I’ll miss your daily reviews. Perhaps a repeat performance with another director? Kubrick?

And thanks to everyone else who contributed to making this thread such a stimulating read. Special mention though to Evan whose comments often prompted more thorough discussion.

Thank you for the offer, although I’m not sure what I would have to say beyond my current comments. If I come up with something worthy, I will let you know. As it is, I think I may burned my current Coen candle down to nothing but a nub with this film-a-day thread.

Seriously, Joel, you should take all of this and write an article for my site for Coens month. Game?

I’ve never seen Intolerable Cruelty, and its been ages since I’ve seen The Ladykillers, so I’m looking forward to approaching what most consider to be the worst of the Coens’ ouevere. Knowing my proclivities, I’ll probably love them.

Uneven and generally misfiring, this is the only Coens film I consider a failure.

Deakins’ cinematography is once again spot on, especially the beautiful shots of the thieves disposing of various dead weight from the bridge (these scenes do involve a lot of CGI, to be fair). Then there’s the cast, which includes Tom Hanks, Stephen Root, J. K. Simmons, and…Marlon Wayans. Irma P. Hall and Tzi Ma are also good in supporting roles. And then there’s the story, which follows a misfit band of crooks with a rather elegant heist plan and the morality play that will see fate render unerring justice on them all, a common theme in Coen brothers’ films.

But something (many things) just don’t come together for a satisfying film, no matter how hard I want to like this movie. Let’s begin with Tom Hanks, who marries an extremely mannered Southern accent to a performance rife with odd tics. I want to like it and in parts I do, but something about it just doesn’t work. His professor Dorr is less creepy than he is goofy, and something about that undermines my enjoyment. Hanks doesn’t nail Dorr so much as he buries him under the eccentricity of the performance.

J. K. Simmons gives his all to Garth, but the explosive diarrhea his character suffers from is a lame plot device that we can see coming a mile off. It’s one step removed from the toilet humor of most Marlon Wayans’ roles.

Speaking of, Marlon Wayans is actually kind of funny in this movie, if he didn’t feel like such a ridiculous b-boy caricature. Ultimately I really can’t stand Wayans’ style of shrill comedy and he grates on me to no end. I’m not saying he’s bad, just supremely annoying. Nuff said.

Stephen Root is enjoyable as Wayans’ boss, even if his egocentric dickhead of a boss character is fairly cliche. Tzi Ma’s General is a more physical role than anything else and he sells it well. Irma P. Hall is good in the straight-(wo)man role as Mrs. Munson, a gracious woman with little patience for Prof Dorr and company’s shenanigans.

Then there’s the Southern setting of this story, which takes the Coens into a black matriarch’s home and her world of gospel, fiery church sermons, and that bizarre portrait of her deceased (but still watchful) husband. Watching the Ladykillers, I felt at times like the Coens had turned their sardonic eye towards a sub-culture they’ve only witnessed through films and television and the result was oddly uncomfortable. Maybe my political correctness nerve was being unfairly overly sensitive, but it didn’t feel right. That sense of discomfort, that maybe they’re treading on ground they don’t have a clue about, made the entire movie feel awkward and misplaced.

As much as I love the Coens and as much as I think they tried to make Ladykillers a success, it fails in a number of places for me. It’s an awkward comedy of errors that feels like its more mawkish elements are misplaced,often erring on the side of simplistic comedy and tired cliches. Parts of it are very good, but the whole fails to satisfy.

I usually love anything Geoffrey Rush but I couldn’t agree more, Craig. For some reason that opening just rubs me the wrong way and puts the whole experience of the film on the wrong foot out of the starting gate.

Classic.

I hate the whole opening with Geoffrey Rush however.

More so than any other Coen brothers’ film, Intolerable Cruelty feels like it bears the burden of an overzealous producer and studio behind it. To be fair, the Coens involvement was reportedly originally limited to script work (they did not originate the script), but they eventually took on directing duties too.

