In Which The Coen Brothers Enter The Studio System

Backstroke

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Hail, Caesar!
dir. Joel & Ethan Coen
106 minutes

History becomes ancient history. When American people thought of the recent past in 1953, the cultural life of the previous fifty years had not quite absconded from them, principally because there was not too much of it. For Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) to manage his job as a movie executive, he only has to know five or six things, and once he knows them, he has plenty of time to genuflect as to whether he really does know them.

Hail, Caesar! is a kind of anti-nostalgia, pared down to its bare essentials. Scarlett Johansson has only two scenes in the movie as a kind of anti-Esther Williams, a Brazilian actress giggles through one scene like a jack-in-the-box, Tilda Swinton plays twin sister gossip columnists for a combined five minutes and that is it for women in Hail, Caesar! Hollywood during this period (and when you think of it, most others) was largely composed of the interlacing stories of male homosexuals and Jews fleeing Europe.

Esther Williams' movies are not half bad if you watch them today. A lot of times she portrayed the same role she played in life: a talented swimmer in a stage show at odds with the management. Williams' brilliance at marketing herself and her evident abilities as a performer are never touched on in Hail, Caesar!

Instead she is a foul-mouthed slut sleeping with a foreign, married director, not her first. Abandoned by the father of her baby, she has no other options, and so marries Jonah Hill after admiring his physique. Hill is in the movie for two minutes, and Scarlett only five more than that, so how they had made it on the poster moves beyond deceptive advertising into the realm of true evil.

But then, the male stars are just as vapid and sloppy in their art, except for Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum). The best part of Hail, Caesar! by far is an extensive song and dance routine about how there will be no women on a submarine the sailors are boarding in the morning. Tatum, who was recently so awful in The Hateful Eight, appears to be some kind of oscillating god here, and his singing and dancing is ten out of ten. Maybe in the future he could just not talk.

The rest of the movie sets that Josh Brolin strolls onto are shooting awful, satirical versions of failed projects from the period. Clooney is better at pretending to be a period actor than performing a modern role. His not-so-hidden homosexuality is a riff on Tony Curtis, but the vapidity of the character is not. Turning Tony Curtis, a Bronx Jew who was savagely beaten by his schizophrenic mother, served in the U.S. Navy and achieved success from the most meager circumstances imaginable into a spoiled, whimpering ditz is pretty low.

Clooney's character, Baird Whitlock, is abducted by a group of communists. The humor comes from the idea that they explain they have been actively plotting to include communist ideas in their Hollywood scripts in order to do their part for the movement. Isn't this ridiculous? the Coens crow. Except there were films which presented Russia as an idyllic utopia — after all, communists were always substantially better at explaining themselves than actually governing.

But the important thing is that Hail, Caesar! is funny, right? If something is funny, it doesn't matter who it makes fun of, or why, or whether it's true because that would mean, you know, like, actual research. The Coens aren't too good with that part of the process. Over time any director acquires a sinister envy and disgust for actors. Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes) even slaps around his young star for not being able to say, "Were that it twere so simple" in a convincing manner.

You feel the contempt for the performers in most scenes of Hail, Caesar! We rush so quickly from moment to moment as Brolin assuages the feelings and insecurities of all these people that you start to think of them not as individuals, but only as problems. Hail, Caesar! is a bunch of brilliant skits that explain all of the jokes for people who don't grasp the overly familiar subject of Hollywood satire. I think most of us understand it by now. William Goldman's book about one year on Broadway, The Season, once estimated that 80 percent of the subject matter in any given Broadway year concerned the theater itself. Today an endless parade of comic book movies saves us from the harsh reality of old.

When I do watch films from this period on TCM, I am not struck by any difference in quality, or even production values. The most obvious change between Hollywood's output today and then is the seriousness of its story choices. During this period, scripts explored non-trivial issues even in frivolous films, and they took their characters just as sincerely, even in goofy contexts. There was a chance of doing that here, but it vanishes as swiftly.

Josh Brolin comes home to dinner with his wife. He doesn't touch her, kiss her, or even look at her. He considers a job offer from Lockheed Martin that would have him working substantially less hours at a higher rate. "What should I do?" he asks his wife (Alison Pill) as he eats the food she has prepared for him, prompting her to comment on a decision that could completely alter the next decade in her own life and the lives of her children. "You know best," she tells him. Maybe I didn't get the joke.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

"The Caterpillar Workforce" - Guided By Voices (mp3)

In Which It's The Best Jewish Comedy Western Since Blazing Saddles

Nature's Cathedral

by MOLLY LAMBERT

True Grit

dir. Joel and Ethan Coen

110 minutes

Who incepted my fantasy about wandering the wildernesses of New Mexico with Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon? Who told the Coen brothers that every scrappy tomboy sees herself in Rooster Cogburn? When did Matt Damon get so goddamned awesome? Is he Leonardo DiCaprio's black swan because he reminds us that what we don't love about Leo is his humorlessness and inability or unwillingness to make fun of himself?

