Here I am on a Sunday morning, sipping coffee and feeling glum as hell about the films of Joel and Ethan Coen no longer being part of our world. They haven’t been, really, since Inside Llewyn Davis, the last bona fide Coen Bros. flick (low key, early ’60s folkie vibes, slurping cereal milk, Schrodinger’s cat). It opened almost exactly a decade ago (May ’13) in Cannes.
As we speak the only Coen flick on the horizon is Ethan’s Drive-Away Dolls (Focus, 9.23), a lesbian road comedy with Margaret Qualley, Geraldine Viswanathan, Beanie Feldstein, Pedro Pascal (again!), Colman Domingo, Bill Camp and Matt Damon. Even irreverent Ethan is following orders from the wokester commandants.
The Coens’ last joint effort was The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (’18), an anthology film for Netflix. My view is that Scruggs didn’t count because it wasn’t really a single-narrative “Coen Bros. film” that opened in theatres. Within that realm, Joel and Ethan have actually been M.I.A. since Hail, Caesar!, which came out in 2016 and was a bit of a disappointment. It was fine (Josh Brolin was excellent) but it also felt incomplete, plus Jen Yamato thought it was too white.
The Coens have always conveyed a sly, darkly humorous contempt for American culture, and one way or another they’ve always served that shit on a plate. Whenever they delivered a dark-funny-perverse scene, which The Big Lebowski and No Country For Old Men are chock the fuck full of, it was heaven. I miss those scenes. My life feels incomplete without them.
I “liked” but didn’t love True Grit (’10) all that much. It was basically about Jeff Burly Bridges going “shnawwhhhhr-rawwwhhrr-rawwrrluurrllllh.” It certainly wasn’t an elegant, blue-ribbon, balls-to-the-wall, ars gratia artis Coen pic — it was a well-written, slow-moving western with serious authenticity, noteworthy camerawork, tip-top production design and, okay, a few noteworthy scenes.
So let’s just call the last decade or so a difficult, in-and-out, up-and-down saga for the boys, but at the same time acknowledge that the Coens at least enjoyed two golden periods.
The first golden period was a four-film run…actually make that a three film run — Blood Simple (’84), Raising Arizona (’87), Miller’s Crossing (’90) and Barton Fink (’91). The Hudsucker Proxy (’94) was an outlier…a weird, half-successful, half-sputtering in-betweener that didn’t quite work and nobody really liked. Truth be told I never liked Raising Arizona either so let’s call it a two-film run.
The second golden period (’96 to ’09) was what earned them a place in film history — a 13-year, nine-film run that included Fargo (’96), The Big Lebowski (’98), O Brother, Where Art Thou? (’00), The Man Who Wasn’t There (’01), Intolerable Cruelty (’03), The Ladykillers (’04), No Country for Old Men (’07), Burn After Reading (’08) and A Serious Man (’09).