[The first couple or so subsections are a long stretch of what might be considered academic shuffling around. To get to the detail-oriented meat of this entry, you might go to the subsections dealing with Burn After Reading and A Serious Man, or start with "Aspects of the legal world in their movies."
This review ended up rather like a Coens movie—intellectually pretty clear, but dense, and a sort of sachet of neat ideas that comprise a product that’s an acquired taste.
Many might say that a Coens movie is something you have to be alert to enjoy and to be in the mood for. This may be why one of their most popular movies, and the one that seems to appeal most to young viewers, is The Big Lebowski (1998), which always struck me as on the insubstantial side, if amusing. Of course, the big draw there is the character played by Jeff Bridges, “the Dude,” diligent references to which stirred up recently when Bridges appeared in the last Coens movie, the remake of True Grit.
“The Dude” is rather like “comfort food” that a wide array of people who are (temporarily) not thinking too hard can relate to—e.g., the young, the depressed, and those of somewhat diminished mental status: he’s like chocolate or coffee for these folks. Meanwhile, Coens movies that are more about the peculiarities of adult life, like Intolerable Cruelty or A Serious Man, might strike the chocolate lovers as “yuck! Scotch or Listerine! I don’t want it!”
A little disclosure—my general view of lawyers
If you considered me as a juror in a case depending on a good view of lawyers, you would need to question me for biases.
As a personal matter, when I’m less formal and more “jazzy,” I dislike lawyers.
[The rest of this subsection was redacted, for the sake of space.]
Introduction—Coens versus Kubrick, etc.
Of all the “auteur”-type film directors I might take a close look at, the Coens are rather unique. The set of directors from the baby boomer generation, which rather defined the modern idea of the auteur director, have had books written about them, a number of which I’ve read part or all of. I read books on Francis Ford Coppola and Stanley Kubrick (the latter not a baby boomer director, but about two decades older). Meanwhile, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, to me, have managed to make themselves familiar by appearing in commentary so often, either on their own works or on others’, that you feel you don’t quite need to read a book about them.
So these baby boomer directors seem to have been made familiar not only by their own works but by study from others or in a sort of “curator” role they’ve had, and by and large they are less subject to a sort of “cult” treatment by fans.
The Coens are different in a number of ways. They are younger than these directors—they are in their fifties now. They only started releasing notable works in the 1980s (Blood Simple—which I never saw—was in 1984, and Raising Arizona, their first big hit, was in 1987). I myself never happened to read much about them aside from what appertained to their individual works (information may have been revealed in movie reviews, or in DVD commentary). As artists they didn’t seem accorded the respect as to warrant a book, but maybe I’m not aware of such books if they exist. They also seem young enough as not to warrant book treatment yet. [Update 2/17/15: There is at least one book on them; you can find it/them on Google.]
More to the point, their work is offbeat enough, and they seem enough reserved in a curious way when you see them in their DVD interviews—which they assiduously include with every DVD release I’ve seen—that there’s something rather hermetic (not hermit-like) about them. Perhaps most to the point, when I look over the Wikipedia articles written on their movies—Wikipedia articles often seem to be written by young people, twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings, with all the advantages and disadvantages that carries—I’m impressed that they have a sort of cult status, especially among younger viewers, which would seem to entail a sense of “ownership” these younger fans feel toward them, which may perhaps, in turn, may mean there is an intransigence in certain views about them.
People may entertain a range of opinions about Coppola or Spielberg, and it doesn’t seem as if you ought to watch your neck lest someone really get out the long knife for your view; but because the Coens still seem to be a “major going concern,” as artists still flourishing, with a pulse on a younger audience’s views, it seems I have to define very carefully what I mean in the opinions I present about them. It’s as if there’s a certain dangerously political aspect to this.
