The Screengrab : miller's crossing

Set Your DVR! December 29, 2008 - January 5, 2009

Hayden Childs — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Ugh. The post-Xmas blues are coming on strong. Hell, let's drink to baby new year 2009 and get it over with! Here's the DVR-worthy scoop for the coming week. Times are Central/Eastern and overnight movies go with the previous day.

Monday, December 29:

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is all wacky postmodernism, while The Sweet Hereafter is quite the opposite. The Player is somewhere in-between, but a lot funnier.

1:30/2:30 pm: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead on IFC.
9/10 pm: The Sweet Hereafter on IFC.
11 pm/12 am: The Player on IFC.
3:05/4:05 am: The Sweet Hereafter on IFC.

Tuesday, December 30:

The penultimate day of 2008 is all about the past and the future! Ang Lee's Ride With The Devil is a topsy-turvy Civil War film, while Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch is not just the greatest Western, but the greatest film that this country has ever produced. CQ is about a lost young screenwriter in swinging Europe during the 60s making a Barbarella-like retro-future flick. Soylent Green is, uh, people. Heaven's Gate is an amazing, dull something.

4:30/5:30 pm: Ride With the Devil on AMC.
7/8 pm: The Wild Bunch on AMC.
7:30/8:30 pm: CQ on IFC.
9/10 pm: Soylent Green on TCM.
1/2 am: Heaven’s Gate on TCM.

Wednesday, December 31:

It's the last day of the year, spend the sober part of it with America's (fictionalized) history. Stagecoach, the film that Orson Welles studied to learn how to direct movies, is surprisingly claustrophobic, given that it was shot in Monument Valley, and one of the most influential films ever made. And of course you've seen the two Sergio Leone movies before, but there's never a bad reason to watch one of the Man With No Name films.

5/6 am: Stagecoach on TCM.
9/10 am: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly on AMC.
1/2 pm: A Fistful of Dollars on AMC.

Thursday, January 1:

If you find yourself up early (or late), The Coen Brother's gangster film Miller's Crossing is the best movie they've made. TCM has a Cary Grant film festival running during the day, with the screwball classics Bringing Up Baby, The Awful Truth, and It Happened One Night (there's others, too, but these are the best). In prime time, TCM is running the original King Kong, which is an awe-inspiring movie. And Reservoir Dogs is, of course, the movie that launched Madonna's career.

8:15/9:15 am: Miller’s Crossing on IFC.
10/11 am: Bringing Up Baby on TCM.
2:30/3:30 pm: Miller’s Crossing on IFC.
3:15/4:15 pm: The Awful Truth on TCM.
5/6 pm: It Happened One Night on TCM.
7/8 pm: King Kong (1933) on TCM.
9:15/10:15 pm: Reservoir Dogs on IFC.
2:35/3:35 am: Reservoir Dogs on IFC.

Friday, January 2:

While IFC has the weirdness of Blue Velvet, TCM is running a Randolph Scott film festival. The first two were directed by Budd Boetticher and are great, sometimes dark, versions of the classic Western style. I don't know anything about The Cariboo Trail. Western Union was directed by Fritz Lang. Excuse me, I mean Fritz "Kick Ass" Lang.

6:25/7:25 pm: Blue Velvet on IFC.
7/8 pm: The Tall T on TCM.
8:30/9:30 pm: Ride Lonesome on TCM.
10/11 pm: The Cariboo Trail on TCM.
11:30 pm/12:30 am: Western Union on TCM.
2:15/3:15 am: Blue Velvet on IFC.

Saturday, January 3:

Saturday doesn't have much. The 47 Ronin is the first part of an epic samurai tale. I'm guessing the second half will run the following Saturday. And Modern Times is the classic Chaplin film.

7/8 am: The 47 Ronin, Part I on IFC.
7/8 pm: Modern Times on TCM.

Sunday, January 4:

Burden of Dreams is the documentary about the ambitious dreamer Werner Herzog slowly going insane while trying to film Fitzcarraldo, a movie about an ambitious dreamer who slowly goes insane. Harlan County, USA is a documentary about a mining strike in Kentucky in the 70s. After watching this movie, you may join the IWW. And Paranoid Park is Gus Van Sant's 2008 film about skateboarders and murder. It's in the vein of his Death Trilogy rather than his more conventional style, and it's topping many Best Of 2008 lists.

7/8 am: Burden of Dreams on IFC.
8:45/9:45 am Harlan County, USA on IFC.
12:05/1:05 pm: Burden of Dreams on IFC.
5:30/6:30 pm: Paranoid Park on IFC.

