Remove one element from every Coen Brothers movie — indeed the exact same element from each — and what you’re left with is normal, run-of-the-mill movies of no great importance, mediocre flicks that garner sub-par reviews and moderate box-office takes.
Yes, their direction is exceptionally good, but in each of their movies the writing/directing duo weave one thing throughout their stories, one thing that unites all the characters with all the plot devices, one thing that exaggerates and manipulates the story just enough to make a basic story so utterly profound and diabolically sinister. That element: language. It’s the way the characters talk, the way they syntax their sentences, that twitchy diction, those Southern drawls, those glib jabs and frustrated burps of dialogue. The Coens don’t just direct great talkers, they write great talkers. Their scripts are full of colorful characters, nearly every one of which has an interesting manner in which he or she communicates.
Look at any of their works, even the early ones. Look at Raising Arizona, that madcap comedy that somehow manages to wring laughs out of child abduction of all subjects. Listen to the way Holly Hunter squeals at her no-good husband, the way she blasts through her thoughts in stammering run-ons and then howls those elongated syllables. All Nic Cage can do is grumble and fumble back, pecking out his lines like they were unwanted chores assigned to him. Cage and Hunter are talented performers, but these lines were not written nor directed by them. They may have breathed life into them, but they were spawned by the Coens, magicians of the English language, virtuosic players of the spoken word.
Raising Arizona is the absolute tip of the iceberg. Listen to Tim Robbins in The Hudsucker Proxy, confident and jeering in those crisp suits and that inflated ego. Listen to every character in O Brother, Where Art Thou? — those Southern twangers, gulping hillbillies, magnetic simpletons and Holly Hunter, who returns to utter what may be the most convincing non-sensical line in Coen history (“He’s bona fide.”) Listen to one of their more mediocre films, The Ladykillers, where a Tom Hanks pulls a Col. Sander-like baritone bravado with a highfalutin gentleman of the bayou. Listen to No Country for Old Men, in which Tommy Lee Jones uses a back-country form of English so effectively it transcends acting altogether; he speaks his words like he’s lived them. We could go on for several more movies (two more at great length below), but the point is that Joel and Ethan Coen use their characters’ language — tempo, timbre, tone, saliva, pauses, coughs and … everything — to heighten the detail and impact of their stories. Credit also goes the actors who breathe life into the dialogue; indeed, casting is as important to a Coen film as the manner of speech of the characters. But really the origins of the greatness exist long before the films are ever cast. The two examples that best show the style the Coens utilize were released about two years apart and each redefined they way people viewed these two talented writers and directors — The Big Lebowski, released in 1998, and Fargo, released in 1996.
First, let us consider Fargo, a movie of surprising detail and scope considering its setting is a white-empty canvas and it takes place in remote, lifeless locations. Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) is a police chief and she’s very pregnant. She speaks in an accent I’ve since learned is called Minnesota Nice; it’s almost too comical to be real, but I’ve since found out it is a very real dialect. Roger Ebert, who was forgivably critical of the language in Raising Arizona in his 1987 review, wrote it best in one of his Great Movies essays: “Marge Gunderson is one of a handful of characters whose names remain in our memories, like Travis Bickle, Tony Manero, HAL 9000, Fred C. Dobbs. They are completely, defiantly themselves in movies that depend on precisely who they are. Marge is the chief in Brainerd, Minn., still has bouts of morning sickness, eats all the junk food she can get her hands on, speaks in a ‘you betcha’ Minnesota accent where ‘yeah,’ pronounced ya, is volleyed like a refrain.” Roger goes on, praising the acting, directing and especially the method of the dialogue.
Marge has this way about her: very soft-spoken and friendly, prone to strange bouts of regional slang (“There in a jif.”) and her language colors her with so much more detail. The way she communicates with people is so effective that Jerry Lundegaard, the man who orchestrates the bulk of the plot, finds it uncomfortable and invading, especially since he’s guilty of a lot more than he’s admitting to. Marge appears late in the movie, and before we get to hear her wonderful “I think I’m gonna barf” line we are able to communicate openly with many other characters, including Carl (Steve Buscemi), a man so obsessed with communicating with his near-mute partner that it becomes test of wills. At one point he tries to respond about a car in an intelligent way, gets frustrated, trips over his words and simply says, “Ah fuck it, let’s take a look at the Sierra” — in a sense, his limits to communication have been breached and he throws his hands up in defeat. This is one of many interesting examinations of the movie’s language. Consider later when Carl’s shot in the mouth, a clear assault on his verbal communication skills. And all the while his partner is silent, and those associated with him, like Shep Proudfoot, can only respond in monosyllables. Every character in this movie is given a device in their language. Jerry, who was hurt by his father-in-law’s words (“Gene and Scotty will never have to worry,” he says implying his money is no good for Jerry), communicates in lies, in “bold-face lies” making his language an integral part of his manipulations. Later, when he’s setting up another lie, the Coens allow him to practice his language before making that fateful and deceptive phone call to his father-in-law. Jerry and several other characters are given other forms of communication, too: they beat on iced windows, bang on snowy TV sets and slam the contents of a desk — clearly their mouths can’t express what boils over inside them.
