A Coen Brothers Cross-Section: A Later Peak

I’m nearly out of Coen Brothers movies in my collection, and that means my deliberately incomplete cross-section of their work is nearly done. I’ve covered some of their early breakthroughs and their first really big peak, now it’s time to cover their second peak from the mid-2000s.

No Country For Old Men

One day whilst hunting in a remote spot in West Texas, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) encounters a bizarre sight – a circle of pickup trucks, with corpses scattered around them. Investigating, it becomes apparent that he’s stumbled across the sight of some sort of organised crime rendezvous gone horribly wrong; the slain men died clutching their weapons in the midst of a hideous firefight. Tracking down the one that got away, Moss finds him having bled out under a tree where he’d sought shelter, along with the thing he fled with – a thick briefcase stuffed with cash.

Moss thinks he’s got it made – just leave with the suitcase and there’s nothing to connect him to the incident, at least as far as any law enforcement investigation is concerned. Yet his conscience tickles him – for there was one survivor left at the crime scene, too wounded and incoherent to walk or drive away, begging him for water. Moss makes the fatal error of returning to the scene with water – only to find that the survivor is dead, and to get himself spotted at the scene by some interested parties. The backers of that deal want their money back – and to get it they hire Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a hitman who unleashes all the hideous violence he is capable of for the sake of finishing the job – beginning by killing his employers so he can ultimately keep the cash for himself. Is Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) equal to the task of taking down Chigurh? Has the modern world become too depraved for Bell’s folksy values? Or is it the case that the American West has been haunted by generations of cyclical violence, that facing it is a young man’s game, and this is No Country For Old Men?

A Coen Brothers Cross-Section: Peak Coen

So far in the Coen Brothers segment of “Arthur uses his blog reviews to decide what media to keep in his collection”, I’ve covered Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, and Barton Fink, three movies which took the Coens from scrappy indie filmmakers punching above their weight to filmmakers who were gathering respect and applause from critics and peers alike. For this article, I’m going to cover a trio of movies which between them cover their first big career peak and its immediate aftermath, beginning with the movie which cemented their rise to Hollywood royalty…

Fargo

It’s 1987 in Minnesota, and Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) is a thieving sack of shit who, desperate not to be exposed as a thieving sack of shit, is about to become an even worse sack of shit.

Specifically, Jerry’s been embezzling money at the car dealership he works at, which is owned by his fearsome father-in-law Wade Gustafson (Harve Presnell). The shenanigans he’s been running to cover the shortfall are wearing thin, and if he’s exposed Wade will have no mercy and Jerry’s wife, Jean (Kristin Rudrüd) will surely take a dim view of Jerry shitting the bed at the job Wade was nice enough to give him. Jerry needs money, fast, so he cooks up a scheme in which he contacts North Dakota’s sleaziest dirtbags-for-hire, Carl Showater (Steve Buscemi) and Graer Grimsrud (Peter Stormare), and get them to kidnap Jean, the idea being that Wade will pay a handsome ransom for her, a chunk of the ransom money will go to Jerry to pay off the gap, and Carl and Graer get to keep the rest.

It’s a bad plan, not least because it requires trusting Carl and Graer to hand over the money afterwards – but Jerry’s prone to bad choices, and things will go awry well before Jerry has to worry about his cut of the ransom. Soon enough, the caper has a body count, and Brainerd, Minnesota’s police chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) – is on the job. Can Marge untangle the twisted strands of Jerry’s scheme and capture a killer, all whilst juggling meeting up with an old school friend and dealing with being heavily pregnant in a chilly northern Midwest environment replete with authentic “Minnesoda” accents? You betcha!

A Coen Brothers Cross-Section: Early Works

Joel and Ethan Coen might, like David Lynch, be fairly entry-level talents in terms of people of my generation getting into the more arthouse side of movies. That isn’t to say their work is simplistic – Lynch’s certainly isn’t – but the Coens’ output, like Lynch’s, tends to be the sort of thing which gets widely and enthusiastically enough recommended that whilst they’re clearly not going for populist shovelware, at the same time you can hardly describe them as obscure. Can you really be a cult moviemaking duo if your work is so broadly well-received?

Still, even though it doesn’t get me any points on the niche-o-meter, I do really enjoy a lot of their work, and since part of the function of doing reviews on this blog is to help me Marie Kondo my collection to make sure I’m not needlessly hanging onto stuff I’ve fallen out of love with without realising, I may as well address their works. This article series is unlikely to be a full profile of all their work, it’s more a cross-section of their stuff which particularly stands out to me. For this article, I’ll look to the earliest phases of their career, starting with their debut.

Blood Simple

Texas bar owner Julian Marty (Dan Hedaya) has a problem: Ray (John Getz), one of his bartenders, has been getting really close to Abby (Frances McDormand), Julian’s wife. In a vulnerable moment, Ray and Abby cross the line and check into a motel, where they bang – and where they’re tracked down by Loren Visser (M. Emmet Walsh), a private detective working for Julian. A phone call in the morning lets them realise they’re rumbled – a meeting between Marty and Visser sees Marty tipped off. Abby and Ray see about getting her stuff out of the Marty household; Ray takes the risk of swinging by the bar quickly to demand his back pay from Julian.

Things don’t go so well, and get worse when Marty tries to kidnap Abby from Ray’s home, only to get his ass kicked. Despite his distaste for Visser, Marty decides to hire him to kill Ray and Abby, but Visser double-crosses him. When Ray stumbles across the aftermath of that, it inadvertently sows seeds of suspicion between him and Abby – neither of them realising that it’s Visser they should be afraid of…