A Serious Man

Even when life is quickly going from bad to worse to you-gotta-be-kidding-me terrible, no one is willing to admit that they are a modern day Job.  We are always taught to seek out a silver lining and keep saying, “Everything is going to be fine.”  But sometimes someone upstairs just doesn’t like you or your ancestors cursed you by bringing a dybbuk into their house and all you can do is look around in wonder and dismay at your life going down like a sinking ship.

The doomed life in question is that of Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a professor who lives in Minneapolis suburb around 1967 with his wife, two kids and brother-in-law.  His wife wants a divorce asking him to stay in the seedy little Jolly Roger motel.  His son listens to rock music in class with his bar mitzva approaching.  His daughter is stealing from him money for a nose job.  One of his students is trying to simultaneously  bribe and blackmail him into a passing grade.  The tenure committee is receiving threatening letters about him.  And he can’t even get an appointment with the wisest rabbi in town.

His wife is leaving him for who he thought was his best friend, Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed).  Seeing that he is the friend and the lover turning Larry into the third wheel, Sy decides to take charge of the relationship going on by comforting Larry.  Larry isn’t the sort of man who would start a fight out of this gesture, sees it for what it is; a very weird way to try to help Larry while hurting him.

Larry stays mostly placid for nearly all of his burdens.  He just deals with them as they come, and eventually we see that they are starting to get to him.  He shows his desperation mostly to rabbis he seeks out for their council hoping for some answers, but they don’t have much advice to offer.  As his problems pile up, Larry also has dreams that quickly turn into nightmares.  They ways his subconscious figures out how to deal with these problems just turn into more disturbing things that wake him up in the middle of the night.

The weirdest part about this film is that it’s a comedy, and the Coen brothers know how to pull that off in the most delightful way.  It’s not slapstick or side-splitting, but a very black comedy born out of us repeatedly saying, “Oh, that sucks.”  The way the Junior Rabbi tries to enjoy his terrible view saying, “Just look at that parking lot!” gave me a hearty chuckle.  Sy being both the source of grief and comfort was hilarious.  The way Larry’s kids just dismiss him, even when another storm is pulling through cracked me up.   And that very end image, with Jefferson Airplane playing into the credits, all I could do was laugh.  Really, what other reaction can you have to such a terrible course of fate?

“I feel like the carpet’s been yanked out from under me.”

True Grit

When Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) loses her father to a senseless gunfight, she steps up to take care of the arrangements for his body and to take vengeance on his murderer, Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin).  This girl is only fourteen, but with her father gone, she assumes the role as man of the house, and with damn true grit.  She can handle herself, sleeping in the same room as the corpses at the undertaker, and she can handle the men who underestimate her, bargaining like a pro until she gets what she deserves.  To track down Chaney, Mattie hires one-eyed Reuben J. “Rooster” Cogburn (Jeff Bridges), who is reputed to be the toughest U.S. Marshall around.  With his drinking and unruly behavior, Rooster wants to do the job alone, but stubborn Mattie insists on going with him out to the wild Indian territory.  Along the way, Texas Ranger LaBoeuf (Matt Damon) joins the hunt for Chaney and the three are tested to the edge of their grit.

Something I really noticed was the use of proper dialogue throughout the film.  It can be jarring at first, but feels like a Coen trademark.  Many times they have different dialects or speech patterns in their films (the strong Minnesota accent in Fargo, southern dialects in Oh Brother Where Art Thou?).  As I sat in the theater, I contemplated this idea of speech patterns, but realized that this proper speech was just making me listen more intently to the dialogue.  Perhaps that’s the purpose behind the types of speech, to perk our ears up.  That is so clever and simple.

I have yet to see the original True Grit, but according to my husband’s grandfather, this 2.0 version is much better.  He left the theater just beaming about the film, saying it was the best movie he had seen all year.  I’ve also heard from him and other sources that Bridges’ Rooster and Steinfeld’s Mattie are not taken at all from John Wayne or Kim Darby, but made their own darker characters closer to the book.  I seriously doubt Bridges would be competing for Best Actor right now if he had let a Wayne impression slip in occasionally.

The western has felt like a by-gone genera that was made for us to watch as little kids with our grandparents, but this seems to be the first great western for the twenty-first century.  The Coen brothers have resurrected the western from its old cowboys and Indians days into a darker, meatier film that can stand among today’s topics.  With some Coen deadpan laughs, classic western cinematography, a little blood and make little Mattie the toughest of the grit trio, you have got an amazing film.  Besides, who would have imagined sticking bad-ass Rooster Cogburn next to geeky Zuckerberg?

“If you would like to sleep in a coffin, it would be all right.”

If The Academy is looking to award the best resurrection of a by-gone genera, the Oscar for Best Picture will go to True Grit.

Fargo

Right here, it’s snowing outside.  The sky is a dull white, matching the snow covering the ground.  To get from town to town around here, you have to take the vacant country roads with sprawling white fields at each side.  Add in just a touch of fog or snow, the sky matches the ground and the road disappears into the white unknown.  I could drive a mile up the road right now and lose myself knowing that Fargo looks just like the world around me.  An eerie, cold no-man’s land, where the pure white snow only magnifies anything out of place.