The Coens use these devices in almost literary ways, and they are backed up by the images on the screen. Notice the bleak high-angle parking lot shot as Jerry walks to his car to bang on his window. It isn’t just a wonderful shot designed to amuse our eyes; it shows us how isolated and alone Jerry has become. Notice the tracks in the snow run opposite those Jerry’s car; it’s as if he were traveling against the film’s flow, grating past his moral limits and interrupting the lives of those around him. Language is important to Fargo not just because it transports us to Fargo and Brainerd, the home of Paul Bunyan, but because it transports us into the cop’s quaint lifestyle, the car salesman’s bitter plight, the kidnapper’s lonely assignment, and the murderer’s nihilistic rage. There has been some dissenting opinion on this with regards to Fargo. For instance, consider the writing of reporter James Lileks, who is actually from Fargo and found the accent of the characters as annoying and superficial as the film’s violence. He writes: “People in Minneesohta do talk that way, ya know. Yes, it’s funny to hear people plot, you know, that murder-type deal there in an accent better suited for swapping hot-dish recipes. I don’t think the accent is inherently funny, but that’s because it’s familiar … The real problem was the audience. I saw Fargo in Minneapolis, a supper-hour showing at the Mall of America. Behind us was a couple in their sixties who apparently had chosen this movie based on the title. Perhaps they expected a western. When characters started cussing, I could hear legs being crossed and uncrossed. When the policeman was brainer’d, there was a slight sigh of disappointment. Half an hour into the film, I heard the woman whisper: ‘Well, this is different.’ … In Fargo-speak, that means this is a raw horror blown straight from Satan’s colon, and any decent person would disapprove. I was embarrassed for them. And for me as well. It was a replay of those trying moments when you rent a videotape to watch with your parents, and suddenly the characters are naked and having sex.”
But to counter his response, he doesn’t have the luxury of being not from Fargo like most of the viewers of the movie, most of whom will find the dialogue to be expressive and a defining factor of the film. Language — not just what is said but how it is said — allows us inside the turbulent world of characters that can’t be unfolded just by looking at them. The Coens have mastered it with every picture.
The other film, The Big Lebowski, follows a similar approach. The movie, an inside-out deviation of the film noir — it asks the question: What if Sam Spade were a loser bowler? — not only created a believable world for its eccentric characters to flourish, but it nourished and enriched a growing cult following that now call The Dude an unlikely saint (St. Duder, maybe). The Coens took what could have been any one of James M. Cain’s pulpy detective stories and flipped it on its head and then blew bong hits in its face. And it did this using language. Deadbeats have been in film noir before: Detour, for instance, had a famous deadbeat, as did The Killers. But never has a deadbeat been given so much meaningless dialogue before in a film noir. Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski is a cursing, existential nobody. He has a rug that “really ties the room together,” calls the bowling alley a home away from home, has spliffs that tumble from his pockets when he leaves change for coffee, consumes glass after glass of White Russians, and oh I can’t forget, his Creedence collection in his heap of a car. But more than anything, he has his mouth, a ranting hole of mindless philosophy, deliberate stupidity and simple brilliance.
The Coens have since said The Dude really exists, but I doubt he was this philosophical or crude with his tongue. In Fargo everyone speaks in turns; in Lebowski the dialogue overlaps three and four times creating tapestries of voices and ideas. While Dude rants Walter rants louder and Donny, who wears bowling shirts with every name but his own (proving his ghost-like status in the film), chimes in with question. Donny’s chatter always produces the same response from Walter: “Shut the fuck up, Donny.” It’s language as a weapon, which happens throughout the film with Walter, who intimidates and hurts with his words. Other performances: the nihilists with their cruddy English and thick German clicks, Big Lebowski’s assistant who uses his swollen Harvard language to promote himself and his employer, Maude and her faux British elitism, and finally Maude’s friend (David Thewlis) who uses giggles to stab at Dude’s eardrums. The dialogue is even self-referential: “Do you speak English,” Big Lebowski says to The Dude; later we’re explained words, that sex is coitus and coitus is sex; not long after we’re told men fear the word “vagina”; and when the stranger (Sam Elliott) makes one of his quick appearances he asks if the dude has to swear so much. Speaking of the stranger, he translates stuff into his own vernacular — “I ain’t never been to France, and I ain’t never seen the queen in her damned undies either …” The Coens are manipulating language for our benefit, otherwise what they would have given us would have been a basic, even boring, mystery.
The way the Coens write dialogue is important and by looking at how things are said, in what manner, in what speed and in what tone, we can analyze and come to our own conclusions about what they’re trying to tell us. Whether it be Marge Gunderson or The Dude, language can diagnose their agenda, rip through the plot to reveal the methods and tactics of their players, and the language cuts through the genre to reveal truly intelligent and important filmmaking, the kind we talk about — and quote — for years to come.
***This is the fifth of five in-depth essays on great directors.***
Chinatown is an examination of genre. Many films have sampled from the film noir lexicon, movies like Body Heat, with its devious femme fatale. A movie like Dark City used some of film noir’s rules and dramatic lighting but used them in a science fiction universe of special effects and horrific imagery. Some, like Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye or the first Naked Gun film, have tried outright parody of film noir to a certain degree of success. L.A. Confidential did a blatant neo-noir exaggeration that effectively appealed to every film noir convention, from the hard-boiled detective to the labyrinthine corruption of power. But if there is any film that truly supports the original spirit of the golden age of film noir, it is Chinatown, Roman Polanski’s stubborn vindication of his talent and personal life inside a Hollywood that would turn against him.
