Revisiting Coen Country for Odd Men

By BRUCE HEADLAM
Published: August 29, 2008

“SOMETHING just went horribly wrong,” he said.
The sound of hysterical laughter is heard.

That line of dialogue and the stage direction that follows could have plausibly been found in many of the 13 major movies created by the Coen brothers: black comedies like “Blood Simple,” “Barton Fink” or “Fargo” where invariably something does go horribly wrong.

Here, however, the speaker is Joel Coen, and the laughter is provided by Ethan, his younger brother (by three years). They were responding to the question of whether their big night at the Academy Awards last February — four Oscars for “No Country for Old Men,” including best picture — changed the brothers’ outlook on the film industry, or their place in it, or in any way represented an apotheosis of their 24-year career as darlings of art-house cinema.

Apparently not. According to the Coens, who spoke by phone from their hometown, Minneapolis, where they are currently shooting their next movie, the Oscars were barely an interruption.

“It was very amusing to us,” Ethan said.

“Went right into the ‘Life is strange’ file,” Joel said.

The Coens’ “Life is strange” file must be overflowing by now. For more than two decades they have made popular movies — some loved by critics, some loathed — by following a simple formula: Typically, a slightly down-on-his luck protagonist driven by a single motivating belief (“The Dude abides,” “I’m a writer”) gets involved in a low-level criminal plot involving kidnapping or extortion, setting off a chain reaction of complications and reversals. And more often than not, somebody gets shot in the face.

Their steady progress as filmmakers contradicts the prescribed path for independent (or at least independent-minded) directors in Hollywood: Make a few small-budget movies, maybe in a genre like film noir, then climb the Hollywood pay scale until, like Bryan Singer or Christopher Nolan, you’re given the big-budget summer extravaganza.

What keeps filmmakers on this path — other than money — is the ability to make the kind of films they want. The Coens have been able to navigate their way all along, without once setting foot on a “Batman” soundstage.

“We’ve never navigated anything,” Ethan said. “We’ve been lucky.”

It’s not luck, however, that the two have been working in lockstep their whole Hollywood careers.

Sometimes Ethan, 50, is credited as the writer, and sometimes Joel, 53, as director. But in reality both conceive the film, write the screenplay and direct, and edit under the joint pseudonym Roderick Jaynes. You think your family is close? These guys finish each other’s movies.

That may work wonderfully on the set, where actors call them the Two-Headed Director. In an interview, however, the Coens are tough sledding. Like many close brothers they have developed an almost impregnable wall of in-jokes and verbal shorthand broken up by inexplicable fits of laughter, shared references and large inaudible patches when they speak over each other in a race to the next punch line.

Their new movie, “Burn After Reading,” is set in Washington, or rather in the gray area between the old file-and-dagger Washington of Allen Dulles and the creeping suburbs that surround it. Frances McDormand, Joel’s wife, plays Linda Litzke, a literally wide-eyed employee of Hardbodies Fitness gym, whose signature line, “I’m trying to reinvent myself,” underscores her belief that four expensive plastic surgeries will help her meet a better class of man on Internet dating sites.

Through a series of strained coincidences (if plots had their own Hollywood guild, “Burn After Reading” wouldn’t qualify for a union card), Linda receives a computer disk containing a draft of a memoir written by Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich), an angry alcoholic relic of the C.I.A. whose wife (Tilda Swinton) is having an affair with a federal marshal and aging Lothario (George Clooney). Linda decides to trade the memoir for cash, aided by a dimwitted personal trainer played by Brad Pitt, showing again that he’s a great character actor in a leading man’s body.

With its coldly satirical tone, stylized dialogue and broadly drawn characters, “Burn” will feel like familiar territory for longtime fans, a return to Coen Country for Odd Men. Is “Burn” a deliberate return to form, a step away from being Very Important Oscar-Winning Filmmakers? “It was nothing like that,” Ethan said. “To tell you the truth, we started writing down actors we wanted to work with.”

One was Richard Jenkins, who has appeared in three Coen films, starting with “The Man Who Wasn’t There” in 2001.

“They’re incredibly consistent, absolutely the same,” said Mr. Jenkins, who has also worked with Hollywood’s other best-known brother team, Bobby and Peter Farrelly. Those filmmakers have more defined roles, he said, but the Coens are almost interchangeable on the set when working with the actors. “I can’t imagine them not being together making a movie. I can’t think of one without the other.”

The Two-Headed Director is one way to think about the Coens. Another — to borrow a concept from the horror movies they grew up on — is that they share the same brain, one cut crosswise. Ethan, whose first reaction to almost any question is to reject the premise out of hand with “No, that’s not it” or “I don’t remember,” occupies the lower half, and Joel, who tends to pause, then provide a slightly more politic answer, occupies the other.