From the opening title credits though, it’s obvious this isn’t a standard Coen brothers affair. IMDb lists six producers (including the Coens) and three executive producers on the film, with only one of these a regular Coen co-producer (John Cameron). It’s not abnormal for the Coens to have production help, but previously they’ve had a single co-producer and usually, it’s been someone they’ve worked with extensively. Regardless, Intolerable Cruelty feels like a mainstream Hollywood dark comedy for much of its running time and this is likely the result of Brian Grazer, Grant Heslov, and Joel Whitaker’s involvement.

Intolerable Cruelty is about uber divorce attorney, no strike that, uber divorce litigation samurai Miles Massey (George Clooney) and the ensuing war with a gold-digging goddess, Marylin Rexroth (Catherine Zeta-Jones). Massey is taken by Marylin, Marylin simply wants the money. All the money. Hilarity ensues.

Clooney proves once again to be adept at screwball comedy, alternately portraying Miles as a immoral master of the law and as a lovestruck schoolboy in Marylin’s presence. Zeta-Jones is good as the seductive con artist, Marylin, but the chemistry between her and Clooney seems one-sided at best. This might be because they seem to be in two different movies. Clooney channels the same goofball energy he brought to Oh Brother, where as Zeta-Jones is on slow-burn as Marylin. A movie like this can only work when the two leads show some real fireworks between each other, but that never really happens in Intolerable Cruelty, partially because the two performances are never in tune.

Richard Jenkins is once again great as Marylin’s attorney and Billy Bob Thorton offers a straight-faced supporting turn as one of Marylin’s many wealthy husbands. Paul Adelstein is also great as Massey’s hapless assistant, Wrigley. The rest of the cast is a bit more of a mixed bag and to be fair none of them really stand out in the script except for one notable exception, Irwin Keyes as Wheezy Joe. I mention Wheezy Joe because he is the single most Coenesque detail of the film and the one moment during Intolerable Cruelty where it was clear who was directing the movie. I will say no more so as not to ruin it for the uninitiated save to say that Wheezy Joe is a brief yet memorable part of the story.

In a nutshell, Intolerable Cruelty proves that the Coens will never comfortably inhabit the mainstream. I remember seeing this in a mall multiplex opening weekend on a Saturday night, with a crowd that more multiplex audience than Coen fans. As the end credits rolled, most of them seemed disappointed, possibly even perplexed by the movie they had just seen. It was not what the Clooney/Zeta-Jones fans were hoping for. Being a Coen brothers fan, I was in tacit agreement.

It’s not a complete failure as a film, but it’s also not as enjoyable or memorable (for Coen fans) as the Hudsucker Proxy either. Ultimately it’s a fairly forgettable movie, not one that fits neatly within the consistent style and oeuvre of the Coen brothers’ filmography.

Good stuff.

The Man Who Wasn’t There is an odd little movie that rides squarely on the shoulders of Billy Bob Thorton’s mannered, nuanced performance as barber Ed Crane. Without him, the disparate parts of this movie would probably completely fall apart. There are UFOs, a musical prodigy, adultery, betrayal, murder, dry cleaning, and toupees. And haircuts. Or maybe I should say the cutting of hair is a motif.

The Man Who Wasn’t There really isn’t a heavily plotted film noir so much as its a character study with a film noir plot. The Coens dissect Ed Crane, a man who has retreated so far into the periphery of his own existence that he is a shadow of a person. He is a zen master of barbering and cigarettes, achieving something of spiritual contemplation during the act of cutting heads. But Ed’s home life has become less than perfect. He has an odd scheme he concocts to change his life and take charge of his future, but the scheme seems to have a life of its own. When fate throws him a curve he’s more passenger than conductor in the events that follow, offering a verbal narrative that faithfully captures the details but usually underplays Ed’s reaction to them. And if Ed does react, it is submerged under a stoic surface so resolute and so thoughfully paced that Ed mimics more a glacier than a man. He’s not cold so much as he takes his time. We discover him not through his words or thoughts, but how he notes the details of what is going on around him. He’s the spectator to his own life in a sense.