More than any film outside the true film noir era — which ran roughly from 1940 to the mid 1950s — Chinatown adheres to what made the genre great, with only a few notable exceptions: it was shot in color using a subtle lighting scheme; the dialogue, while suggestive, is not nearly as titillating as any of the great film noirs; and it was shot after the abandonment of the Hays Code, which, as detrimental to films as it was, gave film noir its hidden edge. Everything else about Chinatown, though, is true-blue film noir in the greatest respect. Consider first the opening credits that reveal the entire cast and crew in an almost sepia-tinted simplicity. By 1974 movies had long ago stopped running complete credits this way at the beginning of the film, but Polanski adopts the technique to begin developing his film noir essay, by slowly transporting us back to another age. Consider next the character of J.J. Gittes, the hard-boiled detective who’s sent into a seething curiosity with each new lie — “You shortchanged me on the story,” he tells Evelyn Mulwray. Gittes could be a Sam Spade or a Philip Marlowe, a Bogart or a Mitchum, and not just because he’s a private detective, but because his quest for the truth is almost his undoing. “[Is this] business or obsession,” Evelyn asks. With Gittes it’s a little of both — business at the beginning, obsession at the end. Evelyn isn’t quite the femme fatale from most film noirs, but she assumes the role as best she can. She lies a great deal, manipulates the truth, endangers Gittes, but overall she’s not doing these things for selfish reasons like a Brigid O’Shaughnessy (The Maltese Falcon) or a Phyllis Dietrichson (Double Indemnity). In fact, her intentions could be almost understood as noble ignoring the implications of her previous relationship with her father. In the end, all she desires is to protect her daughter from a man who bears some right to her as a daughter and grand-daughter. Does she deserve a bullet to the eye? No, but it’s Chinatown and the rules are unforgiving.
Polanski dives deeper into film noir with his setting (Los Angeles), his plot (a murder mystery), his time period (1930s) and Gittes’ obsessive spiral into the water corruption case. We, like Gittes, learn the facts, or maybe the half truths, as they are presented to us. In a sense, the viewer is investigating the case as much as Gittes, who flies by the seat of his pants from one deadly encounter to the next. Even the title of the film is a nod to film noir. Consider The Long Goodbye and The Big Sleep, euphemisms for death; or Sunset Boulevard, a place where men go to die; Double Indemnity, a death clause written into an insurance policy; or Touch of Evil, which references the doomed path men take to the grave. These are classic titles that hint at the film’s narrow descent into darkness. It’s as if film noir’s main compositional work was the exploration of death and its many subterranean avenues. Chinatown is no different; the title refers to a place where law and order (i.e. death) are circumvented by the tragedy and corruption of life. Roman Polanski wasn’t creating just a mystery; he was bowing to the greatness in which mystery thrived — film noir.
But what is Chinatown? And is it coincidence that Gittes is sharing a joke about a “Chinaman” when he meets Mrs. Mulwray and then later is with her as she’s killed while fleeing from Chinatown? I don’t think it’s just coincidence, and Polanski — with Oscar-winning writer Robert Towne — was knowingly exemplifying Gittes’ fear of Chinatown long before we ever step foot there. And by exploring Gittes’ apprehension to returning to his old police beat — watch the slow zoom on his face when he’s told an address in Chinatown — we are aware of its power and aware that by going there we risk the death the title so convincingly tempts us with.
***This is the fourth of five in-depth essays on great directors.***
Of all the films we have discussed here, Amores Perros is probably the most straightforward of them all. It’s not as linear as No Country For Old Men or A Clockwork Orange — although it’s about as chronologically sound as The Conformist — Amores Perros is still one of director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s more basic pictures. 21 Grams leapt through time to visit its characters at contrasting points in their story arcs, and Babel involved a larger cast (megastars no less) and a variety of languages in a number of different countries. Those films, sometimes mistaken as American films, were grander in scope and execution. Simple little Amores Perros — at a not-so-simple 150 minutes running time — follows three sets of lives in one city using one language across what may be about a month of film time. But don’t assume that Amores Perros, with its easier plot devices like its identifiable chapters and title cards, is any less important. If anything it might be Alejandro González Iñárritu’s finest work, especially if you consider that his later works are clones of a similar idea examined in this, his directorial debut.
Iñárritu, sometimes called the Mexican Altman because of the way he interweaves people’s lives together on film, has writers on his pictures, but I think he must fancy himself as a quasi-documentarian. His films deal with life, the way we glide (or maybe scrape) through it, and the way choices and actions never end with the person making them. If every cause has an effect, every action has a reaction, then Iñárritu has tasked himself with looking at both sides of that dynamic, but from two different perspectives. He does this using handheld cameras, minimal lighting, found (and very real) locations and an attention to detail that is almost journalistic in its honesty. What we see in Amores Perros, excluding the plot (although even that perhaps), is not unlike anything we might actually see in a major Mexican city. His characters do real things, the way real people would actually do them. I think that’s one of his major contributions to film — he can coax honest performances from his stars.
