Initially, I had always enjoyed their movies, although my experience with their material was pretty limited before all this. I'd seen O Brother, Where Art Thou?, The Big Lebowski, The Ladykillers, No Country for Old Men, and Burn After Reading, which seems like a good amount, but it leaves out the heart of their material from the first half and more critically acclaimed I guess, while being lesser known. I saw Raising Arizona just before this whole movie director month group had started and unsurpringly (especially to those who know my weird affinity for Nicholas Cage in the face of all those who think he stinks) I loved it. From there I watched Blood Simple, Miller's Crossing, Fargo, and Barton Fink (in that order).
Although it's almost hard to separate all of them out from each other when you watch them all pretty close together (I admit this is the first time I've tried to pay attention to multiple movies in relatively short intervals one after another), as I think about them all, they definitely had distinctive personalities, much as the children of odd and creative parents would. I'll try to relay them chronologically though, and for the love of God, IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THIS MOVIE, READ THE FOLLOWING AT YOUR OWN RISK:
Blood Simple (1984)
This is the first Coen Brothers movie they put out on a big screen (I guess, if that's what someone's "first" movie as a director means). I'm not really sure what I expected from it, especially having never heard jack about this movie. Basically, I was blown away. It's not like I hadn't seen a good Coen Brothers movie before or even a good movie in general, but it felt good to watch something for real for once and get knocked off my chair for it. Before I blubber on, I'm sure others will have other opinions as tends to happen, but I want to hit on the strong points that made an impression on me. First off, setting. The Coen Brothers fucking love setting, and of all settings, America. I can't really think of a director that really goes for capturing America in the deep, melancholy, sweeping way that the Coen Brothers manage to (is it weird that no one ever calls them simply, the Coens? I guess "brothers" always stands out a lot more, fucking brotherhood). And there is not much more deeply American as the weary and vast American West. The whole thing seems more like an acid trip than any other place I can conjure up really (as GTA: San Andreas should show any lucky soul who happens upon the wild abandon of that game), and not because it's so exotic, but because it's so damn familiar, just exaggerated beyond any comprehension. There's maybe three or four of their movies that they use this close-up shot of black-as-night pavement flying by with that white stripe whizzing in and out of the frame every half second or so. And then there's this crazy, out-of-body camera pan up onto an infiintely long highway, and then some sort of insanely fast zoom in, only it's not technically a zoom because the whole damn camera is moving forward. They definitely use this setup in Blood Simple, and I'm pretty sure they use it in Raising Arizona, and maybe some other movies. Or maybe I've just seen other directors do this as homage to this or perhaps even inspiring this. Either way, I love that shot of the white line shooting past the camera over and over, and the slow realization of who is doing the traveling and why. It reminds me a lot of how every damn Star Wars movie starts with the camera on the stars then eventually pans to whatever happens to be going on in the film.
What's funny (not actually funny, just odd) is that this is not even the opening of the movie, but the opening of the story within the movie. The opening of Blood Simple actually starts out with an extremely far away landscape shot of the West, Texas in particular I believe, and the oil fields with the heat blurring the giant machines and industry in the middle of a scorching day, all set to voice over. And the voice over comes from a voice so weathered, twangy, and just plain fucked up that you listen hard as it tells you about life in the West, about capitalism, and about how people always slip up. These words, although pretty broad and vague, are about as direct as any detail the audience will be given the whole movie. The rest is shot like an extremely rich and sweat-inducing fever of a dream. One of the most compelling parts of it all is how complicated it gets twisted with only four major characters and one basic plot point, this woman is cheating on her husband. It becomes complicated not unlike No Country for Old Men in that people keep misinterpreting, misjudging, or just missing altogether certain things that only we as the audience can see, making us try to imagine what they are going through having only a narrow perspective on the increasingly skewed thing.
Rie put it pretty much spot on after we all watched the movie, saying it was an extremely moody movie. This pretty much describes it, but you really have to feel out how deep the mood of each scene goes, how long each pause or look or moment is, to really appreciate this establishment of mood. Also, I was amazed at how well they establish setting on a miniature scale, in that of a certain room, like the office at the bar and the house where she goes to stay with Ray(?) (the man she's cheating with) in particular. These places keep getting revisited over and over, with certain details slightly different each time.
What's interesting about the course of this movie and the course of a movie that is so based on atmosphere and suspense and boiling tension is where things start to spill over, slip away, and derail altogether. That seems to be the nature of what they were going for, with each character reaching his or her limit at various points in the movie when things start coming back to haunt them for no easily identifiable reason (like when Marty warns Ray of Abby saying "I ain't done nothing funny"). The violence is so potent each time it shows up, with the shots of the camera and the awkward heaviness of dragging a human body. All of this combines to make for a near headache of turmoil to sift through in your head as you watch it all sort of mutate into itself (again, this goes into my theory of that final image the private detective sees in the bathroom). And through it all, the detective's voice over in the beginning and his sort of comic relief (although I wouldn't really call it "relief") become the only thing you can really bounce off of as an audience member searching desperately for reason or meaning or something. The problem is, we realize what we're listening to is almost a weird incarnation of Satan himself, the way he laughs and shifts in his seat and talks through a crackling voice. It's a dark movie no doubt, but it's almost too balled up to let the whole weight of it fall completely on you as an audience. You're left more with images (of the incinerator out back, Abby and Ray sleeping through the bedroom window, and the bullet holes through the wall) and sounds (the Same Old Song in the bar and the haunting music always so large in the Coen Bros. movies I've found). It's a movie of impressions, some as shallow as an itch that may be a bug or a bite from a bug, while others are so deep that they occupy you without showing sign of entry like getting mercury poisoning from just being around the stuff. I definitely recommend it, and I can certainly see a lot of what made so many of the mood shots poignant in Blood Simple, sticks with the Coen Brothers in each movie thereafter.
