Oscar Isaac... with Cat

If Jonesy starts hissing, Oscar, run! He's spotted an acid-blooded alien or at least a Hyperdyne Systems 120-A/2.

Actually Oscar is just hauling around a new co-star (role size to be determined) on the set of Inside Llewyn Davis in which he plays Llewyn Davis, a singer songwriter in 1960s New York. The best part of this news is that this is the latest from the Coen Bros and it's filming already. Inside Llewyn Davis reunites Oscar with his Drive wife Carey Mulligan who is contractually obligated to be in every picture released for the next four years. Other costars include Garret Hedlund, Justin Timberlake (now no longer a musician at all though maybe someone should tell him he's more fun as a pop star than as an actor? SNL hosting aside), Stark Sands, F Murray Abraham and Coen Bros mainstay John Goodman.

You only have to wait until 2013 to see it.

Curio: Barton Fink, Portraits of the Artist

Alexa here. Michael's post on Barton Fink at 20, in conjunction with the recent Lebowski cast reunion, got me thinking about the effect of the cult status of each on movie-inspired art.  You can't browse tumblr without seeing a new Lebowski poster each week, but where is the Barton love from indie designers?  It seems ripe for visual interpretation, what with its stark visuals and, well, emphasis on wallpaper (something every graphic designer finds irresistible).  But maybe, as Michael noted, it's almost too elemental and abstract to cause a glut of fan creations à la Lebowski (with its marmot and toe and other what-have-yous). But I did a bit of digging and yes, the Barton love is out there. Here are some creations I particularly liked.

 

A limited edition poster with lovely detail by Brian Methe.

Poster by Kevin Dixon.Click for more, including Barton on wood...

Click to read more ...

That Barton Fink Feeling Turns 20

Michael checking in.

My first introduction to the brothers Coen was viewing Fargo on VHS at age 16 and nothing since that memorable night has been able to dislodge it as my favorite of their films, although a college-aged love affair with Milller’s Crossing came closest. But even as Marge and Jerry have remained secure on their pedestal, I have returned to none of the Coen brothers films more often than 1991's Barton Fink. Not even the compulsively rewatchable Big Lebowski has kept me coming back more consistently.

So as Barton Fink turns twenty years old (tomorrow), I wonder what it is about the Coen's Cannes-winning, surreal, showbiz fever dream keeps me so fascinated?

I certainly don’t return compulsively to solve mysteries of the story, that’s for sure. The Coens may plot their stories with a Swiss watch precision that suggests all the answers are there if you look hard enough, but the ambiguity the brothers place in their movies is deliberate, and not meant to be puzzled out to a solution. The Coens often feature unanswerable questions prominently in their stories. What did, after all, happen in the hotel room in No Country for Old Men where Javier Bardem seemed to vanish into thin air? What motivated Gabriel Byrne’s character in Miller’s Crossing? What was the meaning of the prologue in Serious Man? Or the epilogue in True Grit?

Written, the brothers say, as they struggled to untangle the plot of Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink is the story of a lefty playwright in the early forties who has one hit on Broadway and promptly goes to Hollywood to sell out only to find himself facing an epic case of writer’s block. Taken simply Fink would earn a place in the canon as one of the most wicked Hollywood satires ever put to film. But, as most everybody knows, Barton Fink cannot be taken simply. At the three quarters mark Fink takes one of the all time most jawdropping plunges into surreality, and audiences to this day are still trying to make sense of it all, from the contents of Barton's mystery box to the beach painting on his wall.

Barton Fink theories are numerous and fun and I could fill a book debating them all. The most obvious of course is that Barton is in Hell. The clues for supporting this range from obvious like the omnipresent heat to subtle like the repetition of the number six in the elevator. Once you start looking for clues you can find them everywhere. On my most recent viewing I just picked up on the suggestive names of wrestling pictures  - “Hell Ten Feet Squared” and “Devil on a Canvas”.