Speaking of honesty, let’s consider the tagline to Amores Perros: “Love. Betrayal. Death.” Those three little words represent the entire film, and the periods between indicate they’re separate sentences, or separate stories. “Love” belongs to Daniel and Valeria, who are one-third of the film’s bulk. Daniel has cheated on his wife with Valeria (and his wife, or possibly another girlfriend, calls and hangs up randomly); Valeria, a professional model, is injured in the car crash that serves as the film’s ground zero. The struggle with her leg, her failing career and her missing dog are compounded all at once as Daniel does his best offering care. Their love unites them when all else threatens to tear them apart. “Betrayal” belongs to Octavio and Susana, the brother and his sister-in-law who commiserate over their lots in life while Susana cares for a child (with another on the way) and Octavio fights his dog Cofi in vicious dog fights. Just when he’s ready to run away with her, she betrays him by stealing the money he’s raised fighting Cofi. Later she betrays him twice more: once when she vows to name her unnamed baby after her dead husband, thus not after Octavio, and again when she refuses to meet him at the bus stop. “Death” belongs to El Chivo, the homeless man with the mysterious past. Of course, El Chivo deals in death as a hired gun, but he also witnesses it firsthand when Cofi is brought into his home and slaughters his other dogs, pets he looked upon as family members. It’s ironic that he’s “Death” and that his daughter thinks her father is dead — it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy he’s involved himself in.
“Love. Betrayal. Death.” — those are the themes for their respective chapters, but also for every chapter. “Love” could count for Octavio, who loved his sister-in-law, and for El Chivo, who so truly loved his animals and his daughter yet gives them up to the cruelty of his world. “Betrayal” works for El Chivo, who is betrayed by the dog he saved, and for Daniel and Valeria, who betray another woman, Daniel’s wife, so they can be together. Alejandro González Iñárritu has crafted a labyrinth of intersecting lives and emotions. The fact that they so accurately represent each character and story goes to his credit. Besides, juggling all this at once can’t be easy to do as a director.
More than anything, though, Amores Perros is about how three sets of people react to a common problem that has been grafted into their lives. If ground zero is the crash, then all three chapters are altered by it, and the sum of the film’s importance is not the crash and everything prior to it, but the crash and everything after. Yes, the film explores how the crash happens and what people were doing before it, but only because it allows us to contrast the before with an after. The real purpose of the film is to examine what changes in these people’s lives after the crash. Octavio, the architect of the crash — although, not its aftermath — tries to cope with the betrayal of Susana, yet he still can forgive her when she turns up after her husband’s death. Watch how Octavio, who could not appropriately cope with the betrayal of his dog Cofi during the dog fight in the pool, forgives Susana long enough to be betrayed two more times. After the crash Daniel shows his compassion, even as his model girlfriend returns home disfigured and broken. Valeria just wants a companion, which is when her dog goes missing under the floorboards. By the time Daniel tears up the wooden slats on the floor, he’s saving more than a dog, but his relationship. Finally, El Chivo is affected the most. After adopting Cofi and after the dog kills the other pets, the homeless father can finally see what senseless killing is capable of doing on the greater landscape of a person’s life — it’s interesting that he learns of his humanity from a canine. Without this important lesson he would have killed the businessman and been the same miserable soul wandering the street. Instead, because of the accident and its various effects, he can have the courage to stop the cycle of death and make small contact with his daughter.
Iñárritu weaves all this together masterfully, involving us explicitly in the agony of life. Existentialists believe in a great contradiction examined profoundly by Jean-Paul Sartre: Mankind is bound by its freedoms, doomed by our ability to choose. Amores Perros definitely plays that up with every scenario it allows us to witness. I think it reaches its zenith with El Chivo, who drastically comes to realize he’s doomed to choose, but, by damn, he will choose what he views to be the right decision. When he walks off on that black landscape, scraped of all life and color, he acknowledges that his decisions are nothing but what we make them, and he has decided to fade into the tapestry of Mexico, of life, of Alejandro González Iñárritu.
***This is the third of five in-depth essays on great directors.***
The Conformist might not be Bernardo Bertolucci’s greatest film (it is in no way my favorite), but it fulfills the essence of what the famous director believes: challenge authority, topple the norm, be subversive at all costs. The incestuous, riot-provoking teens of The Dreamers obliged to this mantra, as did Paul and Jeanne in that steamy apartment in Last Tango in Paris. Even to a certain extent did Lucy Harmon, the tattered soul in search of resolution in one of Bertolucci’s tamer films, Stealing Beauty. His films deal with moral corruption at the basest levels, on levels that are so human and so simple that to even question them is in its own right a subversive act. Notice in The Conformist how Marcello, during his confession, argues with the priest so vehemently the priest must stop and correct him — “You are talking to a priest,” the man of the cloth says. Marcello waves it off, as if no priest will hold his beliefs hostage. He talks about his “carnal sin” and a murder and then rails on the priest when he wants to know more about one and less about the other. “You don’t care that I murdered, only that I never went to confession,” he says. I think this scene is evocative of Bertolucci’s style because confession is a rather simple act, but because his characters deal in truth — or just subverting the truth — a simple confession can turn into a hateful rage fueled by a man’s lust for self-worth, which is maybe why Marcello was a cog in a very large Fascist machine. The confessional scene is also very funny to me: all Marcello had to do was complete a confession for his wife, but he makes it this big argument, this massive revelation of his character. It signals his uncompromising position in the film’s landscape.
