Movie Journal: Coen Brothers prep-week

In honor of Burn After Reading hitting theaters last week I decided my latest mini festival was going to be some of the Coen Brothers movies I have in the library. There are some notable omissions from that collection that I don’t have a good excuse for but I did want to rewatch some of the ones I’ve picked up.

First up was Barton Fink, my first introduction to the Coens way back when it was first released. I’d seen bits of Raising Arizona but never really gotten into it. Fink, though, sucked me in and turned me into a fan of the brothers. The darkly comic tale of a writer who migrates from New York to Los Angeles in the mid-40s is always a treat on a number of levels. Not only are all the performances pitch-perfect, but the scene where Barton finally figures out what he wants the wresting picture he’s commissioned to write to be about and he winds up essentially re-writing the play we see in the movie’s opening always kills me. It completely undermines everything that we’ve seen about the character up until that point, that he’s some genius just overflowing with talent. Instead he winds up doing the only thing he knows how to do – repeat himself.

Next was Fargo, which is so good on so many levels it defies most descriptions. Trust me – As good as this movie’s reputation is, those reviews don’t come close to describing how well made it actually it. It’s a bit scary.

Finally I snuck in Intolerable Cruelty, which might seem like an odd choice but I like it. Catherine Zeta-Jones gives what might be called her usual performance and is more than a little funny, but she just doesn’t know what to do with the Coen’s style and so comes off a bit stilted. Compare that to George Clooney in his second Coen outing, who knows exactly what to do and how to sell his character. He’s the only one who seems to know what to do and what the Coens were doing in the movie, which is admittedly not one of their top-tier films. Still, it’s breezy and enjoyable and worth checking out or re-watching with a fresh perspective if you’ve previously dismissed it.