The Edge Online - Reviews: Joel and Ethan Coen

Joel & Ethan Coen
Edited by Peter Körte and Georg Seesslen
Titan paperback, 287 pages, £14.99
ISBN 1-84023-097-5
Review by Gerald Houghton (2000)

This book, rather like William Preston Robertson’s The Big Lebowski, is something of a lost cause. For, while the films of the Coen brothers scream out for some kind of analysis – textural, contextual, whatever – sliding the critical scalpel in too deeply inevitably kills. You can admire the skill with which the patient is opened up, but it’s to little avail when you clumsily rend their heart in two.

The book isn’t helped by its translation from the original German. There’s a sterile approach here that, one senses, is as much to do with transition as intention. And in a brief opening interview the brothers remain as aloof and slippery as ever; interviewing them must be the most pointless journalistic assignment known to man.

Thus, what remains are a sequence of detailed riffs on each of the eight features (including Raimi’s Crimewave as a slight but important branch line), Georg Seesslen’s extensive essay ‘Looking For A Trail in Coen Country’ and complete credit listings. And an extraordinary 500 plus well-produced and intelligently sequenced illustrations.

Joel & Ethan Coen remains, though, a hit and miss affair. The essays on Blood Simple, Fargo and The Big Lebowski tell us nothing, while Ulrich Kriest’s piece on Raising Arizona and Sabine Horst’s on their first great film, Miller’s Crossing, are really rather good. Brigitte Desalm’s thoughts on their masterpiece, the bizarre, twisted and densely ephemeral Barton Fink, fall somewhere in-between.

The text correctly identifies the brothers as essentially post-modernist – arguably the most post-modern of all current filmmakers – and more than once cites David Lynch as a fellow traveller. (We can perhaps think of Lynch as the Coens dour cousin). It also references those critics who see the Coens as taking popular genres ‘in order to remove them from circulation once and for all’, but fails to note that here was a trait more associated with Kubrick. We are expected, in Stanley’s cinema, to regard The SF Movie, The Horror Movie, The War Movie, The Erotic Movie, et al, to have all been stamped, filed, briefed and debriefed. The Coens are not – at least obviously – that arrogant. Their films are hermetic, they exist in ‘Coen Country’. And Coen Country exists on no map you will ever unfurl.

Which is why, in a sense, Joel & Ethan Coen becomes redundant. The book throws up some intriguing points – comparisons between The Shining and Barton Fink; the idea that Raising Arizona might just be a dream; deconstructing the ‘vertical, masculine structure’ of The Hudsucker Proxy against the ‘horizontal, feminine opposite’ of Fargo (think about it) – but is all too willing to ascribe meaning where there is none. The Coens are highly talented, highly intelligent filmmakers, but that doesn’t make everything they do significant. That’s why as many loathe Barton Fink as love it. ‘(The films) are probably so hyper-realistic,’ Joel is quoted as saying, ‘that they have nothing at all to do with reality.’ And this book, like the aforementioned Robertson’s The Big Lebowski, ignores composer Carter Burwell’s huge contribution.

The measure of a great film book is that it sends you scurrying back to the work in question with fresh eyes and renewed vigour. Joel & Ethan Coen, sadly, doesn’t.