Why beat around the bush? Intolerable Cruelty is stupid.

Silly, maybe that’s a better word–more PC. But the idea’s the same. It’s a comedy that’s only rarely funny and a romance that’s only sometimes charming. About the “game” of marriage and divorce, it deals in caricatures and plot-turns to make its point, when maybe all it really needs to be is quirky and lovable. Look at something like Sleepless in Seattle.

I’ve talked before about a “consciousness” I notice in the Coen’s work, a kind of dishonesty between what it is they’re doing and what they’re showing us that often keeps me from connecting. But I don’t think I ever really nailed my meaning. But Ebert did. I think he got it just right when he wrote:

“Plots like this have fueled lovely screwball comedies, and Intolerable Cruelty is in the genre, but somehow not of it. The Coens sometimes have a way of standing to one side of their work: It’s the puppet and they’re the ventriloquists. The puppet is sincere, but the puppetmaster is wagging his eyebrows at the audience and asking, can you believe this stuff? Joel and Ethan are bounteously gifted filmmakers, but sometimes you just want them to lay off the irony and climb down here with the groundlings. Their Fargo was a movie that loved its characters, and it’s one of the best movies I’ve ever seen.“

I couldn’t agree more. And I couldn’t say it any better. Intolerable Cruelty fails because it’s never completely genuine, always a wacky kind of tongue in cheek, relying on exaggeration for laughs because it doesn’t trust its characters enough to get them without it. It isn’t because of poor acting or crappy writing, but because it mocks its players, turning its story into a kind of emotionless circus. The Coens are better, every time, when they’re on the level, friends with their characters, inside of their story–Fargo, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, The Big Lebowski. Not when they’re on top of it, separated and pulling the strings.

Bottom line: If it’s a romantic comedy you’re looking for, go see (500) Days of Summer. If it’s a Coen movie, you’re better off with…really, any other one.

Next Coen: The Ladykillers

Check out a reading of The Big Lebowski, too! And there’s even a Stars Wars one.

Plain and simple, O Brother, Where Art Thou? is awesome. It’s a smiler, one of those movies that plants a goofy grin on your face and keeps it there without you realizing. The characters are great, the writing’s funny, the mythological undertones are interesting and it’s musical without really being a musical. And maybe that last thing is what really sells me. Most musicals, they’re theatrical and melodramatic. They feel conscious and big–not just a movie, but a *musical*. They don’t feel integrated like this one does, like the creators’ first intention was still to tell a story, not just fill the gaps between dance numbers.

I’m really feeling now that the Coens are onto something. Their last 3 (including Fargo and Lebowski) just seem so much more settled into themselves than most of their earlier stuff. Not necessarily in terms of style–it’s seeming more and more that one of tenets of their style is that it constantly change–but more in the way it feels on the screen, more comfortable, not as staged. And watching O Brother again really cemented that in for me, their dedication to change and experimentation, one film a wacky comedy about baby stealing, the next a ’30s-era mafia story, then an metaphor-steeped Faust-ish one, then a musical. There are similarities, sure, but when it comes to matters of tone or form, what they’ll do next is anybody’s guess. And there’s really something to be said about that. If it’s not the range you respect, you have to respect the stubbornness. These guys are making movies for themselves, putting their art over any desire they might have of securing an “auteur” status or being consistent to any kind of fanbase. And if you ask me, that’s pretty damn admirable.

Next Coen film: The Man Who Wasn’t There

The Big Lebowski
Director: Joel Coen
Released: March 6, 1998
**** 4/5

Tangent: Everybody has one. Maybe they don’t think about it often or keep a physical list, but everyone has a set of actors that fascinate them, a “dream team” who they’d bill together in their perfect ensemble-casted dream movie. But you can’t just pick the obvious ones. You gotta take some chances. So in my own personal opus, starring next to Naomi Watts (a shoe-in) and maybe Steve Carell (who I still say has a “wow” performance somewhere in his future), under a director like PT Anderson or Darren Aronofsky, John Goodman just secured a role with some serious screen time.

Don’t get me wrong. I’d add a bit more edge before I was done, edge like Phillip Seymore Hoffman, Zooey Deschanel, Diane Keaton and, hell, maybe even Carey Grant for his ridiculous amount of cool. But John Goodman–Roseanne John Goodman, live-action adaptation of The Flinstones John Goodman–after watching him tear it up in Barton Fink and then own Lebowski, he just became an automatic. My movie will be the craziest and most brilliant tour de force acting clinic around…

Off Tangent: I like The Big Lebowski. I do. Jeff Bridges is great and Goodman’s better, playing a Vietnam vet caught in a crime web that seems to anger him solely on principle. It made me laugh pretty much from start to finish. So why is it, then, that after all of my like for this, my love for Fargo and 5 of their others scratched off of my list, I feel like I still don’t totally “get” the Coens?

In almost every one of their films so far I always feel the same way, that they’re very subtly trying to do something more than what they’re doing, except I can see a shadow of their process pulling strings in the background, attempting to add those extra layers and levels. And I never end up grasping them all. They just end as excess, almosts, things to keep me off-balance and slightly annoyed.

Take John Turtoro’s character here, for example, Jesus the flashy sex-offending bowler. Sure, he’s funny, but am I supposed to pick up some kind of significance from his character? Why is he here? Is his name supposed to imply something? Then there’s the cowboy narrator who bookends the movie but we only actually see twice. “I hope he makes it to the finals,” he tells the camera in the final scene about the Dude’s bowling team. And I have to wonder, Are the finals some kind of metaphor for happiness or for the lazy, carefree “bums” of the Dude’s generation actually winning this time, winning while “taking a break for the rest of us sinners”? And most of all, why is the narrator some Old West Yo Semite Sam cowboy? If there’s meaning or focus to all of this, I’m not getting it, and that’s a trend I’ve noticed in most of the Coen’s line until now. Nothing ever feels quite as tight as I’d like it to feel.

(But I’ll tell you what: One thing I am sure of is that they’ve got to lose this narrator sum-up device. They did it in The Hudsucker Proxy, too, where the narrator comments on how “This is it,” and something about his tale being “A pretty good one,” as if he were closing out an episode of Mr. Rogers. Note to Joel and Ethan: Don’t tell me that your movie’s good just before the credits roll. Seriously. We’re talking matters of principle here.)

Still, the dialogue’s rock solid and the characters are awesome. And I never want to be that guy who can’t enjoy brainless, wacky comedies because he’s too caught up in “depth” and finding inconsistencies. But there’s the problem: I simply don’t see this as just a brainless, wacky comedy. Or at least I don’t think it’s trying to be. What it is, is fun, a lot of it. And the plot might not actually go anywhere and, once again, the Coens have managed to make me feel a bit stupid, but just watching Goodman wear those ridiculous sunglasses and constantly go off, screaming about injustice or taking out his gun at the bowling alley to uphold the rules of league play–it seriously makes the 118-minute run time worth every second.

*Next in the Coen line: O Brother, Where Art Thou?
*But being that that’s 1 of the 3 of theirs I’d already seen (Fargo, O Brother, No Country), I might just b-line right to The Man Who Wasn’t There.