Every time I see The Conformist it reminds me more and more of three movies. The first one is Jean-Luc-Godard’s Breathless, which was released a decade earlier. More on the other two later. Breathless, the film that sparked the powder keg called French New Wave, was told utilizing a technique I call Abstraction Interaction: it broke the fourth wall, it featured a staccato composition of jump cuts and other camera trickery, and frequently did nothing at all inside its story — yet nothing at all, of course, is very much something. The Conformist, which is also set in Paris like Breathless, rolled forward (literally, too, as Marcello drives to the assassination) on a series of flashbacks, utilizing a hard-to-follow story structure, allowing room for his characters to vent and mull over their lives. Occasionally the film would jump between points with such sharp precision, and to jarring effect, that it would unseat the viewer inside its time loop. Notice the way Marcello gets out of the car at the beginning and begins walking in the mist and fog. The scene cuts quick to the tree-lined street where Marcello, as a young boy, meets the chauffer. Then back to the mist and fog, and finally back again to the boy and his first homosexual experience. Or notice in the scene when Marcello agrees to go to confession that there is an obvious jump cut, or maybe just a continuity error (which is unlikely). One moment he’s leaning against a wall, the next he’s away from it embracing his wife who is happy he has agreed to talk to a priest. Are we seeing a subjective perspective of Marcello’s life? I think we are and Bertolucci utilizes an almost New Wave-like style to hammer it home.
The other two movies it reminds me greatly of are rather strange comparisons to make: The Godfather and Star Wars, both because they share interior space. Bertolucci gave his Conformist interesting rooms to work in. They’re large spacious halls, marble-lined antechambers, padded green rooms and the claustrophobic professor’s homes. With each, though, they have character. That’s what reminds me of The Godfather, with its large offices and meeting rooms with darkened corners. The settings don’t serve the story so much, but they become great because great things are discussed in them. And even though the characters barely interact with furniture, lamps or fixtures in the room, they are memorable and full of character and personality. That’s the way I feel about The Conformist and its various interiors. There’s also another element, the Fascist element to the interior designs and the architecture. This is what reminds me of Star Wars, which had numerous empire sets designed to look cold and evil, fascist to a certain degree. The echoing chambers of the Ministry of the Interior, the colorless Greek-like insane asylum, the large waiting areas where men with falcons and busts criss-cross the halls … these are rooms that bolster the fascist elements of this film. I find humor in the way George Lucas borrowed camera angles and setups from Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of Will, a film that chronicled Hitler’s ascent to power at Nuremberg in 1934. Maybe Triumph of the Will, through Star Wars and The Conformist, was the film that told us large, stone rooms with high ceilings and cold surfaces made for fascist imagery.
It’s not just the rooms, though, it’s the way Bertolucci and his cinematographer move through them. Some things are framed slightly askew, or completely crooked, while others are just framed in a very unorthodox manner, using Camera Thirds (divide a frame horizontally and vertically into thirds and then center subjects on the intersections of those lines). Watch the blind party — as large a metaphor you can make without venturing into parody — how the camera hangs above people’s heads, making things almost out of frame completely. Then also watch the scene in the park as Marcello’s assassin comrade walk in the park talking to himself; watch as he sits down and the camera pans so the man is behind a tree. Through all these devices, Bertolucci was showing us the shifty perspective of Marcello’s narrative. As a whole I don’t much care for The Conformist, but the details, like the cinematography and the interiors, have always intrigued me. They’ve also shown how subversive Bertolucci can be with his filming style. He really does provoke us to think outside of what we already know and understand.
***This is the second of five in-depth essays on great directors.***
Stanley Kubrick deals with isolation. He deals with men who have been secluded from society, from their morals, from their own agency. Consider Colonel Dax from Paths of Glory, who’s removed from the decision making of his World War I fighting unit. Or Dave from 2001: A Space Odyssey, who is removed from his command by his ship’s computer, HAL 9000. The list could go on: Private Pyle from Full Metal Jacket, Jack Torrance from The Shining, Dr. Harford in Eyes Wide Shut, the bomber and its crew in Dr. Strangelove … even robotic boy David in Artificial Intelligence, Steven Spielberg’s interpretation of a Kubrick idea, exhibits this theme of isolation. All of these human and non-human characters are marginalized by the forces near them, scorned by an abnormally cruel world or set of fates. But what makes a Kubrick film so decidedly a Kubrick film is the way in which the characters react to their isolation, the way they process it all together and make informed — and sometimes brash and violent — decisions.
And this is where Alex from A Clockwork Orange steps in. Alex always seemed to me to be a loser hero, a stock character crafted under the film noir genre. Loser heroes tried to make the right choices, but were hopelessly misguided, usually by women, which is how femme fatales were born. Alex was never led astray by women, just his unquenchable urge for self-indulgence (ultra-violence, horror show, “in-out/in-out”). He lived a great but terrible life — great to him, terrible to us — and was betrayed by the Droogies he thought he had tamed. There his isolation begins. And the rest of the movie, he spirals downward by a society eager to punish. It’s ironic that at the end of the movie he’s spiraling back up thanks to the society he so callously abused. I’m reminded of the opening lines of The Departed: “I don’t want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me.” Alex and his malicious batch of Droogies, all nihilists to a moderate degree, had tried to make their environment products of themselves, to Alex’s downfall.
