miller’s crossing (w&d the coen brothers)

Did we know, way back when, that we were witnessing the birth of a dynasty? In a world where so many filmmakers come and go, have their moment of glory and then are moved on, to TV or being a gun for hire, or obscurity, the Coen Brothers have stood out over the course of thirty years as a team that gets films made and occasionally strike gold. Miller’s Crossing, their third feature, is an assured piece of filmmaking. The Coen Brothers thrive on big casting, a heightened sense of reality and some tastefully excessive violence. It’s noticeable how Gabriel Byrne keeps bouncing back from repeated beatings, as though he was made of rubber. Then again, this feels like part of the Coen bros schtick - rubbery faces which contort, distort and then come back into some kind of regular shape, a rubbery plot that wobbles around but gets there in the end. It’s a kind of playmobile filmmaking; straining the boundaries of emotional plausibility whilst the actors charm pants off the viewers. So good to see Albert Finney in there doing his thing, one of that great generation of British/ Irish film actors that stalked the movie world and exuded charisma. (On which note and completely tangentially, RIP Terrence Stamp.)

hail caesar (w&d ethan coen, joel coen) & the big short (d adam mckay, w. mckay, charles randolph)

Hail Caesar

There’s not that much to say about Hail Caesar. A packed out Saturday night Ritzy settles down to watch some escapist fare and gets what it pays for. No matter how much the film theorists might speculate about an subtext of “faith” in years to come (the word Clooney cannot utter), the film’s narrative barely holds together; instead there’s just enough in its bricolage of ideas to muddle by as a plot. Reminding us that film, the artistic medium most lacking a process of creative unity, is no more than a collection of sequences which sometimes makes for a coherent whole, and sometimes doesn’t. And that sometimes this lack of coherence matters, and at others it doesn’t much. In this case, it doesn’t much. There are some lovely sequences which pastiche or homage the ‘golden age’ of Hollywood; some lovely comic moments; some lovely cameos. All strung together like a bunch of mismatching pearls by a narrative that just about gets the film from start to finish. Some of the comic moments, notably the meeting of the religious elders and Fiennes’ lovely cameo as the director of mannered, Cowardian melodramas are worth the ticket price alone. Hail Caesar might be more like a review sketch than a serious drama, but on a dank Saturday night in Brixton, it goes down a treat. 

The Big Short 

So, the demise of the intelligent Hollywood star-fuelled blockbuster has been overrated. All this in a year when Spotlight, which I haven’t seen, won an awards competition which people take note of. The Big Short is a fluent, compelling tale of how the system failed in 2008, which manages to pull it off despite making its protagonists a group of disconnected white guys who never meet and who make it rich by outwitting that said system. It really shouldn’t work as a movie, under any of the usual terms. Sympathetic hero - no. Clear protagonist - no. Unity of action - no. However, whilst Hail Caesar is not really a film about faith; The Big Short is. The faith of the individual in his capacity to hold firm to his beliefs when all the evidence is screaming that he’s wrong. This is the uniting narrative of all the eight lead characters; although none more so than in the case of Christian Bale’s drum-toting investment guru, whose main function in the movie is to do nothing other than wait. Waiting, as we all know, is fundamentally anti-dramatic. There’s no action in waiting. There’s stress and no release valve. Even the drums Bale bashes don’t help much. Yet this is what his character does for the best part of two hours. It shouldn’t work, but it does. Which is largely down to two things: McKays bravura direction, which isn’t afraid of flirting with ridicule and in the process provides a light touch to what might have been a dour tale; and Steve Carrell’s grandstanding performance as the one banker who really seems to care, his shock at the stupidity of his nation constantly etched onto his face. The film makes much play of being based on fact; there is something in the relentlessness of Carrell’s performance, its lack of any sense of redemption or catharsis, which helps to convince us that this is indeed a real character, who will die being pissed off, rather than a script developed concept who has to go on his journey towards a greater sense of enlightenment. The film, with its flouting of so many of the standard rules of script-assembly, is something of a heist in itself. 

burn after reading (d. joel & ethan coen)

You can sort of see what they were trying to achieve. And if they'd pulled it off, it would have been great. A comedy thriller about paranoia set in Washington DC. Almost, as the poster suggests, Hitchcockian, and ripe for paranoid times. When Malkovich storms out of the meeting after being informed of his dismissal from the CIA Balkan office, he hollers, 'this is political' and for a fleeting moment I thought this was going to be a biting satire on Plamegate. Which someone should be making, and who better than the Coen brothers?

