The Coen Brothers return with the thriller No Country for Old Men, starring Javier Bardem as a psycho killer, Tommy Lee Jones as a saintly sheriff, and Josh Brolin as a man on the run. A look back at the Coens' best movie moments.
A shady Texas detective (M. Emmet Walsh), on the trail of an adulterous couple, is smarter than everybody else in the movie but not luckier, as he realizes when his hand gets stuck on a window ledge — with a knife through it (87-minute mark). Who could tell from this debut feature that Joel (born 1954, went to NYU film school) and brother Ethan (1957, Princeton) would become the most distinctive and unpredictable American filmmakers of their time? Everybody who saw it.
Blood Simple has the division of labor that has always applied: Joel writes and directs (with Ethan’s help), Ethan writes and produces (with Joel’s help), and both edit under the joint pseudonym Roderick Jaynes. Carter Burwell provides the plangent score, as he has for all their films. Blood Simple already has the identifiable, satisfying Coen fingerprints: Greedy losers run into the brick wall of fate in this smart update of a James M. Cain thriller. There are visual surprises aplenty; the camera knows exactly where it wants to go, but you don’t. Lending the film a measure of audience identification is the cheating wife played by Frances McDormand. She married Joel the year Blood Simple came out, and has appeared in four more Coen movies.
A lovely image, the proud parents Hi (Nicolas Cage) and his wife Ed (Holly Hunter) with their new baby (21-minute mark). Problem is, the baby is stolen. Hi, an ex-con, and his ex-cop bride have longed for a baby to lavish their love on. But, as Hi’s ornate narration informs us, “biology and the prejudices of others conspired to keep us childless.” So they appropriated one from a rich man, Nathan Arizona (Trey Wilson), whose wife has just given birth to quintuplets. That act leads to no end of trouble with Nathan, a couple of Hi’s old prison buddies (John Goodman and William Forsythe), and a tough bounty hunter (Randall “Tex” Cobb) — a demon road warrior, a warthog from hell who grenades rabbits, torches roadside flowers and has a secret tattoo of Woody Woodpecker on his left pectoral.
One of several kidnapping comedies in the Coen catalog, this is the sunniest of their films, where even the meanies have a sentimental streak. Just before robbing a store, Forsythe buys balloons for Hi’s and Ed’s purloined child. “These blow up into funny shapes?” he asks. “Not unless round is funny,” the clerk replies. In Raising Arizona, round, like everything else, is funny.