Billy Bob is excellent in the main role, but the supporting work of Tony Shalhoub as Riedenschneider nearly eclipses Thorton’s performance. Shalhoub is chewing the scenery but doing it in masterful style. Riedenschneider is part master lawyer, part carnival barker, part con man. He sees Ed as a paycheck but leaves Ed believing he’s committed to the cause.

Ed on Riedenschneider: ”He told them to look not at the facts, but at the meaning of the facts. Then he said the facts had no meaning.”

The supporting cast of Richard Jenkins, Jon Polito, Frances McDormand, and Michael Badalucco are also all good, each getting to try on different hats in this film. I think James Gandolfini may have been unnecessarily type cast as the heavy here, and while it works he definitely feels out of place to me.

It’s quite a mixed bag rendered beautifully by the amazing black and white cinematography of Roger Deakins. Deakins had to compose and shoot the film in color for foreign release requirements while simultaneously planning every frame for black and white. Deakins actually preferred the look of color desaturated over standard black and white stocks because it could achieve a broader depth of shadow detail, sharper image detail, and less apparent film grain. This attention to detail shows too, especially in the wonderful jail house conference where ace attorney Freddy Riedenschneider is enveloped in a spiderweb of shadows and light. It’s a gorgeous movie.

While it’s never been clear if the movie was actually distributed in color overseas, there have been a few reports of a couple color prints accidentally showing up in a couple American theaters. I feel sorry for those poor souls, because The Man Who Wasn’t There would be robbed of all its meaning in color. It’s film noir to the core (with UFOs), a throwback to the films of the 40’s and 50’s.

I have no idea how to end this post so I’ll leave it here, with a moment of uncertainty coupled with hope much the same way Ed leaves us.

The issue of dreams in Coen films have to do, I think, with the differences between the real world and the imagined world and the world we all aspire to.

For all you aspiring filmitists that read this site regularly (and Craig), if you interview the Coens or anyone directly involved in making Barton Fink, make sure to ask about that scene.

Inquiring minds want to know.

Good point about the dreams, Alexander. That is definitely a reoccurring narrative motif in the Coen brothers’ films. Doesn’t Norville’s dance sequence with the feather lady in Hudsucker Proxy count as a dream sequence too?

The pelican thing is like that piece of paper blowing right past Orson Welles in Touch of Evil. I think it was planned, and it’s so fabulous because you naturally suspect it couldn’t have been. (Of course, I could be wrong on that, like everything else I write about, heh.)

The postcard…I’m not sure it has a specific meaning. It may just be a postcard, that comes to life after Barton has lost his mind. At least, that’s how I read it.

One thing I’ve always loved about Barton Fink’s ending is that pelican. It couldn’t have been planned, but it’s a great little moment.

Joel, that Oedipus connection is hilarious. It may be true, come to think of it… ahaha…

The way the hat blows in the wind seems to indicate a certain incapability to withstand the forces of nature as well.

Joel, I’m really enjoying the more recent capsule reviews of yours just like the earlier ones. Hudsucker should be a better film than it is considering all of the elements at work; it’s still very interesting, however.

Craig, your thoughts on The Big Lebowski are interesting because I remember after seeing it, thinking immediately, “Wow, they actually outdid Raising Arizona.” I love Raising Arizona… but… it’s The Dude!

Humorously, I just saw Keith Olbermann play a couple of clips of The Big Lebowski to open his show (tying it in with the abysmal bowling of the two Democrat presidential candidates).

Barton Fink is a heavy film, for good and ill, perhaps, depending on your perspective, and fits in the Coen catalogue in a way not too dissimilar from The Seventh Seal: it may not be the most straightforwardly appealing or even necessarily the all-around best but it’s stuffed with symbolism, allegory and metaphor, a significant amount of which Evan describes.

Craig there’s no need to apologize for being an apologist :-)