Generally, when I discuss movies in this blog, I’m not terribly interested in such back-room or outside-the-office stuff as how many years something was in development, or who had sex with whom, or where the different gobs of financing came from, unless this has some apparent significant effect on the work interpreted as art. In short, I look at these movies as the finished product, at how well as a story and piece of craftwork a movie serves its purpose and has its significance; and then if there’s some backstory that is relevant, I may mention it. It strikes me that the Coens inspire their Wikipedia-article writers to dig up a lot of backstory in a way that I don’t see done (in general) with the baby boomer directors, nor do I feel it is very important. But maybe this means I don’t see some level of importance and throbbing relevance—“divine fires burning that can mean spiritual implications for me and thee”—in the Coens that these younger article-writers do.
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Here’s a specific example of what I’m talking about. When I tossed off a comment about the Coens being heirs to a certain cinematic approach to Stanley Kubrick (when I mentioned True Grit some blog entries back), and tied this in with both the Coens and Kubrick being Jewish, I thought this was a relatively uncontroversial point to make; but when I look at the Wikipedia articles later (to see what cultural waters I dare to bumble into), it seems I ought to make my assumptions clear.
The Jewish aspect I would think would be relatively trivial, and not a point of contention. I think where it has relevance to both the Coens and Kubrick is in a certain irony, or cool distance (but not necessarily coldness or contempt), that they would bring to their depiction of aspects of American life. (I should note that the Jewish aspect of Kubrick as influencing his work—I’ve been familiar with his films since at least the 1970s—was not something I thought about much, until it was mentioned in some writings in the 1990s or so.) In the Coens’ case, I wouldn’t have considered it a terribly conspicuous aspect either, even if you consider their recent movie A Serious Man (2009).
The way in which I think the Coens are heirs to Kubrick in some sense (though that’s hardly the only way to look at them) is as follows. They both are concerned with craft and directorial control of their material. They both focus on detail as key conveyors of their story. (It’s interesting that, as is noted in Wikipedia articles, the Coens include sly references to Kubrick movies in their own films as far back as Raising Arizona, and include some sound effects from Kubrick movies, such as from 2001, in the soundtracks of some of their own movies, e.g., Intolerable Cruelty and Burn After Reading.)
Now let’s look at the differences. In general, the Coens include a lot more comedy in their work than did Kubrick in his—even in films that overall are not obviously or primarily or broadly comic, like Fargo. In terms of the general genre approach of their films, Kubrick could be called an existentialist—looking at how man makes meaning when pressed to make personal decisions (he didn’t use the term existentialist to describe himself, but in an interview from about 1971, he suggested that this “making meaning” idea was an important part of the life view—however he termed this dimension—espoused in his work). Also, his films could be considered to conform with the American literary tradition of realism, that from about 1870-1910, in works in which things were depicted with as much photographic fidelity as possible—or, to put it in esthetic terms, with mimesis as a key strategy.
By comparison, the Coens—if we use the 1870-1910 literary period as a measure—seem to embody the schools of naturalism and satire (the former associated with Stephen Crane and Frank Norris, the latter associated with Mark Twain). Naturalism, especially, looked at man as a plaything of forces beyond his control; actual dramatizations in line with this school of thought could look like satire or farce, which of course the Coens employ not infrequently. Some might say the Coens don’t have a lot of respect for their characters, but I think the matter can be viewed this way: respect of characters or not, they are espousing an idea that man—outside their art—can be pretty silly sometimes, whether in shenanigans tied to crimes, to infidelity, or to something else.
Interestingly, despite these differences between Kubrick and the Coens in terms of the lens through which they viewed man—realist/existentialist for one and naturalist/satire for the others—they both have taken care to render some facts about our environment and life with unusual high fidelity, not only in the cinematography (as with Roger Deakins for the Coens, and John Alcott for Kubrick) but in focusing on details (especially with the Coens). This is such that sometimes, even when the Coens in a given film are more broadly concerned to express some satirical intent, their depiction of a character’s actions or a set of minor events seems to be coolly interested in nothing so much as showing the minutiae, fascinating when well portrayed, of our life in this country today—such as with a legal process. So, for instance, a Coens film can be satirizing a set of people in their entanglements, yet you could learn some real-life aspects of a legal process, or some general nature of legal business, from how they depict it.
