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score /10
With "Miller's Crossing", the Coens turn their playful pens to the world of 1930s gangster flicks and 1940s detective noirs, churning out a film that owes a little too much to Kurosawa's "Yojimbo".
It's a slick picture, every shot precise, every colour carefully calibrated, but what eventually emerges is little more than a formalist game. Gangster iconography meets laser printer, the plot plays out like a self-conscious attempt to capture the labyrinthal tone of early noirs. Characters beg and break down in tears...but we don't care for any of these people. They're robot copies, everything reduced to an aesthetic choice.
More than Tarantino, Leone or De Palma, the Coen's are the poster-boys of cut and paste cinema. Their films are exercises in stylistic wit, more a series of vignettes that work in isolation as comedic short films, than any sort of comment on the world. Sample filmmakers, theirs is a cinema that can't look beyond its own stylistic myopia. That they sample legendary directors and iconic films does not by association make them part of that league of talent. And yet...
And yet the Coens are honest about their dishonesty. Their films are cartoons, exercises in buffoonery (only a trickster would title a film, "A Serious Man"), which tend to wallow in comical nihilism. It's all a game because cinema has become a game. It's all pastiche, because Western cinema has become pastiche. It's nihilistic, because most of American cinema has lost all meaning. So why not wallow in the filth and do it with style? The Coens thus leave us only two choices: revel in their cinematic wit or reproach them for not trying.
7.9/10 – "Miller's Crossing" has two great sequences, but it's also one of the Coens' most smug pictures, its overly glossy look (shades of "Road to Perdition") and heavily stylized dialogue diluting any long-lasting imapct. Worth two viewings.
tieman64 25 December 2009
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2180327/ |
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21-11-2019 12:44:58