Monday, January 5:

Back to the grindstone again! In this case, the grindstone will be played by Andrei Tarkovsky's experimental film Solaris and Michael Winterbottom's trippy history of Tony Wilson and the Manchester scene, 24 Hour Party People.

1:35/2:35 pm: Solaris on IFC.
4:30/5:30 pm: 24 Hour Party People on IFC.

In Other Blogs: Trick or Treat

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Night of the Living Dead made the top five in our list of the 25 Greatest Horror Movies, but our enthusiasm for George Romero’s seminal zombie film pales compared to that of PopMatters, which has put together an exhaustive tribute in honor of Night’s 40th anniversary. “Love it or hate it, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead is a recognized cornerstone of American culture and world cinema. After 40 years, Romero’s film remains an influential film that generates a variety of readings and discourses. Furthermore, this horror classic continues to spawn a variety of sequels, remakes, and copycats…Indeed, the magnitude of the cultural significance of Night of the Living Dead is made evident in this massive collection of 30 articles that uniquely analyze, dissect, discuss, and re-appreciate the cultural, political, social, ideological, philosophical, and psychological meanings of this groundbreaking horror film. Here you will find fresh perspectives, appreciations, and theoretical frameworks that bring a new light to the critical examination of Night of the Living Dead.”

Spoutblog checks out the sexiest vampire movie of all time: Daughters of Darkness. “The tone is set right from the start: an appropriately blue-hued sex scene, jump cuts from Valerie’s ecstatically grasping hand back to naked entwined torsos, Stefan virtually devouring his young bride, burrowing his head into the heaving flesh of her chest, going for the jugular without drawing blood. The entire atmosphere of the film is steamy, as visceral as the Florida summer of Body Heat. From the rising and falling suspense string score to the lush, sensuous colors and velvet fabrics of the European resort, as cavernous and creepy as the Overlook Hotel; from the fluid camerawork, the grand high angle and long shots, the noir shadows, the close ups on Seyrig’s flawless face, a playful pixie vixen, nails and lips forever painted blood red.”

Filmcatcher looks at (near) great horror movies you’ve probably never seen, including 1974’s Bad Ronald. “Scott Jacoby, a popular TV actor back in the day, plays weirdo Ronald, a high-schooler who lives with his mother. When Ronald accidentally kills a tormenter schoolmate, his Mom fears the police and hides him away in a secret room in the house. Well, Mom dies and eventually a whole new family moves in; trouble is, Ronald is still trapped in the house. Confined to his hiding place, old Ronny starts to become deranged and invents an alternative reality, a fantasy world called ‘Atrantra,’ drawing and writing about it all over the walls of his room in a scrawled graffiti that is truly freaky. Then Ronald begins to venture out of his improvised prison and things get really nasty…”

The 31 Screams photo-essays at Arbogast on Film continue with Arlene Francis. “Francis spends a lot of time screaming in MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE (1932). In fact, it's all she does. Cast in her film debut as a ‘Woman of the Streets,’ she is screaming when we meet her, watching in horror as two men kill one another (presumably for her favor). It's a startlingly savage scene for the time, grainy, shadow-ringed and doom-laden, and when both combatants are finally dead, Bela Lugosi swoops in whisk away this damsel in distress.”

Unfortunately, we end this installment with some real-life horror. Andrew Johnston, longtime contributor to The House Next Door, died on Sunday. House founder Matt Zoller Seitz pays tribute. “So many truths only become clear with hindsight. Here’s one of them: Unbeknownst to nearly everybody, even those closest to him, Andrew Johnston was a superhero. His influence was as profound as it was largely unseen. Like the hero of Miller's Crossing, Tom Regan, Andrew managed to re-order large parts of his universe without anyone being the wiser.”

Hebrew Hammers: The Top 12 Tough Jews of Cinema (Part II)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 15 May 2008 20:30:00 GMT

JOHN GOODMAN AS WALTER SOBCHAK IN THE BIG LEBOWSKI (1998)

