Tag: Coens

Thanksgiving with the Coens?

Published on by D. G. Hart2 Comments

lone biker of apocThe e-message this week from the nice folks at Christianity Today included a list of the five best movies on thankfulness. According to Annie Young Frisbee (imagine if she had married into the Boomerang clan) the Coen brothers come in at number five with – drum roll – Raising Arizona. She writes:

An ex-con and an ex-cop kidnap one of the Arizona quintuplets in hopes of creating the family they couldn’t have on their own. On the run from the law and a bunch of outlaws, their journey leads them to be grateful for the joys they have always had.

Raising is a great movie but hardly the warm fuzzy that Ms. Frisbee makes it out to be since the Lone Biker of the Apocalypse is an omen of the killer in No Country for Old Men, and the last line, said by H. I. while overlooking a Thanksgiving Day spread, about a fairer future for him and his beloved, mocks Utah. This means that it concludes with a swipe at the support Mormons gave to family values during those years when Reagan – that “sumbich”– was in the Whitehouse. (Frisbee’s take on Raising may confirm Ken Myers’ clever line that “evangelicalism is making the world safe for Mormonism.”)

For that reason, a better Thanksgiving Day pick may be Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters. Yes, it has its dark moments and Woody’s funny but starting to get old complaints about love and death. But it begins and ends with a sumptuous Thanksgiving Day meal, and it is probably Allen’s most uplifting movie – ever.

The choice for the Harts in 2009, though, is Accidental Tourist, a movie based on the novel by Anne Tyler that is set in Baltimore – a plus for all fans of Machen and Mencken – and features an idiosyncratic family and their methods of cooking turkey. Yum, yum.

Have the Coen Brothers Lost Their Edge?

Published on by D. G. Hart9 Comments

tom reaganAn affirmative answer would be one way of reading the recent piece on Joel and Ethan Coen, the makers of such great movies as Miller’s Crossing, Hudsucker Proxy, and No Country for Old Men at Christianity Today. The neo-evangelical habit is to take the rough edges off Christianity in order to make the faith relevant and agreeable to middle America. That also seems to be what happens when the editors at CT turn a kind eye toward former bad boys of Minnesota. I mean, of the many characters available to him, Josh Hurst, the author of the piece, turns to Marge, the family friendly cop from Fargo. Hurst writes:

That’s a good way to describe the brothers’ opus: a chronic search for truth. Some might argue that the Coens’ world is amoral, but a discerning look reveals morality aplenty. Good and evil stand apart from one another as clearly as black and white—or red and white, in the case of their classic crime story, Fargo. Set against the endless snow of the frigid Midwest, it’s a movie about greed, about a perfect crime gone horribly awry—in short, about the wake of destruction left by one man’s evil ambitions, seen starkly as a crimson trail of blood against the pure white terrain.

But then comes the evangelical smiley face:

Fargo’s heart and soul is local sheriff Marge Gunderson, played in an Oscar-winning turn by Frances McDormand. She’s chipper, [did someone say “chipper”?] pleasant, and very pregnant. She’s deeply affectionate and supportive of her husband, Norm. Their tranquil life contrasts the frenzied greed of the bad guys as much as a drop of blood on the snow. . . . Like Marge herself, the Coens have a longstanding curiosity about matters of morality. But hard as they might try, they can’t seem to shrug off the realities of evil as calmly as their most famous heroine.

Another reading of the Coen’s comes more from Tom Reagan, the punching-bag hero of Miller’s Crossing, than Marge Gunderson, the cop who likely pulled the Coens over a couple times during their youthful indiscretions. Tom repeatedly says, after being told to look into his heart, that you can’t know what motivates anyone, not even yourself. That’s actually fairly compatible with what Protestants know about the ambiguity of moral impulses even among the saints. But it is not the same as, “the heart is desperately wicked, who can know it?”

Granted, the Coens did lose some of their mojo when they indulged Hollywood with Intolerable Cruelty and Ladykillers. Both movies appeared to be parodies of Coen brothers movies, what Hollywood would try to do if it were going to make a movie like Joel and Ethan.

But when you take a movie that features a human leg sticking out of a wood chipper and turn it into a study of purpose and rectitude, you may feel, like the teenager who is embarrassed to find that his parents also like The Who, that the church lady is trying overly hard to live on the edge.