Hail Caesar! is coming out later this month, and it looks like a hoot. A comedy set during the Golden Age of Hollywood, it's united a great cast under what should be a snappy 100 minutes of gleefully ironic fun, featuring fat Jonah Hill, bumbling George Clooney, and Channing Tatum dressed as a sailor. But equally notable is that it's the 17th film by the Coen Brothers - their first in three years. And when investigating why this should be seen as a proper "event", it might help to go back over their 32-year-long career and examine what, exactly, makes this dynamic duo so compelling.
I first discovered the Coen Brothers when I was 14 years old. I caught the last half an hour of Raising Arizona on television, and had absolutely no idea what was going on: the action was loopy and fantastic, a colourful phantasmagoria of Southern accents, rapid-fire dialogue, banjo covers of Beethoven, and Nicolas Cage. I went back and watched it again, a few more times, just to be sure it wasn't all a dream. As a fiercely individual piece of work, it struck me as unlike anything I'd ever seen before. Its humour was offset by irony, yes, but there was also a professionalism and coherence to the proceedings, a tightly-controlled celebration of chaos that transcended the film's screwball nature and made it something special.
From there, it was off to snowy Minnesota, to the cityscapes of Los Angeles, to the various plains of desolate Texas for a number of tales surrounding kidnap, murder, and plans gone awry. Joel and Ethan Coen, two Jewish kids from suburban Minneapolis, became, in my world, established deities of cineliteracy, whose intimate knowledge of film history wowed me as much as it confounded me. Their influences range from the literary, with films based on works by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, to that of genre: their critical approach has led them to make comedies, thrillers, noirs, Westerns, gangster dramas, romances, musicals - even horror, in the Shining-inspired design of Barton Fink's hellish Hollywood hotel. In short: two smart motherfuckers.
What characterises their films is a sense that they know how stupid people are, and how seldom they understand their emotions: how they interpret individual symbols and signs differently, often to disastrous effect. Think of Jerry (William H. Macy) in Fargo, who assumes his plan to kidnap his wife and then claim the ransom money from her rich father will work, without recognising that the two criminals he has hired to complete the job - played by Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare - are clearly insane.
Or think of Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton) in the vastly under-appreciated The Man Who Wasn't There, whose open affectlessness incites "Big Dave" Brewster (James Gandolfini) to try and beat him to death. Crane instead stabs him with a letter opener; and, of course, it is Crane's wife Doris (Frances McDormand, later Mrs. Joel Coen) who gets charged with the murder. As Strother Martin's Captain from Cool Hand Luke once said: "What we've got here is failure to communicate."
This stupidity bleeds into their other, lighter works, too, prompting comparisons to Preston Sturges - though I have to confess, as time goes on, I'm finding these increasingly irritating. Moronic goofballs, often played by George Clooney, are at the heart and centre of films like The Hudsucker Proxy, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, The Ladykillers, Intolerable Cruelty, and Burn After Reading, comedies of errors where idiocy, in all its many forms, leads to a series of humiliating consequences.
What's not always clear is whether we're supposed to be laughing at or with these characters - and it's here that complaints about the brothers' lack of genuine empathy become apparent. So heavily layered are elements of irony, cultural appropriation, and even postmodernism that, at the end of the day, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the brothers take a rather dim view of human nature, and a perverse glee in smashing people's heads together like puppets.
But I don't think that's always true. In their best films, there's a strong morality that accompanies this academic reading of history and genre - people like pregnant police chief Marge Gunderson (McDormand again), who can't understand people's tendency towards violence, or Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac), an artist who keeps trying, in spite of continual, crushing failure. If anything, the strange, outlandish characters that pepper the Coen brothers' universes, by default, actually endear those who bear the slightest resemblance to a real human being.
Picking a favourite is always hard. There's a reason why I keep mentioning Fargo, and if I was trying to be objective about it, I'd pick No Country for Old Men - though there's an issue with authorship there, much of its greatness deriving from Cormac McCarthy's novel. And I'm convinced that the agonisingly melancholy Inside Llewyn Davis will, come 2020, be seen as one of the best films of the decade.
Yet ultimately, I'd have to go for their third film: Miller's Crossing. A 1920s gangster thriller, somewhat inspired by Hammet's The Glass Key, it's got a reputation for being dense and convoluted - but there's so much to love, including a fascinating performance from Gabriel Byrne, a beautiful Carter Burwell soundtrack, and some of the GREATEST DIALOGUE EVER WRITTEN ("I'm awake." "...Your eyes are shut." "Who you gonna believe?"). The iconic scene where Byrne and John Turturro face off in the titular spot in the woods is still a career zenith for all involved - and again, it's all about communication. If Hail Caesar! can even be one-tenth as good as the Coens' best, it'll be a treat.
EDIT: Also, because all of you (read: none of you) wanted to know:
1. Miller's Crossing
2. Fargo
3. Inside Llewyn Davis
4. No Country for Old Men
5. The Man Who Wasn't There
6. The Big Lebowski
7. Blood Simple
8. Barton Fink
9. True Grit
10. Raising Arizona
11. A Serious Man
12. Burn After Reading
13. The Hudsucker Proxy
14. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
15. Intolerable Cruelty
16. The Ladykillers
No, I won't negotiate on A Serious Man.