Okay, so technically, this one is a bit of a cheat. Not only was Walter Sobchak portrayed by the decidedly non-Jewish John Goodman, but the character isn’t even technically of the People; as the Dude points out, he’s a Polish Catholic who converted when he married a Jewish woman. Still, that doesn’t stop him from maintaining his Jewish identity to the point of outright hostility; he won’t roll on Shabbos, and claims that he’s “as Jewish as fuckin’ Tevye”. Nor does it stop him, in a movie not exactly known for its macho tough guys, from being the toughest guy on screen: whether it’s pulling a .45 on a burned-out hippie for going over the line while bowling, hatching a scheme to take out an entire gang of phony kidnappers, or biting the ear off of a German nihilist, the proprietor of Sobchak Security displays a toughness that borders on the psychotic. And if he sometimes flags a bit, backing off from an outraged neighbor whose car he’s just totaled, he makes up for it later by brusquely yanking a paraplegic out of his wheelchair to see if he’s faking. (Turns out he isn’t, but hey, he had to check, right?) As an aside, Walter may be the toughest Jew in the Coen Brothers’ cinematic ouvre, but he’s hardly the only one; their films are crammed full of hard-assed Hebrews. There’s tough-as-nails furniture magnate Nathan Arizona (nee Huffheinz) in Raising Arizona; steely mob moll Verna Birnbaum in Miller’s Crossing, who has plenty more guts than her conniving brother Bernie; monstrous movie producer/force of nature Jack Lipnick (played by longtime tough Jew Michael Lerner) in Barton Fink; scheming business tycoon Sidney Mussberger in The Hudsucker Proxy; and inscrutable post-modernist shyster Freddie Riedenschneider in The Man Who Wasn’t There. Sure, only one of those characters was actually played by a Jewish actor, but the Coen Brothers clearly have a soft spot for tough Jews, and Walter may be the best, but he won’t be the last.

HANK GREENBERG IN THE LIFE AND TIMES OF HANK GREENBERG (1998)

No other baseball player could ever match the impact of Jackie Robinson breaking the color line in 1947, or go through the hell he did to achieve it. But as the 1998 documentary The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg makes clear, the major leagues were no picnic for the first Jewish slugger either. When Greenberg got his start in the Texas League, a teammate was puzzled by his appearance; he'd been told that all Jews had horns. Things didn't improve when he made it to the show in the 1930s. Between Father Coughlin and Henry Ford, Detroit was a hotbed of anti-Semitism. Chants of "kike" and "sheeny" rang out through the stands and opposing dugouts. But through it all, Greenberg was a one-man wrecking crew. He was twice voted the American League MVP and he led the Detroit Tigers to back-to-back World Series in 1934 and 1935, despite refusing to play on Yom Kippur during the pennant drive. (He did play on Rosh Hashanah, though – his rabbi found a loophole in the Talmud.) The Hebrew Hammerin' Hank was the first prominent Jew known for physical prowess and an inspiration to kids like Walter Matthau ("I was just delighted to know there was someone like Hank Greenberg around, and I didn't have to wind up as a presser, a cutter or a salesman in the garment center") and Alan Dershowitz ("He defied every stereotype – he defied Hitler's stereotype!"). He's in the baseball Hall of Fame – and now he's in our Hall of Tough Jews.

MICHAEL LERNER AS ARNOLD ROTHSTEIN IN EIGHT MEN OUT (1988)

How tough was Arnold Rothstein, the only man to successfully fix the World Series? So tough that Rich Cohen, the author of Tough Jews, calls him “the Moses of organized crime”. Though the man many refer to as the most successful Jewish gangster in American history met an ugly end, getting his gut shot after he bowed out of what he claimed was a crooked poker game, he made quite a name for himself along the way: starting out as a masterful oddsmaker and proposition bettor, he rose to such prominence that Lucky Luciano credits him as having taught the Italian mobsters of the day how to act and dress, and Frank Costello claims he was the first to truly recognize the vast amounts of money to be made off of prohibition. He became fodder for no less an artist than F. Scott Fitzgerald, who based The Great Gatsby’s Meyer Wolfsheim on him; Damon Runyon picked up the gauntlet, writing Arnold into many of his stories under a variety of names. Along the way, he also became a legendary pool shark (providing inspiration for the marathon game in The Hustler) and made a nearly unprecedented mark on modern organized crime – so much so that another tough Jew, The Godfather Part II’s Hyman Roth, cites him as an inspiration. Oh, yeah – and he fixed the 1919 World Series and got away with it scot-free. Although the names of many a White Sox great was dragged down into ignominious disgrace (including two, Joe Jackson and Buck Weaver, who were likely innocent of any wrongdoing), Rothstein, the architect of the fix and the man who made more money off of it than anyone else, was completely exonerated by an impressionable jury. In Eight Men Out, Rothstein is expertly played by Michael Lerner, no stranger to playing tough Jews (see the entry on Walter Sobchak, above); his icy, unflappable confidence and contempt is perfectly realized in a scene where, discussing with his fixer the likelihood that the best players in baseball will take a dive, says “I know guys like that. I grew up with them. I was the fat kid they wouldn't let play. ‘Sit down, fat boy'. That's what they'd say. ‘Sit down, maybe you'll learn something.’ Well, I learned something all right. Pretty soon, I owned the game, and those guys I grew up with come to me with their hats in their hands.”

