unimaginative "Minnesota nice" of their childhood, which they sought to exorcise in Fargo just as surely as Todd Haynes did the wealthy Southern California of his youth in Safe. There are a number of scenes in which the film's attitude towards Marge peeks out: her choice of cuisine, her reaction to Mike Yanagita, her small pleasures and simple dreams, her "police work" which so impresses Deputy Lou but which is strictly small-town. But nowhere is it more apparent than in the final scene with the blank-faced killer Gaear Grimsrud: with the murderer, captured through little more than luck, sulking in the back seat of her prowler, Marge counts down a list (incomplete, as it happens) of everyone who has died because of his crimes. "And for what?" she asks of this Nordic hulk, so far removed from her world of Arby's and postage stamps. "For a little bit of money. There's more to life than a little money, you know. Don't you know that? And here you are, and it's a beautiful day. Well, I just don't understand it."

Indeed she doesn't. She doesn't understand it, and she probably never will. We aren't privy to the decision-making process that led someone as cloistered as Marge Gunderson to become a law enforcement agent in the first place, but her befuddlement — almost irritation — at being exposed to the ugly reality that the police must often face is less sadness than it is annoyance. We see here what we glimpsed in the scene with Mike Yanagita: Marge doesn't like being out of her comfort zone. She wants a quiet little life of sameness and simplicity, and her reaction to Gaear Grimsrud isn't one of moral outrage; when she encounters the first crime scene (which, it's easy to forget, begins with the murder of a fellow officer), she treats it with all the gravity she would a stolen bicycle.

Does this make her a bad person? Certainly not. In fact, it's perfectly normal — which is, in fact, the point. Marge isn't a heroine. She isn't a special person at all. She's resolutely normal, bland: boring. She is a very conventional, and in some ways small, woman who we are tricked into thinking is exceptional because her banality is on a different moral level than that of the other banal characters in the film. She is not someone who grows over the course of the film, who develops or transcends — and that is perhaps the greatest reason to believe that the film doesn't think much of her. The Coens, as they are about most things, have been tight-lipped about this, aside from their usual talk of how they don't seek to cause the same sort of reactions in their audience that most actors do, or how people react badly to films where the main character isn't "sympathetic in a Hollywood formula way." But the evidence is there on the screen for those who care to look for it.

And now, you will tell me why I have my head up my ass. (I trust you won't take the tack of a friend of mine, who insisted the Coens must have thought highly of Marge, since Joel Coen wouldn't have cast his wife in an unsympathetic role. I figure he must never have seen Raising Arizona.)

PHIL NUGENT: Leonard, first, let me just say that I would never imply that you have your head up your ass because of your take on Marge Gunderson. However, your suggestion that Pan's Labyrinth is overrated proves that you need professional help. I actually like the idea that Marge is sort of the butt of the movie. So far as theories that seem to me to be unsupported by the movies themselves, it may be second only to the idea that everything that happens in Minority Report after Tom Cruise is locked away in suspended animation is his dream of the what should happen while he actually remains locked away and unavenged. The fact that I have trouble buying it has nothing to do with any deep attachment I have to the idea of Marge Gunderson, Superstar. Rather, it's about what kind of filmmakers the Coens are. I wonder if, maybe out of some insistence on seeing Fargo as a hipper or more complex movie than it really is, you might not be overthinking this a little. Me, I tend to think of the Coens as surface guys who put an incredible amount of conscious planning into the physical details of their movies, and who are inhumanly aware of how they expect both critics and audiences to respond to their cleverness. It might sound as if I'm one of those people who sometimes badmouth the Coens for being 'merely' clever, but cleverness is something I'm all for; at the very least, it sure beats lack of imagination. But I do think that these guys have traditionally done their best work as flashy, surreal comedians — cartoonists, in fact — in such films as Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the underrated Intolerable Cruelty, which is the one movie where I think they actually achieved satire, a sometimes ruthlessly biting satire on the possibility that genuine romantic love might not exist as anything more than a crippling delusion. Fargo is a smart, impressive movie, but it is also a movie outside what I think of as their best range, and a movie that I think they made for the outside world, a movie pitched at the mainstream. I think that it was built to serve two purposes. One was to save their career after The Hudsucker Proxy, a movie closer to their best range, and a movie altogether less successful in every way than Fargo but, overall, I think, more interesting. It features several amazing set pieces that could only have been the work of the Coens, tucked inside a structure that's a bit of a train wreck. I don't think there's any question that Fargo was successful in that and its other goal, which was to give Frances MacDormand a juicy sort-of-leading role that would make her beloved, win her some great reviews and maybe an award or two, and take her career to another level, as a much-sought-after character lead just when she was about to reach an age when good actresses who haven't achieved more than McDormand had achieved before Fargo start to find themselves dropping off the map.

