Aromatic enough: Tommy Lee Jones in No Country for Old Men
Yesterday, Working Title announced at a press lunch that they had re-established their connection with the Coen brothers, severed after The Big Lebowski, which had seen the producers of Britain's lamest comedies get involved with a string of America's most perfectly honed films: Fargo, The Hudsucker Proxy and Lebowski itself. After the Coens' five-film sojourn in the land of the boutique studio outfit, they are back at WT, who proudly outlined the next Coen project: a spy thriller called Burn After Reading, complete with a hefty cast, including George Clooney, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich and Frances McDormand.
Though we should all be grateful that people like the Coens - relatively unconventional operators, with a foot in both commercial and art-cinema worlds - can still make their films apparently unobstructed, that cast list does produce an ominous sinking feeling. I used to consider the brothers practically bullet-proof: they had forged a hermetic cinematic universe populated by weird, empathetic grotesques speaking highly mannered, textually intricate dialogue, all filmed in a graphic-novel style that wouldn't embarrass Tim Burton.
Looking back, however, their film-making divides into before and after. The pivot is the surprise hit, Fargo. Before Fargo, the Coens were considered an eccentric fringe act, who lost people lots of money but gave the high-end crowd a giggle along the way.
After Fargo, however, Hollywood and the A-list started to pay attention. The Coens swiftly became the inheritors of the Woody Allen mantle: the American mavericks who could make the big-hitters look good. Where Allen had to find room for Demi Moore, Robin Williams, John Cusack and a host of others after the success of Hannah and Her Sisters, the Coens have found themselves involved with George Clooney, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Tom Hanks and now Brad Pitt.
I wouldn't suggest that these last performers are in the Robin Williams league (they don't wreck every movie they're in) but it's certainly true that even as accomplished a performer as Clooney has serious problems wrapping his larynx around the Coens' Preston Sturges-style chitchat.
The Coens profited so well from using actors as weird and fringe as themselves: John Turturro, Steve Buscemi, Dan Hedaya, and John Goodman, none of whom you could mistake for a romantic leading man. It's true that occasionally a good-guy role has gone to a name with some measure of clout: Gabriel Byrne, Jeff Bridges, Tim Robbins. Again, though, you wouldn't describe any of them as white-hot - especially at the point the Coens would have got in touch.
In the post-Fargo period, the best Coen films are the ones where they have avoided the denatured icons of the A-list and gone instead for the flavoursome. Billy-Bob Thornton - arguably the smelliest American actor of all - propped up The Man Who Wasn't There, along with the loutish-looking James Gandolfini. This and The Big Lebowski are, at least in my opinion, the only major Coen brother accomplishments since Fargo. Contrast those with The Ladykillers, by some distance the Coens' poorest effort, which saw them dip a toe in Spielberg territory and put Tom Hanks (a fine comedian in his day) in a Colonel Sanders-ish role that was crying out for a bit of edge.
My theory holds true also with No Country for Old Men which, I am glad to report, is a proper example of that hoary old cliché, a return to form. The biggest name involved is Tommy Lee Jones, an actor who isn't quite as aromatic as Billy Bob Thornton, but runs him close. (It can't be a coincidence that both possess a Texan drawl, something the mannerism-loving Coens definitely have a thing for.) No Country also has that noir-template narrative they like so much: a small mistake that costs the protagonist dear in the long run. Comparisons have already been drawn to Blood Simple and Miller's Crossing; for me, it's more like a feature-length expansion of the cowpoke introduction to The Big Lebowski.
Will Burn After Reading get anywhere near this, let alone the surgical brilliance of my personal favourite, Barton Fink? We'll have to wait and see. But I'm not confident.