This “clinical” approach to portraying some of the “furniture” of our lives is one way I see commonality between the Coens and Kubrick. Another way concerns the point that some may make—are the Coens heirs to Woody Allen’s tradition? I would say not really, because Woody Allen—even when his work is at his best—has a strong characteristic of being built on one-liners (which can be wise and not necessarily shtick-y), while the Coens are more about a depiction of Gestalts of what characterizes our life in this country. For the Coens, words are of course important—some of the characters’ dialogue seems as if it would entertain more if read off the page than in how it’s spoken by an actor—but the most obvious value of their movies comes from a combination of crafted image, reference to a certain genre of movie-making, certain constellations of “how things go in American life” (crime happens, the law gets involved, complications ensue), and even non-verbal quirks of individuals the Coens delight in portraying on-screen.
Now I hope I’ve outlined enough of where I’m coming from with the Coens—which still leaves room for their more ardent fans to hold to their own views—that I can move to a more succinct look at what makes them unique, which in turn shapes my argument about how they address the topic of practicing lawyers in their work.
General qualities of the Coens’ work
I want to sketch limitations to my awareness of the Coens’ work. I have seen (at least once) every one of their films from Fargo
Three movies of theirs I have not seen now comprise a sort of transition between (1) their earlier, arguably more visually flashy and genre-bound films and (2) their more straightforward, modern-life-reflecting films: Miller’s Crossing (1990), Barton Fink (1991), and The Hudsucker Proxy (1994). If I saw these three, maybe I would alter my views of the Coens a bit; but I think it’s fair to say that they became more oriented to a general audience’s expectations, more realistic in a sense, with Fargo
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Typical features of their movies revolve around their technical brilliance and the fact that they play on genre features to a large extent. In this latter regard, they adopt a certain genre approach—both in a given film’s story style and in a more general attitude—that both (1) they embrace for a certain structure and (2) comment on or creatively adapt, satirically or otherwise. For instance, several of their earlier movies seemed to play off a noir sensibility (or a 1940s movie style): Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, The Hudsucker Proxy. But then, as their movies became increasingly less “fetishistic” in following a certain genre esthetic and more adapted to mainstream aims, the blending of genre and some other approach became more unusual.
For instance, Fargo is a crime movie, yet weaves in a somewhat whimsical, rather satirical look at Minnesota-area manners (with the Scandinavian-inflected speech styles that, unknown at the time, foreshadowed those of Sarah Palin’s speaking mannerisms that are derived from the upper Midwest, from which her community in Alaska
Along with this, the Coens, who edit their own films (and started in movies being primarily film editors), give their films a flavor that seems heavily influenced by editing: strong economy in how transitions and takes are handled (which of course follows the precision they dictate in the writing of their scripts and on-the-set direction to their actors), which means a lot of precision in how mannerisms are delivered and things are said (often per their consciously literary scripts), well-crafted and –timed reaction shots, and so on.
This methodology may make them seem to fans as delightfully focused and craftsmanly, while to others it may make their movies seem tendentious in making points, artificial, too arch in overall attitude, too often “cartoonishly satirical,” and so on. (A somewhat similar criticism could have been made about some of Stanley Kubrick’s work, which was wrought with some significantly different methods from the Coens’, particularly his not being as micromanaging of particular expressions of his actors as the Coens apparently can be—part of which is reflected in Kubrick’s having used long takes for some scenes much more than the Coens do.)
Whether you like this or not, this directorial method does allow the Coens to portray manners and certain types of activities in a very photographic style—for instance, when an actor is playing a learned professional straight, this can be delightful as “a representation of how things can be,” even if it isn’t done as satire.
Also, their economy can mean more of significance is included in a scene than it would seem at first viewing. Sometimes the value of a scene is in its being a neat vignette capturing some quirky style of manners, or peccadilloes, more than in its revealing a lot of attenuated drama. This is true, for instance, in a lot of Burn After Reading, which remains entertaining after several viewings, for its pillorying of the mores of some middle-aged Americans.
