Much like Intolerable Cruelty before it, the Coens' latest film relies on presupposition: inasmuch as the former capitalized on its audience's cynicism about marriage to communicate its satire, this remake of Alexander Mackendrick's 1955 comedy/crime caper assumes of its audience a working knowledge of genre tropes-particularly with noir-to orient themselves temporally before it zooms off into left field with an oblique meditation on spirituality/small-town entrapment/genre films that is as methodical and dark as anything the Coens have done.
On first brush, the story is deceptively slight: an elderly church-going widow living in a mansion presided over by a portrait of the erstwhile patriarch is visited by an ingratiating figure looking for a room to let (Tom Hanks, who seems like he's shooting for the down-home erudition of Mark Twain and the preternatural look and appeal of Count Dracula). Like in Stanley Kubrick's The Killing, we are introduced to his would-be cronies, in a series of amusing situations that provides a glimpse of each character's personality and quirks. They begin drilling a hole in the cellar wall that will tunnel them directly into the riverboat's safe; along the inevitable way, they have some close-calls with the matriarch. They blow through the safe wall, the old woman discovers their plan, so they must kill her.
Predictably, greed and fear prove divisive and the crooks begin dropping like flies-but decidedly unpredictably, the little old lady seems enveloped by a godly force that thwarts their best-laid and seemingly ineluctable plans. Example: A killer looms with piano wire over her sleeping figure. Mere inches from her neck, a Jesus figurine leaps from a clock, causing him to swallow his cigarette, choke on her dentures in a beside water glass and fall headlong down the stairs when Pickles the cat darts before his legs. I'm positive many critics will jump all over this scenario and others subsequently like it by citing it as part and parcel of the filmmakers' obsession with murderdeathkill (I wouldn't argue that they often highlight scenes of death as punch-lines illustrating the futility of their characters, a peculiar trait of auto-assassination and self-critique that seems enlisted for entertainment's sake)--and it is that, but to think the film's implications can and should be swallowed there is a mistake; the situation depends entirely too much on serendipity.
As the bodies pile up, they are dropped from a bridge into a passing repository ship that moves languidly between the town and a trash-heap situated, ironically, on an idyllic island. The Coens' and cinematographer Roger Deakins are deliberately obscure in their depiction of the town--the downtown is a series of ramshackle shops with no signs of life, the police station is framed in medium close-up, a rectangle of bricks seemingly isolated, and the church sits atop a hill, an unspectacular white building--and signify it in a handful of archetypal shots, which signify entropy, a town without an identity, without spatial or temporal referent.
The criminals die in increasingly unusual and unbelievable ways--Hanks, for his part, dies in a romantic triumph, concurrently the sole living proprietor of the stolen booty and reciting to himself a line of Poe. Looking up, he sees a raven situated atop a gargoyle, and we see the foundation is crumbling. As he continues the recitation, the statue falls and knocks him headlong into the boat, cruising to the rhythm and exact timing of his death; trash in, trash out. Crime doesn't pay, right? By following this time-honored platitude in as subversive and postmodern a way as possible, the Coens' deus ex machina is one completely informed by and keeping in strict compliance with genre code--they may have cheated to get there, but the Coens have made a true anomaly: an intellectually lazy and meta-textually provocative portraiture of life as a poor, confined genre piece. The inanimate genre as empathic character.
On first brush, the story is deceptively slight: an elderly church-going widow living in a mansion presided over by a portrait of the erstwhile patriarch is visited by an ingratiating figure looking for a room to let (Tom Hanks, who seems like he's shooting for the down-home erudition of Mark Twain and the preternatural look and appeal of Count Dracula). Like in Stanley Kubrick's The Killing, we are introduced to his would-be cronies, in a series of amusing situations that provides a glimpse of each character's personality and quirks. They begin drilling a hole in the cellar wall that will tunnel them directly into the riverboat's safe; along the inevitable way, they have some close-calls with the matriarch. They blow through the safe wall, the old woman discovers their plan, so they must kill her.
Predictably, greed and fear prove divisive and the crooks begin dropping like flies-but decidedly unpredictably, the little old lady seems enveloped by a godly force that thwarts their best-laid and seemingly ineluctable plans. Example: A killer looms with piano wire over her sleeping figure. Mere inches from her neck, a Jesus figurine leaps from a clock, causing him to swallow his cigarette, choke on her dentures in a beside water glass and fall headlong down the stairs when Pickles the cat darts before his legs. I'm positive many critics will jump all over this scenario and others subsequently like it by citing it as part and parcel of the filmmakers' obsession with murderdeathkill (I wouldn't argue that they often highlight scenes of death as punch-lines illustrating the futility of their characters, a peculiar trait of auto-assassination and self-critique that seems enlisted for entertainment's sake)--and it is that, but to think the film's implications can and should be swallowed there is a mistake; the situation depends entirely too much on serendipity.
As the bodies pile up, they are dropped from a bridge into a passing repository ship that moves languidly between the town and a trash-heap situated, ironically, on an idyllic island. The Coens' and cinematographer Roger Deakins are deliberately obscure in their depiction of the town--the downtown is a series of ramshackle shops with no signs of life, the police station is framed in medium close-up, a rectangle of bricks seemingly isolated, and the church sits atop a hill, an unspectacular white building--and signify it in a handful of archetypal shots, which signify entropy, a town without an identity, without spatial or temporal referent.
The criminals die in increasingly unusual and unbelievable ways--Hanks, for his part, dies in a romantic triumph, concurrently the sole living proprietor of the stolen booty and reciting to himself a line of Poe. Looking up, he sees a raven situated atop a gargoyle, and we see the foundation is crumbling. As he continues the recitation, the statue falls and knocks him headlong into the boat, cruising to the rhythm and exact timing of his death; trash in, trash out. Crime doesn't pay, right? By following this time-honored platitude in as subversive and postmodern a way as possible, the Coens' deus ex machina is one completely informed by and keeping in strict compliance with genre code--they may have cheated to get there, but the Coens have made a true anomaly: an intellectually lazy and meta-textually provocative portraiture of life as a poor, confined genre piece. The inanimate genre as empathic character.