07 · 09 · 26

The Coen brothers' filmography

Rafael Aviña

On the web site of the Morelia International Film Fest, it was announced that the US-American filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen will be honored with the prestigious Lumière Award granted by the eponymous festival—which will take place from October 10 to 18 this year in Lyon, France. From Blood Simple (1983) to The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018), the Coen brothers–we must refer to them as a unit– have created one of the harshest visions of the US-American society by keeping a remarkable autonomy from the formulas and mechanisms imposed by Hollywood.

Their perspective includes social outcasts and the marginalized from a city—like Los Angeles—or a small town lost in the Middle East, for instance: the dirty and vulgar unemployed lost in the seventies and obsessed with bowling; the ambitious criminals who dream of getting rich with a juicy kidnapping; the wannabe gangster and his twisted notions of loyalty; the writer frightened by the blank page; the mediocre car salesman who plans to kidnap his own wife; or the intricate schemes to swindle foolish husbands in an alienated society that craves more sensationalism.

In their films, we can see the following types of characters: a supposed corpse drenched in blood, still gasping its last breaths on a lonely road; a group of thugs dancing grotesquely to the sinister rhythm of a Thompson submachine gun; a brutal giant riding his motorcycle with a kidnapped baby; an insurance salesman with a devilish gift for storytelling who might be hiding a human head inside a box; a suicidal man watched by an immense clock; a hitman who grinds another man in a meat grinder; a puncher who urinates on a filthy carpet, and unleashes a delirious chase; a talkative inmate who, in order to return home, invents the story of a buried bank loot; a barber who wields his razor and scissors without the slightest emocion; a beautiful gold digger who finds her match in a vain and skillful divorce lawyer; a Hollywood producer from the fifties that not only cleans up the studios’ finances, but also their filth–covering up abortions, homosexuality, crimes, alcoholism, and other impurities that tarnish the image of the film capital.

Throughout their filmography, the Coen brothers have created a universe as chaotic, anomalous, and entertaining as a reflection of a decaying society that coexists with sensationalist crimes and everyday frustration. Tension, blood, sex, and other elements of thriller, film noir, and comedy of errors could evoke the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch, and even Frank Capra, especially through their pathetic, grandiloquent, or redeemable innocent characters. It is the cinema of Joel Coen—as director—and Ethan Coen—as producer and co-writer— the manic brothers who astonished audiences and critics with their first and disturbing exercise in style, in the best tradition of B-film noir: Blood Simple (1983). 

Also, we can see go-to actors and actresses such as Frances McDormand —Joel’s wife—, John Turturro, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Sol Polito, M. Emmet Walsh; as well as celebrities like Jeff Bridges, Nicolas Cage, Tim Robbins, Holly Hunter, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Billy Bob Thornton, George Clooney, Juliane Moore o Catherine Z. Jones. Exceptional images by cinematographers like Barry Sonnenfeld and Roger Deakins, together with the anomalous and minimalist chords of their extraordinary composer Carter Burwell, results in a brilliant teamwork where the somber meets luminous, the comic meets the tragic, and blood provokes both hilarity and horror.

In many ways, the Coen brothers have built their filmography upon unexpected encounters: the common man confronted with a situation beyond all logic; a quintessential Hitchcockian theme that the Coens have cultivated by abandoning the refinement of the “master of suspense” in order to delve into the culture of the marginalized and their dirty, sordid environments.

The Coen brothers are the creators of titles such as: Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, The Hudsucker Proxy, Barton Fink, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, O Bother, Where Art Thou?, The Man Who Wasn’t There, Intolerable Cruelty, Burn After Reading, No Country for Old Men, A Serious Man or Hail, Caesar! Individually, they have directed recent titles such as: The Tragedy of Macbeth, the documentary Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind by Joel Coen; and Drive-Away Dolls, and Honey Don’t by Ethan Coen.

Translated by Michelle Olvera