I’ve always been curious with this film why Kubrick would have used the fashion and architectural choices he picked. The clothing was off-the-wall with purple overcoats, the padded jock straps and purple wigs; and the buildings were modular geometric patterns that seemed to confine the characters inside them. The film, in many ways is very dystopian, a sinister and depressing look at a future society. In some ways — for instance, the milk bar, the Durango 95 car, and the elaborate decorations in Alex’s room — the film is as comparable to science fiction as 2001. I felt that Kubrick was trying to place us outside of the norm, away from what we know and fear to give us new things to know and fear, like the ultra-violence of Alex and his misanthropic stooges. Even the primary colors in the opening and closing credits seem foreign and distant, too bright to even be real — then I remember what Alex said about the blood in the films: “It’s funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on a screen.” I think Kubrick was involving us on an almost subliminal level. Just as Alex’s videos were brainwashing him, we were being “told” on an almost subconscious level that the world we were watching was somehow more real than our own, and that elements of that world (clothes, architecture, themes) were designed to imprison us inside fortified walls.
In many ways Kubrick was also trying to show us the characters’ glaring inconsistencies. Notice how Dim assists in the rape of a woman in one scene and then speaks with kindness to a mannequin milk dispenser he has named Lucy in the very next. Or notice how Alex views himself in the crucifixion of Christ — dressed in an outfit just as gaudy as his purple record-store robes — as a soldier flailing away on Christ’s back. Yet later in the film, he is the martyr, he is the sacrifice of the immoral Ludovico Technique. So is he a messiah figure or the Messiah’s executioners? The movie would have us believe both, but at different times. Lastly, look at his prison number: “six-double-five-three-two-one” — 655321. It’s almost a perfect sequence in the wrong direction. Was Kubrick playing with us? Was he showing us our descent with Alex in a number that was slightly skewed? I think so.
A Clockwork Orange is a complex movie, a film that can be viewed in too many ways to suggest that any answer is 100 percent correct. It’s my belief that Stanley Kubrick wanted us to interpret the film as we wanted. In some ways I think it does glorify violence to a certain degree. It’s impossible to not enjoy the film’s pacing, the music and that silly dialogue, even as rape and murders are so brazenly and wantonly committed on screen. I also believe that violence is also an adequate anti-violence, and that by showing the scenes he did Kubrick was indicting us right along with Alex; we were his voyeuristic cohorts. By the end of the film, it seems to shoot in all directions, mainly back at the society that allowed such a boy to be created. That, in my opinion, is the ultimate message.
***This is the first of five in-depth essays on great directors.***
No Country For Old Men is an enigma. A conundrum. A paradoxical riddle. In its very nature it is meant to confuse and baffle. Here is a man so evil, so methodically murderous, that even great and wise men — men who have bore witness to evil before — are unable to justify his morals. Sheriff Tom Bell is no stranger to murderers. He says so in his first monologue of the movie, but his justification is skewed into nowhere: “The crime you see now, it’s hard to even take its measure. It’s not that I’m afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job. But I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He’d have to say, ‘OK, I’ll be part of this world.’” His words, careful and weathered, are trying to assign meaning to someone who has no real purpose to his, or any, existence. Only Anton Chigurh has those answers and by the end of the movie, as he hobbles off undefeated from the wrecked intersection to whatever fate is ahead of him, he seems unlikely to spill his secrets even then.
These are existentialist tenants through and through: the meaning assigned to life and death, to good and evil; the wanton destruction of so many innocent lives for meaningless reasons; the dreams and metaphors that accentuate then cloud this movie’s underlying themes; and that ambiguous scene at the motel with the good Sheriff and the bad Chigurh in an unseen showdown through a broken lock. Absurdism, mankind’s vain attempt to assign meaning to the things around him, is a major element to existentialism and it drives this movie forward. It is why one man can kill, one man can run and one man can throw his hands up in frustration, beaten at his own game. This is a movie about three men's reaction to evil: Chigurh is consumed by it. Llewelyn Moss attempts to defeat it. The Sheriff finds himself at an exasperating stalemate.
When I first saw this movie I credited its complex values to Cormac McCarthy, the author of the book from which the movie is based. The more I see the film, though, I realize that Joel and Ethan Coen are the ultimate architects of its greatness. They have translated McCarthy’s words into a raw, naked film. Watch how little actually happens in No Country For Old Men: large portions are without music or dialogue, the lighting is subtle and natural, camera movements are quiet and steady, and the pacing is agonizingly methodical. If it tried any harder it wouldn’t exist, it would disappear from the screen. By dimming the lights and turning down the volume, though, the Coens have heightened our senses and given us reason to tune in to the details. For instance, watch the way Chigurh searches Moss’ house, the way he takes out the milk and sits on the sofa. He looks into the TV and watches his reflection. Not long after, Sheriff Bell is in the same location, drinking the same milk and watching his own reflection in the same TV — they occupy the same space. They’re reflections in each others' lives and yet they are intrigued by that dark figure in front of them. Is it fear? Maybe for Bell. Another director would have not settled on hints so subtle, but here the Coens speak volumes with barely noticeable frames.