Since they slayed it on the first try with No Country For Old Men, you might think the Coen Brothers would shy away from making another Western. Apparently they're going for the hat trick and doing Blood Meridian next, although you never know if they'll zig. If they can manage to make Blood Meridian not humorless, I will give them a billion percent of my mind futures. True Grit is a perfect modern existential Western, a tribute to The Wizard Of Oz the way O Brother Where Art Thou was a retelling of The Odyssey.

Matt Damon knows how to play a white hat in an interesting way. He always brings something of a black hat attitude to it. That's why he was so great in The Departed and The Talented Mr. Ripley as a black hat hiding behind a white hat façade. He is a genuine movie star. True Grit reminded me a lot of Hayao Miyazaki movies, which feature determined little girls on dangerous missions in dreamlike environments. National treasure Jeff Bridges really gets his Orson Welles in Chimes At Midnight on.

In addition to Western tropes, all of the Coens' own tropes are here too: severed limbs and digits, repetitions of key phrases that become funnier as they are repeated, salty old men and fast-talking women. The Coens are tender-hearted nihilists, and so are all of their characters. Do other directors resent the Coens because they make it look so easy? I am sure that making it look that effortless is actually really fucking hard. 

My favorite classic existential Western is Man Of The West, Anthony Mann's claustrophobic take on the genre. Existential Westerns are Waiting For Godot against the background of nature. They replicate what it's like to be inside your own mind, and recall all the weird Jungian dreamscapes you've ever seen in your sleep. Attempting to convey in film the intense spirituality of landscapes is Terrence Malick's life's pursuit. 

I have a lot of love for Westerns, because I am from the West. I romanticize Western tropes, and so this movie was perfect for me because it was a romantic but not bloodless take on the Western. I also loved No Country For Old Men, which was decidedly anti-romantic. I love that the Coens can execute both and see no conflict in the differences between them. I respect versatility more than just about anything.

For me, True Grit and Black Swan both captured the atmosphere of dreams and nightmares in a way that Inception did not at all. The immanently mystical quality of some places, especially natural environments, derealization, the ways in which life sometimes feels like a three character play in which you are all three characters. 

Avatar was James Cameron's Wizard Of Oz remake. The Wizard Of Oz is the ultimate existential fantasy movie, and seeing it for the first time is a lot of people's first mundane psychedelic experience with art. In dreams you are often on a mission of some sort, and it is comforting to think about having such a clear purpose in life. In real life our personal directives are much less obvious, if they are discernible at all.  

The modern existential Western/Wizard Of Acid/spiritual landscape film that best captures and approximates my own internal processes is Easy Rider; the avatars of 1970s Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Jack Nicholson are in constant battle for my eternal soul. God help you if Jack Nicholson wins. God help me if Dennis Hopper does. There's an excellent argument to be made that I am also McCabe & Mrs. Miller. 

Genre tropes always sound like liabilities in advance. I've seen enough bad child actors to be instantly wary of a movie centered around a child actor, but Hailee Steinfeld is a born natural. She more than holds her own against the A List actors all around her.

Fun facts about Hailee: her dad is "Body By Jake" as shown in the Pie-O-My episode of The Sopranos, she is a valley girl like me, that diva bitch from Glee snubbed her and it made her cry. If I was caught off guard by the ending of True Grit (and what an ending), it's because I expected her to grow up to be Holly Hunter in Raising Arizona.

Jeff Bridges' Rooster Cogburn is the cowardly lion. Bridges is one of my absolute favorite actors. I have a major soft spot for second generation actors, because a lot of them seem to understand how to treat acting like it's a regular job. They are not necessarily less prone to be divas, but certainly Jeff Bridges doesn't seem like a diva.

Neither does Matt Damon. That's why they are so good. They never pull focus, even when hamming it up. They understand how to collaborate, how to work on a team. It's a quality I think all the best actors have. Can somebody please cast Owen Wilson in their next Western? Shanghai Noon/Knights fan #1 over here, and I'm serious. 

The Coens always create a sort of collaborative seeming world, perhaps because they are themselves collaborating. One wonders if Joel and Ethan ever disagree on things. Surely there must be times when one of them sees a shot one way and the other sees it some other way, and they have to compromise. Who is Micky and who is Dickey?

Here's how to fix The Fighter. Wahlberg and Bale swap roles. THINK ABOUT IT. Wahlberg would be much more genuinely menacing as the fuck-up crackhead brother, as anyone who's seen Fear can attest. Bale's natural smarminess would make the sympathetic lead more complex and interesting. Bale and Amy Adams actually had the best chemistry in the movie in their one real scene together. To make it up to me, they can do a webcast of True West where they switch roles every other scene.

Fargo is a kind of Western (a Midwestern), wherein Frances McDormand is the law. The Big Lebowski is a Western, in addition to being a neon noir detective movie. I was a little sad Sam Elliott never showed up in True Grit. He could have been The Wizard.

In the FMK situation that will be this year's Academy Awards, I think I'm going to have to kill The Fighter, fuck Black Swan (it was college!), and marry True Grit. But I need to see both of the latter again to be sure. How exciting is it to have so many actually good films in theaters? Winter movies are summer tentpole movies for film geeks.