Do you see what happens Larry?"

Then there are the theories about Barton Fink being about the rise of fascism represented by Charlie Meadows with Barton as the intellectual too feeble to notice or stop it. The most glaring red flag in the movie is Goodman’s pronouncement of “Heil Hitler” before he kills one of the detectives which is certainly no accident. But if Goodman represents evil why does he kill the detectives who, with their noticeably German and Italian names, clearly represent the Axis powers? I for one have always read his delivery of "Heil Hitler" as sarcasm before killing the anti-semitic detective, but what does it matter? We should take a cue from the character in Serious Man and “embrace the mystery” or it will lead you in circles like walking an MC Escher staircase.

Once you give up trying to solve what needn’t be solved you can settle in and get the full Barton Fink experience. The film is genuinely hilarious and every word out of Michael Lerner’s mouth as the vulgar studio boss is solid gold. Fink also contains what I consider to be John Goodman’s all time best performance (I know that is saying a lot). Lerner got the nominatio but Goodman would have been my choice to win the trophy that year. And speaking of Oscars, when everyone was bemoaning that Roger Deakins lost an absurd ninth time this year for the cinematography of True Grit they might just as well added that it should have been his tenth, because he was royally screwed out of nod for Fink.

Or maybe you can just forget all that and just groove on all the endless supply of haunting, weird touches the Coens place in every scene of Fink, my favorite being the endlessly humming bell that Barton rings to summon Buscemi’s Chet from the Underworld. There is also the strange dying bird at the film’s end, which is supposedly  just a moment of happenstance caught on film, or the bizarre fact that it is clearly John Turtorro’s voice as one of the actors in the play that opens the film. What are we to make of that?

Slate magazine recently did a retrospective of the Coen’s body of work complete with a poll ranking the films. I was chagrinned but not surprised to see Barton Fink languishing in the lower half of the poll. This is always the way with the connoisseur’s choice. Barton Fink is the Coen’s in their purest most undiluted form, and film’s like that never win the popularity contest. They do however win the test of time as they draw audiences back over and over again to explore their depths.  

True Grit's Masculine Ideal

I thought this was noteworthy. It's an argument from Anita Sarkeesian that Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) in True Grit is not a feminist character. I admire Anita's sand, to borrow a phrase from the film in question.

The points are pretty well made (though I'm not sure the existence of character arcs has much to do with masculine or feminine anything) and it's true that pop stories often labelled as 'girlpower' are really just drag exercizes. Though some, like Kill Bill which is visually referenced (negatively), do have relatively complicating issues involving the femaleness of their protagonists which I don't think she's giving enough credit to.

Still it's an interesting conversation to have and interesting even within the confines of the Coen Bros filmography. By Anita Sarkeesian's standards Fargo's Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand), for example, is just about as feminist a creation as the movies have ever dreamed up... and that's even excluding her ginormous pregnancy. She never adopts "male" values so much as just making her way through a hostile violent world by her personal truths and unique cooperative funny relatively peaceful spirit.

She really is one of the best movie characters of all time. We love Marge, you betcha.

Distant Relatives: Jaws and True Grit

Robert here, with my series Distant Relatives, where we look at two films, (one classic, one modern) related through theme and ask what their similarities/differences can tell us about the evolution of cinema. Please note that hereafter be SPOILERS AHEAD.

Three characters in search of a killer

If there’s one notable difference between the original 1969 True Grit and the Coens’ version, it’s the sense of nihilism and meaninglessness in the world the Coens create. Of course the Coens have long been the kings of nihilistic worlds, and it says something that True Grit provides one of their most meaning filled realities. Still when all is done, in the Coen version, we’re left wondering what it was all worth. The John Wayne version, which suffers in no small part from being surrounded by a sea of bleak late 60’s cinematic masterpieces, feels more like a tale of good guys an bad guys. And while the Coen version has good guys and bad guys it feels more like a tale of how reality itself, the natural world is out to get us all.
 