Another delicate scene occurs in our introduction to Moss, who is hunting on a vast, dead plain. As he hunts, a large dark cloud looms over the animals grazing far below him. We can see the cloud’s edges and we can see it creeping toward us. Dark times are coming for Llewelyn Moss. It reminded me a great deal of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, when a random cloud blankets a meadow before the violent death of the film’s stars. Or consider the agonizing twitching and death of the peanut wrapper in the gas station. What a curious sequence for the Coens to put in their film. Any other director would have shown a fifth of it, but there we sit with nearly five countable seconds of wrapper torture. Yes, indeed it’s a metaphor for the floundering, flopping old man at the gas station, who’s so close to death he’ll never appreciate how close it all came to ending. No Country For Old Men exists in the details, in the way it does the little things, even in the little characters — the trailer park manager, chicken hauler, gas station owner, various cab drivers, sheriff’s deputies and hotel clerks.
Notice also the particular attention to clothes. It’s no coincidence that an injured Moss pays some guys for their coat only to later be upstaged by Chigurh, who pays some kids for their silence and a shirt. They also share several scenes with boots: Moss sheds his to hunt and dive into rivers, while Chigurh takes his off to murder and repair wounds. Let's go one more, this time with socks: Moss tells the manager at the clothing store he only wears white socks. Chigurh wears only black socks and we see this in two scenes: the first time occurs when he removes his bloody socks right after he massacres the Mexicans in the hotel room, and the second time after Moss shoots him in the leg and then repairs his wound. The Coens are mixing these characters together because they're are telling us these men are one in the same — equals — just on opposite ends of the spectrum. But only Chigurh’s side is void of feeling and remorse. That is why he can kill so effortlessly. That is why the country is no use for old men.
Remove one element from every Coen Brothers movie — indeed the exact same element from each — and what you’re left with is normal, run-of-the-mill movies of no great importance, mediocre flicks that garner sub-par reviews and moderate box-office takes.
Yes, their direction is exceptionally good, but in each of their movies the writing/directing duo weave one thing throughout their stories, one thing that unites all the characters with all the plot devices, one thing that exaggerates and manipulates the story just enough to make a basic story so utterly profound and diabolically sinister. That element: language. It’s the way the characters talk, the way they syntax their sentences, that twitchy diction, those Southern drawls, those glib jabs and frustrated burps of dialogue. The Coens don’t just direct great talkers, they write great talkers. Their scripts are full of colorful characters, nearly every one of which has an interesting manner in which he or she communicates. 
Raising Arizona is the absolute tip of the iceberg. Listen to Tim Robbins in The Hudsucker Proxy, confident and jeering in those crisp suits and that inflated ego. Listen to every character in O Brother, Where Art Thou? — those Southern twangers, gulping hillbillies, magnetic simpletons and Holly Hunter, who returns to utter what may be the most convincing non-sensical line in Coen history (“He’s bona fide.”) Listen to one of their more mediocre films, The Ladykillers, where a Tom Hanks pulls a Col. Sander-like baritone bravado with a highfalutin gentleman of the bayou. Listen to No Country for Old Men, in which Tommy Lee Jones uses a back-country form of English so effectively it transcends acting altogether; he speaks his words like he’s lived them. We could go on for several more movies (two more at great length below), but the point is that Joel and Ethan Coen use their characters’ language — tempo, timbre, tone, saliva, pauses, coughs and … everything — to heighten the detail and impact of their stories. Credit also goes the actors who breathe life into the dialogue; indeed, casting is as important to a Coen film as the manner of speech of the characters. But really the origins of the greatness exist long before the films are ever cast. The two examples that best show the style the Coens utilize were released about two years apart and each redefined they way people viewed these two talented writers and directors — The Big Lebowski, released in 1998, and Fargo, released in 1996. 
First, let us consider Fargo, a movie of surprising detail and scope considering its setting is a white-empty canvas and it takes place in remote, lifeless locations. Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) is a police chief and she’s very pregnant. She speaks in an accent I’ve since learned is called Minnesota Nice; it’s almost too comical to be real, but I’ve since found out it is a very real dialect. Roger Ebert, who was forgivably critical of the language in Raising Arizona in his 1987 review, wrote it best in one of his Great Movies essays: “Marge Gunderson is one of a handful of characters whose names remain in our memories, like Travis Bickle, Tony Manero, HAL 9000, Fred C. Dobbs. They are completely, defiantly themselves in movies that depend on precisely who they are. Marge is the chief in Brainerd, Minn., still has bouts of morning sickness, eats all the junk food she can get her hands on, speaks in a ‘you betcha’ Minnesota accent where ‘yeah,’ pronounced ya, is volleyed like a refrain.” Roger goes on, praising the acting, directing and especially the method of the dialogue.