On second thoughts... There are various problems with Burn, which basically, to use the kind of language Malkovich and Swinton relish, fuck it up. Completely. Firstly the narrative isn't as clever as it thinks it is. The fact that Pitt (let's not even bother with the character names) blackmails Malkovich who's married to Swinton who's sleeping with Clooney who shoots Pitt has more of the feel of a Washington after dinner drinking game than a movie narrative. It would be more surprising if all these stars weren't going to be connected than that they are. At the end, the CIA chief meets the CIA underling and they talk about the mess that's been made, and how complicated it's become, and you can't help thinking: Nice try, chicos, but the truth is it's not that complex. To paraphrase their last movie, if this is the mess it won't really do until the next one comes along, you need to make it messier, now! The second problem is that the plot hinges on a notion of paranoia - everyone's paranoid and if they're not they should be. You can't see a black car without someone thinking it's an agent of Hades come to whisk them away. Except that, when there aren't any cars around, no-one seems very paranoid at all. Most of all Mr Clooney, who attempts to veer between laid-back, bearded George and eye-rolling, crazy George in the bat of an eyelid. The conclusion to be drawn from all this is that Clooney isn't and never will be Nicholson. Which is fair enough, as there's only room for one Nicholson in film-land, and George has other attributes. The last problem with the film, as the previous one implies, is the casting. Everyone's a star, they all seem to want to try to outshine one another. Which presumably made the film great fun to make, but a series of turns does not make for an integrated movie; it makes for something rather closer to panto. Something which one senses Malkovich has come to believe he was born for, ever since those people started running around his head and warping his actor-ego completely out of shape.

There's probably more problems. Not least of which that, once again, this doesn't really feel like a Coen brothers movie. It's neither strange enough nor dark enough, and doesn't have a charismatic performance from Badem to compensate. You know this because there's an exception that proves the rule - the moment when Malkovich takes an axe to the guy from Six Feet Under. It's shot from a distance, no close-ups, and for a brief moment Malkovich's psychosis seems completely believable. Not because of his performance, but because of the way the moment's filmed, with a cold terror lurking behind the everyday normality of a pretty suburban street in the capital of the Western world.

no country for old men (d. the coen brothers)

Cormac McCarthy functions in strange territory. Somewhere between Jack London (think of the passage with the wolf at the opening of The Crossing) and Tolstoy. A writer who appears to be able to locate the epic and the spiritual within timeless narratives, but someone whose work retains the popular touch. Furthermore, many of his books occupy the strange territory between the apparent order of the United States and the described lawlessness of Mexico. Drifters bleed across the border (literally in the case of No Country...), driven from the locatable security of the first world to the anonymous safety of the dangerous third. In a country which tends to turn its back on the disparity between its wealth and the poverty of its neighbour, McCarthy is an exception. He knows where the line is and he writes as though he knows what it means to cross it. In his latest book, The Road, the whole world has crossed the line, so much so it's eradicated. The border protects no-one anymore, on either side.

No Country for Old Men is far from his best work. It features a remarkable villain with an unpronounceable name, Anton Chigurh, a great deal of acutely observed violence, and some of McCarthy's least cryptic down-home Texan wisdom. The book's ending is surprising in so far that the writer seems to lose interest in his central narrative, which ends abruptly, and the final section heads off at a tangent to offer a valedictory portrait of Ed Tom Bell, the sheriff who's retiring in the face of the mounting warfare caused by the drugs trade.

The Coen Brothers have adapted the book with a high degree of fidelity. McCarthy's sparse and precise dialogue is lifted wholesale. The film relies on the shifts in the book's narrative for surprise. In an early scene, when Chigurh strangles a cop with his handcuffs on the floor, the camera holds on the scuff marks left on the lino after the struggle, at which point it seems as though the adaptation is going to pay dividends in heightening detail and nuance. Whilst it's true that the Coen bros eye for detail complements McCarthy's precision, it is ultimately less rewarding than might have been anticipated, as the brothers retreat into conservative story telling. They successfully extract the tension from the book, but unfortunately they've selected a text which runs out of tension some time before it reaches its conclusion.

The film has been a critical success. Speaking to someone who didn't know the book, you can see the way in which McCarthy's narrative, in particular the characterisation of Chigurh, might seem surprising and fresh on first acquaintance. Yet one can't help feeling that what the critics are doing are awarding points for competence, rather than cinematic flair. The Coen brothers seem, of late, to have lost their appetite for visual panache and narrative whimsy which made them so compelling when they were at their peak. Perhaps damaged by occasional failures, they've resorted to delivering high-quality, user-friendly product. McCarthy's novel is just about powerful enough in itself to warrant the reverential treatment, but the marriage though functional and effective, is passionless. The film gives glimpses of McCarthy's power, as well as reminders of the Coens' rare talent, but it ultimately fails to take the viewer into the heart of the strange territory both occupy when they are at their most beguiling.