Another aspect of the Coens’ work, which is actually not closely relevant to my lawyers theme here, is that they include snatches of Americana
Another feature of their films could be called the “porn thread”—an aspect (like sex, foul language, and violence) that seems an inevitable ingredient of films for it to be (in the executives’ eyes) suitable for marketing to a mass audience. Their own “porn thread” is usually an instance or set of instances of extreme violence, which turns up in a lot of their movies, almost like a weird fetish. In a way, the oddness of given instances of it (consider the body parts’ being fed into the wood chipper in Fargo
It’s to be noted that as different as they are, all their films since Fargo have made more than they cost to make (sometimes a lot more), except for The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001), which is odd for being a mainly genre piece (echoing James M. Cain), and a sort of empty technical exercise. Meanwhile, all their 1990-94 films did not make more than they cost to make (as suggested in their respective Wikipedia articles).
Aspects of the legal world in their movies
The Coens’ movies deal frequently with the legal world. If the story involves a crime, you can bet law enforcers of some kind will be portrayed (whether favorably—and on occasion pregnant—or not). If the story is more involved with human dealings entailing need of a lawyer for civil or family matters, representatives of such lawyers will be on hand. As the sheriff or ranger or whatever he is who is chasing the escaped convicts through O Brother, Where Art Thou? says once he has his quarry at hand and has readied nooses and graves, and the fearful convicts note that the state’s governor has already pardoned them, the sheriff says, “The law is a human institution.” True enough, but of course in this instance, he means it to reflect that sometimes (licentiously) a lawman takes the law into his own hands, as this one is about to do, though the convicts are saved in a nick of time by water flooding in as part of a reservoir being created.
My focus here is on lawyers, but one could write quite a term paper if one included the various versions of law enforcement personnel in the Coens’ movies, too.
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The Coens handle depiction of practicing lawyers in two ways, which actually are germane to examining them from a robust artistic viewpoint: in a strongly satirical fashion (as in Intolerable Cruelty), and (in other movies) in a merely descriptive fashion, as figuring in a plot without being the butts of major jokes. This latter method I can appreciate, because lawyers are something to observe in action just to figure out what they’re about anyway. Practiced law—whether in the courtroom or in individual encounters—sometimes seems to straddle a line between serious business and self-parody, so when we see this examined in a sort of “clinical” depicting sense, we’re not quite ready to laugh, but we look at what’s going on and can say, “Yes, that is how that odd bird of a professional operates in this society, isn’t it?”
Indeed, learned professionals are so much part of the fabric of American life—and we can so often see lawyers, doctors, and other such “shingle-hangers” plying their trade that we just stare at them in wonder—that the Coens represent them quite a bit. There are doctors in Burn After Reading (2008) and A Serious Man (2009), as well as lawyers in both films. (In the latter film, there is also a vividly portrayed dentist, Lee Sussman, D.D.S., in a sequence comprising a sort of parable told by a rabbi, under the heading of “The Goy’s Teeth,” a tour de force of Coens wacky humor, even if it does make a philosophic point. The story of the apparent miracle of Hebrew lettering with a portentous message appearing on the teeth of a patient is unfolded, with Jimi Hendrix’s song “Machine Gun” swirling on the soundtrack. Various details of the dentist’s practice, such as use of a patient’s use of a cuspidor and the making of a mold for a bridge or the like, will make many viewers squirm with a recollection they don’t much care to have.)
Even in True Grit, there is an entertaining courtroom scene in which we are introduced to Jeff Bridges’ portrayal of Rooster Cogburn (which is the most valuable thing in the scene), and later in the movie, on the trail, we encounter a sort of self-styled medical doctor—wearing a bear skin, with bear head on his own head—that suggests that such professionals were even wandering the wilderness in the 1870s, though the movie suggests they were closer to snake-oil salesmen than learned professionals are today. (And in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, George Clooney’s character—as learned and loquacious as he is—has been put in jail for practicing law without a license, as he explains. Later he entertains a notion of becoming a dentist, envisioning some cohorts’ printing up a license for him.)