Marge has this way about her: very soft-spoken and friendly, prone to strange bouts of regional slang (“There in a jif.”) and her language colors her with so much more detail. The way she communicates with people is so effective that Jerry Lundegaard, the man who orchestrates the bulk of the plot, finds it uncomfortable and invading, especially since he’s guilty of a lot more than he’s admitting to. Marge appears late in the movie, and before we get to hear her wonderful “I think I’m gonna barf” line we are able to communicate openly with many other characters, including Carl (Steve Buscemi), a man so obsessed with communicating with his near-mute partner that it becomes test of wills. At one point he tries to respond about a car in an intelligent way, gets frustrated, trips over his words and simply says, “Ah fuck it, let’s take a look at the Sierra” — in a sense, his limits to communication have been breached and he throws his hands up in defeat. This is one of many interesting examinations of the movie’s language. Consider later when Carl’s shot in the mouth, a clear assault on his verbal communication skills. And all the while his partner is silent, and those associated with him, like Shep Proudfoot, can only respond in monosyllables. Every character in this movie is given a device in their language. Jerry, who was hurt by his father-in-law’s words (“Gene and Scotty will never have to worry,” he says implying his money is no good for Jerry), communicates in lies, in “bold-face lies” making his language an integral part of his manipulations. Later, when he’s setting up another lie, the Coens allow him to practice his language before making that fateful and deceptive phone call to his father-in-law. Jerry and several other characters are given other forms of communication, too: they beat on iced windows, bang on snowy TV sets and slam the contents of a desk — clearly their mouths can’t express what boils over inside them. 
The Coens use these devices in almost literary ways, and they are backed up by the images on the screen. Notice the bleak high-angle parking lot shot as Jerry walks to his car to bang on his window. It isn’t just a wonderful shot designed to amuse our eyes; it shows us how isolated and alone Jerry has become. Notice the tracks in the snow run opposite those Jerry’s car; it’s as if he were traveling against the film’s flow, grating past his moral limits and interrupting the lives of those around him. Language is important to Fargo not just because it transports us to Fargo and Brainerd, the home of Paul Bunyan, but because it transports us into the cop’s quaint lifestyle, the car salesman’s bitter plight, the kidnapper’s lonely assignment, and the murderer’s nihilistic rage. There has been some dissenting opinion on this with regards to Fargo. For instance, consider the writing of reporter James Lileks, who is actually from Fargo and found the accent of the characters as annoying and superficial as the film’s violence. He writes: “People in Minneesohta do talk that way, ya know. Yes, it’s funny to hear people plot, you know, that murder-type deal there in an accent better suited for swapping hot-dish recipes. I don’t think the accent is inherently funny, but that’s because it’s familiar … The real problem was the audience. I saw Fargo in Minneapolis, a supper-hour showing at the Mall of America. Behind us was a couple in their sixties who apparently had chosen this movie based on the title. Perhaps they expected a western. When characters started cussing, I could hear legs being crossed and uncrossed. When the policeman was brainer’d, there was a slight sigh of disappointment. Half an hour into the film, I heard the woman whisper: ‘Well, this is different.’ … In Fargo-speak, that means this is a raw horror blown straight from Satan’s colon, and any decent person would disapprove. I was embarrassed for them. And for me as well. It was a replay of those trying moments when you rent a videotape to watch with your parents, and suddenly the characters are naked and having sex.”
The other film, The Big Lebowski, follows a similar approach. The movie, an inside-out deviation of the film noir — it asks the question: What if Sam Spade were a loser bowler? — not only created a believable world for its eccentric characters to flourish, but it nourished and enriched a growing cult following that now call The Dude an unlikely saint (St. Duder, maybe). The Coens took what could have been any one of James M. Cain’s pulpy detective stories and flipped it on its head and then blew bong hits in its face. And it did this using language. Deadbeats have been in film noir before: Detour, for instance, had a famous deadbeat, as did The Killers. But never has a deadbeat been given so much meaningless dialogue before in a film noir. Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski is a cursing, existential nobody. He has a rug that “really ties the room together,” calls the bowling alley a home away from home, has spliffs that tumble from his pockets when he leaves change for coffee, consumes glass after glass of White Russians, and oh I can’t forget, his Creedence collection in his heap of a car. But more than anything, he has his mouth, a ranting hole of mindless philosophy, deliberate stupidity and simple brilliance.
The Coens have since said The Dude really exists, but I doubt he was this philosophical or crude with his tongue. In Fargo everyone speaks in turns; in Lebowski the dialogue overlaps three and four times creating tapestries of voices and ideas. While Dude rants Walter rants louder and Donny, who wears bowling shirts with every name but his own (proving his ghost-like status in the film), chimes in with question. Donny’s chatter always produces the same response from Walter: “Shut the fuck up, Donny.” It’s language as a weapon, which happens throughout the film with Walter, who intimidates and hurts with his words. Other performances: the nihilists with their cruddy English and thick German clicks, Big Lebowski’s assistant who uses his swollen Harvard language to promote himself and his employer, Maude and her faux British elitism, and finally Maude’s friend (David Thewlis) who uses giggles to stab at Dude’s eardrums. The dialogue is even self-referential: “Do you speak English,” Big Lebowski says to The Dude; later we’re explained words, that sex is coitus and coitus is sex; not long after we’re told men fear the word “vagina”; and when the stranger (Sam Elliott) makes one of his quick appearances he asks if the dude has to swear so much. Speaking of the stranger, he translates stuff into his own vernacular — “I ain’t never been to France, and I ain’t never seen the queen in her damned undies either …” The Coens are manipulating language for our benefit, otherwise what they would have given us would have been a basic, even boring, mystery. 
The way the Coens write dialogue is important and by looking at how things are said, in what manner, in what speed and in what tone, we can analyze and come to our own conclusions about what they’re trying to tell us. Whether it be Marge Gunderson or The Dude, language can diagnose their agenda, rip through the plot to reveal the methods and tactics of their players, and the language cuts through the genre to reveal truly intelligent and important filmmaking, the kind we talk about — and quote — for years to come.