But we’re not here to compare two versions of the same story, we’re here to compare distant relatives. Which brings us to a film where the natural world is quite literally out to get us, in the form of Steven Spielberg’s antagonizing great white shark (nicknamed Bruce) as it terrorizes the citizens of Amity island. Jaws and True Grit present us with all kinds of similarities in terms of structure, character and the eternal theme of mankind’s struggle against the natural world.

Both are revenge films, though there’s something that doesn’t seem quite right about that. They’re not in the same company as Mad Max or Kill Bill because the singular intense insanity of the vengeance-seeker is not the most integral element of the story here. In fact, there isn’t a sole vengeance seeker. In both cases there are three individuals who serve different purposes and convey a wide scope of what could posses a person to go out hunting for “justice.”

Rub a dub dub
 
We can start with the characters who get to be the audience's surrogate. Jaws’ Chief Brody (Roy Schieder) and True Grit's Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) have to present some sort of righteous motive for us to get behind. Mattie’s detached desire to avenge her father and Brody’s obssessive quest to kill a shark don’t exactly invite us to cozy up. But it’s the amorality of others around them that throw new  empathetic light on their pursuits. Those who have the power to bring about justice and prevent future bloodshed have no interest in doing so. So we have to get behind Mattie and Brody. Theirs may not be the best way, but it’s the only way.
 
When we discussed Midnight Cowboy and The Fighter, we talked about the relationships between cinematic duos and how the straight man/comic relief model has had lasting influence. We find in these two films that our teams of three follow a similar mold. The hero is our center, the most rational of the characters, the one whose desires we are most likely to understand. He or she is flanked on one side by a man with more “noble” motives like science or avenging the death of a Texas Ranger. This man is snarky, sarcastic, rather full of himself and his noble goals, though underneath harbors a somewhat more base motivation, money or pure adrenaline. We may call him our uber-hero since in his own mind he’s far more worthy of his cause than anyone else. On the other flank of our hero is our anti-hero, a man with an obsession, usually courtesy a past trauma. Anti-authority, often drunk and wild, he is not hindered by the morality of the other two men. By standard anti-hero rules, he has none. He cares not for the means only the ends. Perhaps it’s going too far to suggest an id, ego, superego connection. But there it is. Quint, Brody, Hooper. Rooster, Mattie, LaBoeuf. Anti-hero, hero, uber-hero.

Into the woods

Both films follow a similar structure too. The first kill, the inciting kill, happens as a prologue, before the main title even appears. Then an act’s worth of gathering evidence, momentum, and a posse and it’s off into the water or wilderness. Here, the randomness of nature is the enemy. And while it might seem odd to compare the instincts of a predatory animal to the free will of a man, consider Tom Chaney when we see him. He is practically an animal; gruff, dim-witted, hairy, smelly and quite frankly, a disappointment. If Bruce the Shark, by lack of a frontal cortex is no Tom Chaney, then Tom Chaney by lack of chutzpah and screen presence is certainly no Bruce the Shark.
 
In both cases, we’re left with the uncertainty of a happy ending. In terms of the prevention of future attacks, the sparing of future victims, indeed both missions are a success. But what of it? Jaws is a happy ending with a question mark, one where our rejoicing is tarnished by remembering what was lost, who was killed. True Grit is a happy ending with ellipses, one that gives us justice served and then follows it with the pointless onward march of time, lives suddenly devoid of a vengeful goal falling into parody or banality.

So, is there a reason why in thirty five years, happiness’s cold side dish has changed from sacrifice to uncertainty? We can consider the films’ directors. For Steven Spielberg, child of World War II, the long sad road to the other side of the rainbow is a constant recurrence in his films. Jaws, made in the waning days of Vietnam asks of the quest for justice “what is the sacrifice?” The Coens, prophets of pointlessness and futility, coming of age in the cold war, coming to prominence during the war on terror, make a film about the quest for justice and ask “what is the point?”