I have a confession to make. It's not going to be easy to hear. Hell, it's not very easy to say. But it's the truth and I need to come clean about it. Here goes. I'm scared...
I, Elie Berkowitz, hate the Coen Brothers' movies.
Okay, hear me out. I should like them. I like them in theory. I want to like them. I just... don't. Everything about their style of film-making appeals to me (reusing the same cast of actors, incredibly realistic dialogue and speech patterns, sometimes excessive use of bad language, Steve Buscemi, etc) and I don't understand it myself but I just can't get on board with their stuff. In a way I think it's very Mametian who is one of my absolute favorite playwrights of all time. They even have William H. Macy in common. I like everything Bill Macy has ever done (except for Wild Hogs, which I like to pretend never happened...) and I actually liked him in this quite a bit. I even understand why Frances McDormand won an Oscar for the movie! So why did I hate it so much? Here's how I think it breaks down:
1. The plot is both too cluttered and mind-numbingly, crawling-at-a-snail's-pace, Dear-God-please-let-something-happen-soon slow. It takes a real talent to do both at the same time. The intial storyline involves William H. Macy hiring Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare to fake-kidnap his wife. Comedy! He needs the ransom money and he's sure her wealthy father will pay up. Unfortunately for everyone, they're all bumbling idiots and everyone is too dumb to pull this off. That's where it all derails. There are (spoiler alert:) other murders that seem to have nothing to do with anything, suspects to interview who seem to have no bearing on anything, and lots and lots of shots of snow and signage and cabins and Winter that put me right to sleep.
2. The dialogue is excellent. I love writing (both for stage and screen) that sounds very realistic and deceptively easy to pull off. [Sidenote: Going back to Mamet, it sounds very, very wrong if you don't speak it with the correct pauses on the correct syllables at the correct times in the correct ways. That shit is not easy to pull off. Lucky for me, it's my favorite type of dialogue and I work very hard to make all writing sound like that when I speak on stage. I think it's more fun, more rewarding and more of a challenge as an actor.]
3. Note that I used the word "dialogue" above and not writing. How this won an Oscar for Best Screenplay is beyond me.
4. Frances McDormand is the greatest person of all time. For the right now anyway. She is truly a study in accent-work. Also acting pregnant. Awesome.
5. The ending. Oy. I think we've all heard about the infamous "wood chopper scene" about which I won't go into more detail here. Except to mention that it is the ending. No, seriously, the ending. The last thing we see on screen. Hello? Did the ideas just stop coming? Did production costs get too high? Finally got too cold on location to keep shooting? Baffling.
6. I've felt this way about other movies of theirs. I fell asleep during O, Brother, Where Art Thou? all three times I tried to watch it and I'm apparently the only person on Earth who thought No Country For Old Men was the worst movie of last year. Anyone with suggestions for better movies to start with, please let me know.
It was a rough night of movie-watching and it left me wanting much, much more. Like, you know, a beginning, middle or end. But I did walk around speaking in that accent for the next week. And that's always fun, ya?
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