Following up on an earlier post about the Coen Brothers, there is an interesting article by Devid Denby here about their body of work thus far. He is quite critical of a couple of films I really liked (Miller's Crossing and Barton Fink) but I have to say a number of his points hit home, at least about Miller's Crossing. He is very appreciative, on the other hand, of Raising Arizona, Fargo, and The Big Lebowski, the latter two of which he considers to be their finest work. Of The Big Lebowski, he remarks, pleasingly, that "It offers a persistent 'no' to the hard-pressing American 'yes.'"
One revelation (at least to me) is that both brothers supposedly have acknowledged that they have never read the Odyssey, which suggests, that the announcement at the beginning of Oh Brother Where Art Thou that it was based on that particular epic may have been a bit of a canard, much like the "Based on a true story" graphic at the start of Fargo. Although it has been a couple of decades since I read the Odyssey, I did not notice any particularly significant link between the epic and the movie (which I thought quite poor), and wondered at the time if I was just being a bit thick. Perhaps I will from now on ask anyone who remarks knowingly about the Odyssey connection just what it is about travels and travails of poor Odysseus that he or she saw in the movie. . .
One word of warning -- the discussion of No Country for Old Men at the end of the article contains an unfortunate spoiler for anyone who, like me, has yet to see the movie because his wife won't go see it.
5 comments:
Okay, so what's the difference between making a great movie and playing at making a great movie if the finished product is quality entertainment?
Great article. The criticism was a little jarring at first, like the first time I read Revolution In The Head, a book that is openly critical of some of the Beatles' lesser works.
"They can say that?!"
I can, however, relate to some of Denby's criticisms of the Coen Brothers, particularly this one:
"These objects were stuck somewhere between gag and symbol—a symbol without a referent."
I don't want to read it b/c I haven't seen 'No Country' yet.
I kind of thought the Homer reference was more of a joke than anything else. What I got from that movie was that it was trying less to parallel the Odyssey than it was to equate the stuff of Southern folklore (the depression era photos of Lange, the birth of Blues, floods, chain gangs, etc.) to Mythology. As usual with the Coens, I wasn't sure whether they were sending it up or not.
But there are some other subtle references to the poem.
I only saw it once, but I think John Goodman's character is supposed to be the cyclops. Didn't he have a patch or something?
Wiki it and you'll see a lot of the parallels, but I think it's meant in more of an old-fashioned medicine show kind of way, where an ostensibly high-brow performance devolves into peanut gallery mayhem. The action is advanced by a journey, a father returning home, who keeps getting entwined with larger-than-life persons helping or hindering his progress. But the film has much more in common with a Preston Sturges comedy than a classical epic.
That's it! In my queue it goes. Damn you and your observations, Lurker.
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