This may sound a little cold, and a lot less cool than the idea that the Coens made the movie to dump on the boring "ordinariness" of the frozen Midwest, but the Coens are very smart guys, who understand the movie business very well, and I see no reason why they shouldn't take these kind of calculations into effect while making the best movie they can, within the terms they set. After all, if they hadn't had their big mainstream success with Fargo they wouldn't have been able to make my beloved The Big Lebowski —a movie that, long before it was enshrined as an acknowledged modern classic, was initially written off as a disappointment by people like The New Yorker's Daphne Merkin because it lacked the "heart" that so many detected in Fargo. That heart pretty much comes down to McDormand, and while it was be a delicious joke if it was something that the squares were projecting onto a blank screen, I do think that the Coens mean for us to find it there, to the extremely limited degree that they mean to instill some kind of feeling in their work at all. Looking at the bill of indictment — all the specifics you cite as reason for judging Marge as, not even a "bad person" but disappointingly "ordinary" — I can't say that it seems like much of a put-down portrait to me. Is it really such a dreary thing for someone to say that they can't understand why somebody, even Peter Stormare, would kill a woman and feed someone, even Steve Buscemi, into a wood chipper? Or that, whether or not they understand this werewolf, they brought him in partly through luck? So long as he's not standing in line behind me at Wendy's, I'd be delighted if he were locked up based on a tip some cop read in his horoscope that morning. No, she doesn't like to be taken out of her comfort zone, but who does? (Extreme sports athletes and professional mercenaries may lead more physically exciting lives than some of us, but talk to some of them for five minutes and you may conclude that, rather than being driven by some wild man need to test themselves, some people just happen to have a comfort zone that includes traveling upside-down through the air at great speeds or being shot at by the last defenders of the presidential palace.)

For all her "ordinariness," Marge still manages to slap the cuffs on Dracula, and she does it while hugely pregnant and while being as gentle as possible with the crazy man in the restaurant and offering tender moral support to her husband, played by the actor who David Fincher recently fingered as the Zodiac killer. The movie gives her a well-timed entrance — we don't get to meet her until after the action has already reached a level of cutthroat scuzziness that encourages the audience to cling to her as a welcome, warm rock — and if she doesn't come across as Sherlock Holmes at first glance, by the end she seems to be solidly in the familiar mold of fictional detectives who use a mask of thick-witted blandness to throw their prey off the scent, and also to make it that much more satisfying to the audience when justice triumphs and the unassuming flatfoot proves his, or her, mettle. More than anything, though, I do think that Marge is shaped so that McDormand can win over the audience and walk off with the movie. Sure, the Coens could write an unflattering role for her; they did it years later in The Man Who Wasn't There, after this movie had done its job and McDormand, her career securely on the upswing, must have gotten a kick out of playing a femme fatale. But as Marge, she's allowed to envelope the character in a homey glow that I don't think the Coens would have tolerated if they meant for the character to inspire anything but uncomplicated love in the viewer. Ordinary, maybe. But definitely special.

LEONARD PIERCE: Like Hannibal Lecter, I must begin with first principles: if Marge Gunderson isn't the butt of Fargo, then who is? Carl Showalter? Shep Proudfoot? The Coens aren't above making even the most seemingly sympathetic characters in their films the targets of their sharpest barbs (or the least sympathetic the subject of unusual tenderness or depth — witness McDormand's role in The Man Who Wasn't There, or for a real treat, ask me about my pet theory that Eddie Dane is the moral center of Miller's Crossing.)

As for the question of what kind of filmmakers the Coens are, that's a bit beyond our jurisdiction here, but you're right that it's a central component of how to read the character of Marge Gunderson. I agree that they put tremendous amounts of planning and detail-work into their films, and that they're hyper-aware of the reaction they're likely to get from their audience — but to me, this argues in favor of my point, and against the idea that I'm reading to much into the depiction of Marge. The Coens are amongst the most economic filmmakers I can think of; at their best, hardly a frame is wasted. It's hard for me to believe that these little moments where Marge Gunderson comes across as small or unsympathetic are accidental, given the care with which her creators have approached everything else they've ever done.