LEE STRASBERG AS HYMAN ROTH IN THE GODFATHER, PART II (1974)

By the time we meet him Hyman Roth is an old man in ill health, yet we'd never think to call him frail. His body may be failing, but his mind is sharp and his lust for wealth and power undiminished. The Godfather saga's fictionalized version of Meyer Lansky was one of the few screen roles taken on by Actors Studio guru Lee Strasberg, and easily the greatest. In a few short scenes, with a handful of well-chosen gestures – the dismissive passing of a gold telephone, the raising of a plate of cake – Strasberg gives us a man in full. We may never have seen him in the full bloom of youth, but we can guess how terrifying he must have been from his "Moe Green" speech to Michael Corleone, one of the all-time great movie monologues. His gaze steady and full of fire, his breath hitching in fierce, staccato snorts, Roth lays it on the line: This is the business we've chosen.

ADAM GOLDBERG AS MELLISH IN SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (1998) AND THE HEBREW HAMMER IN THE HEBREW HAMMER (2003)

In comedic roles from Dazed & Confused to Entourage, Adam Goldberg frequently comes across as a younger, hairier Woody Allen with his fast-talking, hyper-cerebral neurotic characters. But, even in his lighter moments, there’s always a sense of intensity and simmering anger underpinning his performances, leading my fellow Screengrabber Phil Nugent to suggest his work in 2 Days In Paris for this list (“What can I say? The guy scares me!”). But instead, I’ve chosen two of his more overtly tough screen personas, in films where his characters literally bring the pain. As the Jewish soldier Private Stanley Mellish in Saving Private Ryan, Goldberg’s character is a smart, regular guy hardened by combat and his own, very personal stake in the war. Even when his tough façade finally cracks (in one of the most harrowing, visceral depictions of impending death I’ve ever seen), Mellish, despite his fear, remains determined and clear-headed to the end. As the titular superhero in The Hebrew Hammer, meanwhile, Goldberg tweaks the popular notion that Jews are more brainy than brawny in what writer/director Jonathan Kesselman dubbed the first “Jewsploitation” movie. As Mordechai Jefferson Carver, Goldberg wears the wide-brimmed hat of a Hasidim like a pimp crossed with Clint Eastwood as he fights to save Hanukah from the clutches of Santa’s murderous, power-mad son, Damian. Non-P.C. hilarity and Jewish stereotypes repurposed as standard Hollywood action clichés ensue. Shabbat Shalom, muthahfuckers!

CHARLTON HESTON AS MOSES IN THE TEN COMMANDMENTS (1956)

It’s one of the crowning ironies in the history of religious cinema that Charlton Heston, a man who tended to project about the same spiritual qualities as a forcefully hurled brick, portrayed not only the author of the Pentateuch, but also the Pope. It’s even more ironic that Moses, perhaps the toughest Jew in history, was given his most memorable screen portrayal by a man so WASPy his first name was “Charlton”. The Bible tells us that Moses was a willful but often reticent man, a man so unsure of himself, so terrified to lead, that he asked his brother Aaron to do his public speaking; in Cecil B. DeMille’s last huge Bible epic, Heston’s Moses couldn’t be farther from that portrayal. Moses, in the hands of Chuck amok, is a primal force of nature, as intimidating as God himself; when he struts down from the Mount after having received the Decalogue, he looks less like a man awed by coming face-to-face with the creator of the universe than he does Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever. His jaw jutting even beneath his pasted-on beard and his iron chest swelling outside of his robes, Heston’s Moses looks like he’s received special dispensation from Jehovah to start kicking ass and taking names, and he can’t wait to get started. When Moses sneers “Hear His word, Ramses, and obey,” he isn’t imploring, he’s demanding – let my people go, he seems to say, or I’ll take these stone tablets and flatten you right across the choppers with them. It’s no wonder this portrayal resonated with Chosen People and Gentiles alike; the goyim got to claim the actor as their own, and the Jews got to see their main man transformed from thoughtful liberationist rebbe to one-man Pharoah-stomping machine. Heston would go on to play Judah Ben-Hur, who was almost as tough a Jew as Moses, but The Ten Commandments still remains the pinnacle of big-screen Hebrew bad-assery.

