About fifteen years ago I was in a long-distance relationship with a
woman from St. Paul, Minnesota I had met through the Internet. On one of
my visits out to see her, I made the mistake of bringing up “Fargo”, a
Coen brothers movie that I really liked at the time. She let me have it.
“That movie makes us all look like fat and stupid yokels. You don’t know
what it means to be caricatured in a film.”
After hearing her out, I never saw a Coen brother’s movie in the same
light. Her point was driven home when I saw “A Serious Man” in 2009,
another spitball directed at Twin Cities folk, this time the observant
Jews like those who the Coens grew up with. This is a snippet from my
review:
In some ways, “A Serious Man” demonstrates all the flaws of the Coens’
“O Brother, Where Art Thou?”, a reworking of Homer’s Odyssey. Without
the grandeur of Homer’s characters, all you end up with is a kind of
road movie that requires the talent of a Preston Sturges to pull off.
Without a finely honed sense of comedy, the best that Coen brothers can
come up with is characters that they can feel superior to while hoping
that the audience can share the joke. In Preston Sturges’s
Depression-era comedies, you cheer for the characters. Set in the same
historical period, the characters of “O Brother, Where Art Thou” are
involved with what film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum calls pop nihilism.
While I had concerns that “Inside Llewyn Davis” would incorporate the
same kind of patronizing attitudes found to one degree or another in
their entire body of work, I was shocked by the naked display of
misanthropic joylessness that is qualitatively worse than anything they
have done before. This is a dyspeptic hour and forty-five minutes of
cringe-inducing “comedy” that makes you wonder why they bothered. When
you take a period alive with musical innovations that were the first
shoots of a spring thaw after a long McCarthyite winter and turn it into
a desultory and venomous mockery of the period, you have to wonder what
makes these characters tick.
full: http://louisproyect.org/2013/12/06/inside-llewyn-davis/
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