Together the Coens, like any divided brain, have little capacity for abstraction or intellectualism, and they resist delving into the philosophy or the processes underpinning their films. Analyzing their work, Joel says, “is just not something that interests us.” Profiles of the pair frequently mention that Ethan wrote his senior thesis at Princeton on Wittgenstein — the sort of biographical detail film-studies types love — but, when asked, Ethan said he “can’t honestly remember” what he wrote.

The sons of academics, they were raised in a heavily Jewish section in Minneapolis. But asking the Coens how growing up there affected their movies is like asking J .R. R. Tolkien how much time he spent in Middle-Earth before writing “The Hobbit.”

Their next film, which they’re working on now, is based on their childhood, but beyond that, they give no answers to how their city, its social structure or the dialect they heard as relative outsiders affected their work. “Scandinavian. That about sums it up,” Joel said.

They will cop to this: They watched a lot of television. Now in their mid-50s, they’re part of the last generation of filmmakers with a serendipitous relationship to old Hollywood, before VHS and infomercials, when being a cinephile meant watching whatever was on the late show.

“There wasn’t HBO or movies on demand. There wasn’t a lot of choice,” Joel said, adding that they watched “a lot of Hercules movies” and that they and Mr. Clooney have wanted to do a Hercules movie for years.

“The local affiliate had the entire Joseph E. Levine catalog,” Ethan said. “A lot of horror, but he also owned Fellini’s movies, so occasionally, ‘8 ½’ would be mixed in. All dubbed.”

“Badly dubbed,” Joel agreed. “Marcello sounded like Hugh Grant. Very stuttery.”

In their teens they began to make their own movies on Super 8 millimeter, starting with a short film, “Henry Kissinger, Man on the Go.” “It didn’t have a strong narrative,” Joel said. “It was really based on the fact that Ethan had a striking resemblance to Kissinger,” establishing a Coen brothers theme early: the desperate character looking for some kind of payoff.

After college — Princeton for Ethan, New York University for Joel — they had various jobs film editing before making “Blood Simple” in 1984. Since then they’ve moved with deliberateness of an airport novelist, putting out a film at least once every two years. Even “No Country,” an adaptation, was sold on the basis of their script. “The alchemy was already there on the page,” said Daniel Battsek, the chief executive of Miramax, which co-produced the film. “The only question of whether it would still be there on screen.”

One explanation for their longevity is money — the lack of it. All told, the Coens have spent an estimated $340 million, the cost of a couple of summer blockbusters.

“They control their own destiny,” said Eric Fellner, co-chairman of the British production company Working Title, which has been involved in five Coen brothers films, including “Burn After Reading.” “I’ve talked to them many times about doing something bigger, something smaller, something more commercial. It’s very hard to find anything that interests them.”

Joel said: “To be quite honest our movies have never broken any records in terms of box office. We’ve never operated at that level. We’ve never threatened the bottom line of any company that finances us. So they’re happy to finance us, because the stakes are so low.”

“Even our Hercules movie would not be terribly expensive,” he said. (The sound of laughter is again heard.)

Coen brothers films may be cheap, but they’re not small. Long before “No Country” they built large frames for their films, then filled in their themes of morality, violence and the failure of communication using everyday vernacular, like the gangster slang of “Miller’s Crossing” or the flat Minnesota accents of “Fargo.” With apologies to Ethan’s Princeton thesis adviser, that part is very Wittgenstein.

The opening scenes of “Burn After Reading,” inside C.I.A. headquarters, make it appear that the Coens are flirting with another genre, in this case the paranoid thrillers of the 1970s, like “Three Days of the Condor” or “The Parallax View.” Then the film takes a sharp twist into a gray zone without any apparent moral order — or at least the kind embodied in “No Country” by Carla Jean Moss or in “Fargo” in the final speech given by Marge, the policewoman played by Ms. McDormand.

“No character offers that kind of perspective” in “Burn,” Ethan says. Even Cox’s old superiors at the C.I.A. (played by J. K. Simmons and David Rasche), who the brothers wanted to function “like a Greek chorus,” seem bewildered by events and — like many real C.I.A. agents, one suspects — just close the file rather than dwell on how things could go so wrong.

The Coens are big Hitchcock fans, and “Burn After Reading” has a MacGuffin (the device to move the plot along), in this case Cox’s memoir. What’s striking is that this MacGuffin, unlike the suitcase in “No Country,” is worthless. “Why in God’s name would they think that’s worth anything?” the analyst’s wife says in the film.

Ethan said the choice was deliberate: “We liked that idea. There’s nothing at the center.”

It’s maybe the oddest turn, as if the audience watching “The Maltese Falcon” for the first time knew that the bird was a fake all along. But a final attempt to draw out the Coens about the meaning of “Burn After Reading” ends the interview to the evident relief of both brothers, who suddenly relax and seem ready to talk.

“Hey,” Joel said, his voice brightening, “didn’t Karl Popper go after Wittgenstein with a poker?”