Click here for more Tough Jews!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak

In Other Blogs: Oscar Special

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 20:30:00 GMT

The hot topic this week is the 80th Annual Academy Awards, which will mercifully be over sometime early Monday morning. Until then, there’s still a few items of interest in the blogosphere:

The full coverage over at Cinematical includes not only the staff predictions, but those of Filipino cruise ship bartenders and Jose the Cabbie, as well as a look at the all-important Borgnine Factor: “It's hard to get a statistical breakdown of the Academy's membership, but over the years I've formed a mental picture of the Academy's average member. He's male; he's been in show business for decades, usually as an actor; he's wealthy enough to be "liberal"; he's white…In short, Ernest Borgnine. So, when I try to handicap Oscar picks, I ask: WWEBD?”

IFC Film News clues us in on five Oscar nominees who never existed, one of whom is nominated this year. Roderick Jaynes is “one of the most respected film editors in the business, if one of the most elusive. In addition to penning introductions to the published versions of the Coens' screenplays for Barton Fink, Miller's Crossing and The Man Who Wasn't There, Jaynes was celebrated as one of Entertainment Weekly's 50 Smartest People in Hollywood last year and had been previously nominated for an Oscar for Fargo in 1997.”

Film Threat can always be relied on to focus on what’s really important. Screw the Oscars – who’s going to win the Razzies? A hint – put your money on Nicolas Cage for Worst actor. “He's not an actor anymore, he's morphed into a plague of cinema. All leather and twitches, this Cage fellow.”

Finally, if you’re going to be stuck at a desk somewhere unable to watch on Sunday night and just want to keep current, our friends over at GreenCine will be live-blogging the event. At least you won’t have to worry about what to wear.

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.

When Good Directors Go Bad?: The Hudsucker Proxy

Peter Smith — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 20:00:00 GMT

The setup: After making a name for themselves with a series of unique and relatively small-scale crime stories (Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, and Miller's Crossing), Joel Coen and his producer-cowriter brother Ethan won the Palme d'Or at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival with their Hollywood-themed comedy Barton Fink. Their next film saw them collaborating with super-producer Joel Silver and working with a budget of upwards of $25 million back when that still meant something in Hollywood.

What went wrong: The popular rap against the Coens is that their films are stylish but soulless, which is definitely applicable to Jennifer Jason Leigh's performance. Leigh comes off as affected even in realistic roles, and playing girl reporter Amy Archer, she doesn't so much play a role as ape Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. The mannerisms overwhelm the role, which makes sense when she's putting on a tough front for the boys, but once that front begins to fall, the character is meant to be the film's emotional center, and I wasn't feeling it. Compare Cate Blanchett's Hepburn to what Leigh's doing here and you'll see the difference between a fully-realized character and an explosion at the tic factory.

Fortunately, Leigh's misguided performance is hardly fatal, as there's a whole lot of other elements to love about The Hudsucker Proxy. Leigh aside, the performances are spot-on, beginning with Tim Robbins in the title role. As the naïve sap turned into Hudsucker Industries' puppet president, Robbins gives a comic performance that would have fight right into a Preston Sturges film, and his gangly physical presence and good-natured cluelessness recall Sturges' favorite leading man Eddie Bracken. Even Robbins' character name — Norville Barnes — could have been a Bracken character.

As usual in a Coen film, the film's supporting cast is dynamite, especially Paul Newman as the calculating vice president, forever answering questions with a gruff "sure-sure," and Jim True as the chatty, duplicitous elevator operator Buzz. Plus there's the famous stylized Coen dialogue, which might get distracting if it weren't so damned clever.

But the most notable aspect of The Hudsucker Proxy is the world the world the Coens have lovingly created, an Art Deco nightmare version of fifties New York. Norville's experiences in the mailroom wouldn't be out of place in Brazil, while the top-level offices and boardrooms owe a debt to Ayn Rand. Dennis Gassner's visionary production design, coupled with cinematography by the great Roger Deakins and a score by Coen stalwart Carter Burwell that makes liberal use of Aram Khachaturyan's "Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia," make The Hudsucker Proxy the most visually stunning of the Coen brothers' films. It's not perfect, but it's a lot of fun.

The fallout: Clueless how to market the film, Warner Brothers dumped Hudsucker into a handful of theatres to middling reviews, although the film has its share of defenders today. The Coens left Hollywood to make the more modestly-budgeted Fargo, which won back their previous critical supporters and then some. Their latest film, No Country for Old Men, opened earlier this month to ecstatic reviews. — Paul Clark