Best Existential Westerns:

The Searchers 

Dead Man

Man Of The West

High Noon

Unforgiven

Once Upon A Time In The West

The Good The Bad And The Ugly

McCabe & Mrs. Miller

El Topo

Ride The High Country

The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre

Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia

There Will Be Blood

Easy Rider

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. If somebody can hook her up to be artist in residence at the Gene Autry Museum she'll murder your enemies for you. She tumbls here and twitters here.

"River Crossing" - Carter Burwell (mp3)

"A Great Adventure" - Carter Burwell (mp3)

"Your Headstrong Ways" - Carter Burwell (mp3)

"Leaning on the Everlasting Arms" - Iris DeMent (mp3)

In Which The Coen Brothers Return As Serious Men

A Goy Walks into a Dentist’s Office

by JACOB SUGARMAN

Since the 1984 release of their neo-Western, Blood Simple, the Coen brothers have made a career of ironic detachment and outright snark. Even their finest films are marked by an irksome air of superiority towards their characters, viewers and mankind in general. As David Denby observes in his New Yorker feature, “Killing Joke,” the Coens are “masters of chaos, but one still has the feeling that, out there on the road from nowhere to nowhere, they are rooting for it rather than against it. Their latest, A Serious Man, is hardly a Whitmanesque celebration of human potential, but it constitutes their funniest and most affecting offering since the stoner classic, The Big Lebowski.

The film centers on helpless schlemiel, Larry Gopnik, a Jewish physics professor at an anonymous, mid-western university whose life has spiraled out of control. His wife is leaving him for Sy Abelman, an unctuous windbag that looks like a Hebrew yeti; his son, Danny, smokes too much pot and busts Larry’s chops when the TV reception of F-Troop is fuzzy; his daughter, like so many pubescent Jewesses, compulsively washes her hair and pleads for a nose job; and last but not least, his deadbeat brother spends his days lying around the house with a suction devise to aspirate a cyst on his neck. If life with the Jewish Adams family wasn’t miserable enough, Larry’s being blackmailed by a dimwitted student and his tenure application has been jeopardized by several anonymous letters that characterize him as a man of poor moral fiber. In short, he’s fercockt.

Like The Book of Job, A Serious Man follows its protagonist’s quest for wisdom from his friends and colleagues—or in the case of Larry, a cadre of nitwit rabbis. Each offers advice more mystifying than the last, the most memorable of which belongs to Rabbi Nachtner, played with aplomb by George Wyner. Nachtner spins a yarn that owes more to the fiction of Woody Allen than the Torah or the Old Testament.

The story goes something like this: a Jewish dentist named Sussman is giving a check-up to a man described only as “the Goy” when he discovers several Hebrew letters carved into the back of his lower teeth. Together, they spell out the phrase, “help me.” Is this a sign from Hashem that the dentist must offer his aid to this man, or perhaps all men in need? The discovery shakes Sussman to his core and he begins rifling through his patient records for further messages. After a few weeks of anxious hand-wringing, however, he abandons his pursuit for the day-to-day routine of dentistry and domestic life. So much for burning bushes.

What does this have to do with Larry’s tenure application and his impending divorce? Not a damn thing and therein lies the metaphysical weight of A Serious Man; life is a tale of Jewish dentists and goyish teeth, signifying nothing. No sooner does their protagonist’s luck start to change then the Coens, presiding over the narrative like their own vengeful Yahweh, hit the viewer over the head with a chair like The Ultimate Warrior in a WWF Battle Royale. Either we're alone in the universe, subject to the cruelties of the absurd, or we’re at the mercy of a sadistic God who will punish us despite our best efforts to pay our taxes, feed the goldfish and do our homework--to behave like serious men. Hashem, if he does exist, is the town bully chasing Danny down for a $20 debt. As the film’s final scene reveals, he always collects.

However grim a vision of the universe its filmmakers present, A Serious Man is levied by the pitch-perfect performances of its lead players and the Coens’ irreverent humor. Danny’s stoned-out torah reading easily vaults the Star Wars theme-party in Deconstructing Harry as the greatest bar-mitzvah sequence in film history.

These films are so arch and stylized that they can grow distracting when they feature movie stars like Brad Pitt or Catherine Zeta-Jones. With a cast of unknowns and semi-recognizable character actors, the viewer doesn’t have to peel through too many layers of disbelief. Most importantly, the film represents its directors' first venture into their personal history and religious ancestry. Raised on the Great Plains by Minnesotan academics, Joel and Ethan were little Gopniks once too, lighting up and fighting their sister for access to the bathroom. Coen Brothers’ characters always verge on caricature, but there’s an undercurrent of affection in their depiction of these chosen misfits that’s so often lacking in their other movies. A Serious Man cements the Coens’ place in the continuum of great Jewish auteurs and offers proof positive that even Hashem affords the occasional mitzvah.

Jacob Sugarman is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in Manhattan. He last wrote in these pages about Michael Jackson.

"Before You Leave" - Mary Gauthier (mp3)

"Between the Daylight And The Dark" - Mary Gauthier (mp3)

"Can't Find the Way" - Mary Gauthier (mp3)