A well-executed exercise in film-making - and less to it than meets the eye

pfgpowell-1

score 5/10

I first came across the Coen brothers when I caught Blood Simple on late-night TV. There was one scene in that which made me laugh out loud (when one character drives into the middle of nowhere to bury a body and has done so by dawn, only for a moment or two to discover that he can't start his car and might be stranded: try convincing the cops who find you in the middle of nowhere next to a freshly dug grave that your are guilty of nothing). The film's elaborate plot, the double-crossing and double-double-crossing also impressed me at the time. I then saw Miller's Crossing and remember also being impressed. Next came Raising Arizona which did rather less for me (and I don't very much like Nicolas Cage). After that, in no particular order were The Hudsucker Proxy, Barton Fink and Fargo. I admired Fargo - the Coen's are nothing if not stylish - but I didn't like the way the William Macy character, a schmuck in trouble who gets in way out of his depth, was the butt of the jokes. It was like getting easy laughs from teasing the fat kid in class and as, for a while, I thought of myself as 'the fat kid' - I wasn't half as fat as I thought, but I wasn't very slim, either - I didn't like it. I saw a couple more Coen brothers movies after that, for example The Big Lebowski and, more recently No Country For Old Men, but I found I had unwittingly joined the small club of those who aren't quite as impressed with Ethan and Joel Coen as so obviously Ethan and Joel are. Why not? I think it might be because, as one critic I read said of Fargo, they are heartless. There is cleverness galore in their films but each film lacks something essential to a great film. For my money the Coens are good at making good-looking films but those films are never as good as they might be. They seem more an exercise in Ethan and Joel demonstrating what smart kids they are than anything else. A year or two ago, I saw Blood Money again and it wasn't quite as good as I had remembered it. Miller's Crossing is rather the same: yes, you keep watching because - well, these lads make technically good films. But once the credits roll, you find you don't give a hoot. Miller's Crossing has another Coen-manufactured intricate plot, but it is all rather pointless. It is rather like watching a busy junction from an aesthetic vantage point: interesting enough for a while if you've got nothing better to do, but it eventually dawns on you you might well have quite a number of better things to do. Sorry, but I just don't think Miller's Crossing is all that good.

pfgpowell-1 13 February 2010

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2206750/