As the Walker Art Center's Coen Brothers retrospective, Joel & Ethan Coen: Raising Cain, finishes this weekend, I'm rushing to record some brief thoughts on the six films from their second decade of filmmaking.
Read: A Conversation with the Coens & a Look at Their First Decade (1984-1994)
(Title screens via the Walker blog.)
Fargo (1996)
I wasn't allowed to like Fargo the first time - as I recounted last year, nobody in Minnesota was. It was funny, sure, but at the expense of the local culture. Not a culture that I really identify with, but nonetheless one that I obviously recognized and one that was extremely offended by the film. Yes, people do talk like that and yes, the winters are that bad. Sometimes even worse. But in addition to an innately lower body temperature and a twisted sense of humor, most Minnesotans also have a keen awareness of when they're being mocked, and they weren't happy about Fargo until...well, until it started winning awards, and until the Coens became recognized as perhaps the best filmmaking duo of their generation. Then everybody looooved Fargo (read more about the local reaction here).
The charming face of international diplomacy...
Every time I go to Washington, D.C., I find myself increasingly noticing the ugliness of the place. Of course the city is not physically ugly (I love the National Mall), or culturally ugly (quite the opposite), but I'm picking up more and more on the undercurrent of a competitive, cutthroat, ugly attitude that exists in the federal government and the think tanks and the agencies inside the Beltway. It's all happening In the Loop, as it were, and based on anecdotes from my D.C.-based friends and the razor-sharp satire in this terrific comedy, I'm frankly glad that I'm operating outside of the loop.
Granted, half of In the Loop takes place in London, but things are no better over there, the only difference being the flavor of expletive used in any given conversation. Directed by British TV veteran Armando Ianucci, In the Loop shows us a side of international relations that's just too bizarre to be fake, because really, given the nasty dynamic of the health care debate at the moment, and the 25-hour news cycle, and the sheer size of the circuitous bureaucracy that is our federal government, there's every reason to believe hijinks like this take place with some frequency. After all, the government is comprised of us - "we the people" - and the ratio of good apples to bad apples is the same on Main Street as it is on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Calling Ianucci's directly style "breezy" would be an understatement. Tornadoes of dialogue whoosh through most scenes, and with the number of accents and the number of voices speaking at the same time (e.g., the elevator scene), you're likely to be scratching your head as much as you are laughing. But I like that, because it rewards paying attention and it means that you're laughing at a different joke than your neighbor, simply because they probably didn't catch the one you did. The few moments that don't feature dialogue are filled in by deadpan comedic acting, with so many scowls and smirks that it would appear it's a competition as to who can do the best impression of Dick Cheney/Karl Rove (the winner is David Rasche). Or in the case of the impossibly sarcastic Chad (Zach Woods), who can do the best impression of Kristen Wiig.
If there's one thing I didn't care for in this otherwise wickedly amusing film, it was the use of handheld cameras and quick zooming during completely static scenes (people sitting in cubicles), which at this point is so prevalent in every movie, commercial, and TV show, that I'm left wondering who will be the first director to just have their actors throw the camera back and forth to each other during scenes of casual conversation. Fortunately, there are no scenes of casual conversation in In the Loop, so for the most part the crazy camera work simply enhances the sense of chaos, or at the very least makes the film resemble a documentary. Which it isn't - I hope.
Fargo (1996)