Jerry (William H. Macy) is in some deep financial troubles.  The details are never explained because they are not important.  What is important, is that Jerry is desperate enough to hire two men from Fargo, Carl (Steve Buscemi) and Gaear (Peter Stormare), to kidnap his wife, in hopes of splitting the ransom that his wealthy father-in-law (Harve Presnell) will pay.  Jerry gives the men a car off the lot of the dealership he works at, owned by his father-in-law.  But things get messy, the kidnappers kill a cop and two innocent people in Brainerd.  This sends a pregnant cop, Marge (Frances McDormand), out to investigate.

Carl and Gaear are a perfect duo of scumbags.  Carl is repeatedly described as the little funny looking one who’s looking for action, entertainment and money.  Gaear is the more stoic and ruthless one who can shoot a cop in the head without batting an eye.  Carl complains that he hardly talks their entire car ride from Fargo to Minneapolis.  I see Gaear as a human embodiment of the harsh, snow covered, flat scenery that offers nothing much to talk about.

Marge is one of the greatest portrayals of women in modern cinema.  McDormand won the Oscar for lead actress in this role.  Marge is an amazing, tenacious woman who can walk out to a murder scene in six inches of snow six months pregnant.  She and her husband have a loving and simple support system with each other.  Marge is the breadwinner while Norm is an artist, and he makes sure his pregnant wife is eating well.  It’s so refreshing to see a strong, bold, successful woman, in a loving relationship that that has a level head on her shoulders and doesn’t need to be wearing anything more flattering than a fuzzy deer-stalker hat.  That thick Minnesota accent just tops it off as perfection.

What makes this film so amazing is the perfect mixture of senseless violence and the chilling setting.  There’s something about snow that’s so peaceful, pure and innocent.  In the dark, it has this power to become reflective, giving illumination to whatever wrongdoing is going on at the moment.  It can even contribute to the chaos, causing cars to lose control and flip over onto the side of the road.  What is most chilling is when we see a body or blood strewn across and tainting all that was once pure and white.

The most shocking thing about Fargo is that it is based on a true story.  And if the film’s plot follows the truth well enough, it was set in motion by a bumbling family man with money problems.  Of all the horrible ways for senseless violence to be set in motion, it was all completely preventable by one mild mannered man.  Jerry has no idea the string of bloodshed he set loose until it’s far too late and we have no sympathy for him.

Fargo is, by far, the best film of 1996.  The story is shown to us perfectly and the bleak visuals are spellbinding in their simplicity.  Each character has perfect contributions to the plot and are brought to life wonderfully by each actor.  And the ruthless violence among an otherwise peaceful setting stirs us down to our core.  If you want to see the Coen brothers at their best, Fargo is it.

“OK, so we got a trooper pulls someone over, we got a shooting, these folks drive by, there’s a high-speed pursuit, ends here and then this execution-type deal.”

No Country for Old Men

Within the first ten minutes of the film, we see the tone it will keep: barren of hope, calmly violent, and intriguing.  The Texas desert landscape and few and far between characters make the film feel lonely and isolated, like it was raised this way to become a quiet and unsettling person.

You’re not feeling too warm and fuzzy are you?  And you won’t watching this movie.

In No Country for Old Men, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a hunter stumbles upon a horrific multiple murder scene. It’s a drug deal gone wrong and Llewelyn finds a bag full of money.  He takes the money, but is soon pursued by Anton (Javier Bardem), who’s planted a tracking device in the bag.

In the second scene of the film, Anton calmly chokes a police officer to death with his handcuffs on the station floor, leaving scuff marks all around them in the struggle.  (I now count this as one of my favorite murder scenes, thanks Coens!)  It’s clear that Anton is a psychopath, the menacing kind that will kill anyone with no remorse.  Listen carefully for a little story about a kid who killed a fourteen year old girl in the film, I believe this describes Anton’s first brush with the law, though it is never explicitly told.

Javier Bardem must’ve had a lot of fun playing Anton (villains are often more fun to play than the hero).  His voice is menacing and creepy in a calm and natural way, unlike Bale’s Batman growl.  One of the scariest things about Anton is that he’s nearly quirky.  Think about it, take his stupid haircut, the end of the coin toss conversation and rolling down the window to shoot at a bird on the bridge and you’ve got quite a quirky guy, but of course we put the psychopathic murderer upfront with good reason.  It’s no surprise that Bardem won Best Supporting Actor “for making a bad haircut look scary.”

So, Llewelyn has the money, is running from Anton, Anton is leaving a senseless trail of blood behind him as he follows Llewlyn and Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is always just a step behind Anton.  Bell is an aging Sheriff, he’s proud of his work, but is fed up with how fucked up the world has become. “Who are these people?  It’s all out war.”  The messed up stuff he has to deal with has become more than he bargained for.  He’s becoming more and more disillusioned, he thought things would only get better as he got older.  In short, he’s getting too old for this shit.  This ain’t no country for an old man.

I think we can all agree that No Country for Old Men is a complete downer.  In fact, four of the five nominations of 2007 are, I believe John Stewart said it best, “Thank God for teenage pregnancy!”  There are some people that just plain wouldn’t like this movie.  There is a lot of violence.  Senseless, psychopathic, blood on the walls violence that is never brought to justice, and for many people I understand what a moral killer that is.  If you’re one of those people, you’re better off watching Juno five times.  But if you can stomach it, No Country for Old Men is a really amazing film.  The Coen brothers know what they’re doing and if you let them lead you into this horribly violent and lonely world you can still come out to be a normal functioning person in society.

“What’s the most you ever lost on a coin toss?”