Say What?! - The Coens Are Best Outside Of Coenworld

“There's more to life than a little money, ya know. Don'tcha know that? And here ya are. And it's a beautiful day. Well. I just don't understand it.”

The above quote comes from the mouth of pregnant police officer Marge Gunnarson when she is lecturing accosted crook Gaear Grimsrud in a scene which comes close to the end of the Coen Brothers' 1996 masterpiece Fargo. It is, perhaps, slightly unusual to start a blog entry with a quote from the end of a film, and even more so because this particular quote is relatively bland compared to the deliciously witty words the Coens usually write for their actors. But I mention this for a reason.

Watching the writer/director team's latest film, No Country For Old Men, I was reminded of Fargo, and Marge in particular. Based on Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel, No Country blends the Western with a bit of black comedy, a pinch of thriller and a dash of horror to tell the three-pronged story of the repercussions of a failed drugs deal. The first leg of this tripod of tragedy is Llewelyn Moss, a hapless stooge in the great Coen tradition who stumbles into trouble when he picks up the money from the aforementioned drug job. He's an innocent goon in hopelessly beyond his depth brilliantly portrayed by Josh Brolin. But while he may be the character who instigates the film's chaos, Moss is merely a McGuffin.

Instead, the film's central themes revolve around the two remaining characters. First up is the man who peruses Moss in order to get the cash back, assassin Anton Chigurgh. Played with chilling stillness by Spanish actor Javier Bardem, Chigurh is like the Terminator made flesh, a monosyllabic manifestation of your worst nightmares who will coolly blow up a car just so he can create a diversion to rob a chemist of the supplies he needs to heal a battle wound. It’s another stunning, Oscar-worthy performance, and once you’ve seen it, the question “What time do you go to bed?” will take on new, terrifying meaning.

Caught in the middle of this chase is Tommy Lee Jones' Ed Tom Bell, the aging local sheriff who acts as the benevolent yin to Chigurgh's Satanic yang as hopelessly peruses he and Moss across the Texan borderlands trying to fathom just what kind of man would be capable of Chigurgh's evil. Jones is, as ever, laconically perfect and although the character was created by McCarthy, he feels decidedly Coenesque, comparable, in fact, to Marge. Bell is a traditional kind of guy, a humane man, cut adrift in a world without morals and when he opens the film lamenting the crime that's about to take place, it's impossible not to be reminded of Marge's soulful lecture to Grimsrud.

Fargo and No Country For Old Men are, to my money at least, the Coens’ finest films, and it strikes me as no coincidence that the best words to describe them are humane, moral and soulful. The Coens' critics accuse them of intellectual smugness, of placing their films in a hermetically sealed box that makes audience connection nigh on impossible. While I would certainly disagree with the former point (surely the Coens are too withdrawn to be smug), I find evidence of the latter in the overbearing quirkiness of O’ Brother Where Art Thou, the suffocating intellectual surrealism of Barton Fink and the distancing noir coldness of The Man Who Wasn’t There.

This isn’t to say any of them are bad films (except perhaps O’ Brother - but that’s more to do with my loathing of bluegrass, a musical genre so hideous only an oxymoron could aptly describe it) or that I don‘t enjoy the Coens’ sense of humour (you’d have to be dead not to laugh at The Big Lebowski), only that they will never hold a candle to Fargo and now No Country, because every time I hear George Clooney proclaim himself “a Dapper Dan man” or Fink make another reference to wrestling pictures I hear Joel and Ethan giggling behind camera and see an imaginary brick wall being built between myself and the screen.

There are plenty of reasons to giggle at Fargo and No Country, of course; the accents, the hopelessness of William H Macy’s small-time crook, Javier Bardem’s haircut. But each them is couched in a real world scenario stripped of overt quirks, and seem to communicate something of the characters: a naivety, a desperation, a sense of unpredictable, sociopathic evil. All of these are very real human emotions, allowed to breath thanks to the fact the Coens have poked their heads out of the Coenworld bunker for just long enough to connect with the rest of the world.

Burn After Reading, an original black comedy about a gym instructor who is targeted for assassination after stumbling across an ex-CIA man’s memoirs, will be their next film, and hilarious I’m sure it will be. But it sounds like the brothers are dipping their head back in the bunker again, something I‘m a little disappointed by. The Coens are as good, if not better, at creating moments of touching human connection as they are at moments of surreal comedy, and the endings of both No Country and Fargo prove as much.

The former I won't ruin here (although it's at once brilliantly ambiguous and emotionally touching), but the ending of Fargo (which bears a semi-similar resemblance to No Country's coda) reads:

Norm: They announced it.
Marge They announced it?
Norm: Yeah.
Marge: So?
Norm: Three-cent stamp.
Marge: Your mallard?
Norm: Yeah.
Marge: Oh, that's terrific.
Norm: It's just a three-cent stamp.
Marge: It's terrific.
Norm: Hautman's blue-winged teal got the 29-cent. People don't much use the three-cent.
Marge: Oh, for Pete's sake. Of course they do. Whenever they raise the postage, people need the little stamps.

Bland and unremarkable it may be, but accompanied by a tinkly interpretation of Carter Burwell’s Fargo theme and a beautiful performance from Frances McDormand, it’s the best and most human scene the Coens have ever written, touching upon a nobility and appreciation of simple homelife that they are often deemed too cynical to understand.

Surrealism may have made their name, but you can keep your Soggy Bottom Boys, your Satanic hotels, hell, even The Dude’s beloved rug. Norm’s three-cent mallard is the pinnacle of the Coens’ career, and No Country For Old Men is a sign they can surpass it in the future.