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[Film culture]

Double obscurity
The Coen brothers were there

BY GERALD PEARY

Many of my fellow journalists when they meet up with the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, come away disappointed, even disillusioned. Considering smart, subversive, playful films like Raising Arizona, Fargo, and The Big Lebowski, we anticipate two happily guys bubbling with fascinating things to say. But their O Brother, Where Art Thou? press conference at Cannes last year was a typical Coens showing, the duo smug and diffident, strangely disconnected from the Q&A. Their frustratingly evasive short-cut answers made it appear they were tired of discussing their movie — and this at the world premiere!

Representing Moving Pictures magazine, Damon Wise challenged the Coens’ stand-offish attitude. The brothers were unrepentant.

Ethan: "You make the movie and journalists have to write about something. . . . There it is. I don’t know."

Joel: "What I think you are referring to is to the fact that we often resist the efforts of . . . people who are interviewing us to enlist us in that process ourselves. And we resist it not because we object to it but simply because it isn’t something that particularly interests us."

So I was braced to get nothing at Cannes when a gathering of American journalists interviewed the leads and, again, the Coens about The Man Who Wasn’t There, their Billy Bob Thornton–starring homage to the hard-boiled "noir" view of novelist James M. Cain.

First we got Thornton, an off-the-screen little guy in a Metallica T-shirt and eager to talk . . . about how he adores his wife, Angelina Jolie. He leaned over the table to show the gathered fourth estate the vial of spouse blood that hangs about his neck. "For our anniversary, she gave me her will," he said proudly. "She got us both burial spots in Arkansas next to my brother, who died in 1988."

What about Thornton’s character in this movie, small-town barber Ed Crane? "It’s this guy and the guy in A Simple Plan who are closest to myself. I feel like ‘the man who wasn’t there.’ I got my wife, my kids, my mom. I’m not interested in things outside the basement and the back yard. I always identify with John Lennon, who loved to stay home.

"I really don’t care about commerciality. God knows if anyone will see this film. But I love these guys, the Coens, and their sense of humor. I agreed to do the film when Joel told me, ‘It’s about a barber who wants to be a dry cleaner.’

"I love all the Bogart movies, and Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity. I think MacMurray is a great actor. For this movie, I didn’t try to look like Bogart. I was thinking more about Frank Sinatra. When you get into that mood, you look like those guys. In real life, we’re not in black-and-white, but somehow that feels more real in this movie, more monochromatic. You can feel people sweating in black-and-white."

Next up was Frances McDormand, wife of director Joel Coen, Oscar winner as the cornflakes Minnesota cop, Marge, in Fargo, and acclaimed as the protective mom in Almost Famous. "Marge was the embodiment of all things an actress is supposed to be," she said, nostalgic for that once-in-a-lifetime part, "and in Almost Famous, I felt voluptuous and free, very alive and jiggly and complex." In marked contrast, she said of femme fatale Doris that "the role was more technical than usual, me caring that my lipstick was right, the hair was perfect. The challenge was mostly the black-and-white. The movie is about Ed Crane, not Doris."

And what about the Coen brothers’ powers of communication? McDormand, who is straight and open, shook her head, bemused. She knows, because the vacuum that journalists feel is also present on the set. Even for her when she’s being directed by her husband. "Sometimes it’s easier getting direction from Ethan. He’s more direct. Since Blood Simple, it’s a huge improvement how they have dialogue with actors. Their not communicating was to the peril of certain performances."

Are they really opening up? McDormand told us that The Man Who Wasn’t There is a more personal project than earlier Coen brothers films.

Finally, the Coens: Joel, taller and with the longer hair, director and writer; Ethan, producer and writer.

A journalist nudged them. "Frances says this film is more personal. How is it personal?"

Ethan: "I don’t think it’s more personal or less personal. There’s nothing autobiographical."

Joel: "It’s set in the 1940s, and that’s not personal. These are stories that take us away from first-hand experience."

The Coens at Cannes spill all! You read it here first.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com

Issue Date: November 1 - 8, 2001