Beyond that, it's hardly a secret that the Coens like fucking with their audiences, whether that means moviegoers or critics or even studio executives (for a sterling example of this, check out the uncomprehending foreword to the published screenplay of The Hudsucker Proxy, by a clueless producer who laments the deranged casting choices offered up by the brothers, clearly not realizing he was being had). Fargo is rife with this sort of thing from its very conception — it goes out of its way to draw attention right off the bat to its alleged based-on-a-true-story nature, after which it presents us with a story that is clearly anything but true. Given the level of high-stakes game-playing Joel and Ethan Coen have engaged in before, it doesn't strike me as implausible that Marge Gunderson was meant to be something more than Oscar bait, career padding, or a warm-gooey-nougat-center of "uncomplicated love" for the mainstream audience to chew on.

And while I've tried to keep this discussion civil, by gad, sir, I will not have my sanity called into question by a man who calls Intolerable Cruelty underrated.

PHIL NUGENT: I don't know that I can discuss something like this without addressing what kinds of filmmakers the Coens are. And despite your saying that the topic is "outside our jurisdiction," I think you're making your own assumptions about that when you ask who, if not Marge, is the butt of Fargo. If the film were credited to someone less famed for being knowing and sarcastic, you might not approach it with the sense that it must be meant as a joke at somebody's expense. Because the Coens are hip, it might seem fair to assume that they must be inclined to stick it to the most unhip person on the screen.

But working in the movie industry does strange things to you, especially if you're intelligent enough, as the Coens surely are, to be appalled by how much intelligence and skill go into shaping formula crap aimed at the lowest common denominator. And if you look at the Coens' work as a whole, it seems clear to me that they've never reserved their greatest contempt for well-meaning, good-hearted dummies: time and time again, in Raising Arizona and The Hudsucker Proxy and O Brother Where Art Thou? and, yes, Fargo, that's the model for their heroes. With all due respect for your weird man-crush on the Dane, I think the most likable character in Miller's Crossing is the Albert Finney character, who thinks he's on top of things but who doesn't really know the score and has to be protected by the friend who's cuckolding him with his fiancée. Even Jeff Lebowski, a verbally adroit hero who has his erudite moments and has inspired something of a minor philosophic movement, appears to have read great swatches of his how-to-be-a-detective manual with the book held upside-down.

So who, traditionally, have the Coens had it in for? From the start, guys who think they're smart but have no moral compass, like M. Emmet Walsh and Dan Hedaya in Blood Simple, and Billy Bob Thornton and his pretentious windbag lawyer in The Man Who Wasn't There, and just about all the important male characters in Fargo, who at their most advanced suggest some exotic form of insect life. The all-time champion whipping boy for the Coens, even more than the William H. Macy character here who shrieks and whimpers when prevented from escaping through the bathroom window while in his underwear, may be Barton Fink, the self admiring blocked playwright who doesn't listen, who lacks the professional discipline to hack out a B-movie script, and who in the end is denied even the minor dignity that might have come with being a true victim: instead, his uselessness may have inspired the aggrieved representative of dark forces to murder his family, just to get his attention. I don't think this is the kind of cynical, sucking-up to the 'average people' in the mass audience that you see in a shitheap like Forrest Gump. Coming from guys who have had to deal with charges of being 'merely clever' since they first emerged as filmmakers in their late twenties, it smacks of self-examination, and it may be the single most striking and attractive thing I know about the Coens.

The Coens, indefatigable entertainers and reflexive smart-asses that they are, may have laid the tracks for people to suspect that Marge can't be meant to be taken straight by setting her down in a Middle America snowscape where people talk as if they're making fun of the guys in Pepperidge Farms commercials, and I think that they may have intended a corrective to that in No Country for Old Men, where a guy who's not as smart as he thinks he is but who's basically decent is pitted against an abomination, with a guy who's thoroughly decent but not as quick as he used to be as moral referee, in a Texas that never threatens to turn into Blood Simple/Raising Arizona-ville. Fargo is probably still the Coens' biggest mainstream success — however well No Country does on the year-end critics' lists, I suspect it's too cold to supplant or even join the earlier film in the popular consciousness — and that means that its fan base includes a lot of people who the Coens' real fans must hate to find themselves agreeing with about anything. It may be hard for us to believe that guys like this could come up with someone like Marge — good, competent, caring, and utterly, conventionally square — without intending for her to be snickered at. But maybe that says more about us than it does about them.