Burn After Reading and its mostly unaffected portrayals
In the recent films Burn After Reading and A Serious Man, the lawyers are mostly there to advance the plot but not to be obvious butts of jokes. In the former, a divorce lawyer is played by apparent character actor J.R. Horne (who played one of Pappy O’Daniel’s assistants in O Brother, Where Art Thou?), and this character isn’t played for laughs, as amusing as he might be. [See my December 4 entry for a review of Burn After Reading.]
Without engaging in any particularly prideful or otherwise excessive action (unlike most of the other characters in the movie), this attorney unwittingly sets the ball rolling for the intersection of the federal government side of the story (that of the CIA analyst Osborne Cox, played by John Malkovich, who is complexly associated with the sexual “permanent 16-year-old” of a longtime federal marshal, Harry Pfarrer, played by George Clooney) and the gym side of the story (notably featuring amusing performances by Frances McDormand, Brad Pitt, and Richard Jenkins). This intersection, which leads to a host of “comedy of errors” or related shenanigans, is initiated when a CD (burned by Cox’s wife for the divorce action) of Cox’s financial records, inadvertently mixed with a partial memoir of his analyst work, is lost by the lawyer’s secretary at the gym, and is then found by workers at the gym, who in turn use it to try to wangle money out of Cox for cosmetic surgery for one of them.
Some of the Coens’ playful humor (and also an example of their way of cross-referencing their movies) comes in when a private investigator, spying on Clooney’s character in a subplot involving his own wife’s divorcing him, is tackled by an enraged Clooney and the young man reveals he works for Tuckman Marsh Halperin and Rodino [phonetic spellings for some of these names]. The law firm name, abbreviated Tuckman Marsh, comes up again in A Serious Man.
In a mid-story scene, after some small talk about stars he has had involvement with, the divorce lawyer for Mr. Cox’s wife talks about being ready to “execute service” on Mr. Cox, which we smile at because we know in real life what this means, but we don’t know how comically this will be effected in this movie. And after more of the movie’s serpentine turns of plot….
Perhaps the funniest legally related scene in this movie also demonstrates the Coens’ ability to pump a lot of social observation into a short scene, depending on the intelligence shaping the moment depicted and what is fit into a frame, rather as Orson Welles can load a lot of meaning into a scene. When Cox is consulting with a former “spook” associate at a snooty kind of club such as he was at earlier for a Princeton class reunion, and the “spook” has given him info on how his memoir information has ended up with the Russian embassy because of the CD delivered there by the two gym employees, the “spook” points out in a friendly aside that two guys have been watching him there in the club…. Cox confronts them, and one of them asks a probing, seemingly casual question, and when Cox identifies himself, the man hands him an envelope, remarking, “Served. Witnessed”—and as elucidation, gestures with his thumb to an associate finishing his drink. As they head out: “You have a nice evening.” And Cox has been served with divorce papers from his wife.
A Serious Man and its mostly serious lawyers
In A Serious Man, there are a few lawyers, again generally not played for laughs. Adam Arkin plays a divorce lawyer consulted by physics professor Larry Gopnik (played by stage actor Michael Stuhlbarg), after his wife has announced she wants a divorce. Arkin’s lawyer is sympathetic to Gopnik, and a bit of a chatty Cathy about some things. (On a more professional point, he remarks on Gopnik’s wife having retained a lawyer at the firm “Tuckman Marsh,” that this is “an aggressive firm—these are not pleasant people.”)
Another attorney, in the divorce lawyer’s firm, is more played for laughs. Solomon Schlutz, played by Michael Lerner (no pretty boy), is the go-to partner for real estate issues, and has looked into a way to resolve a property-line dispute between Gopnik and a next-door neighbor. The black-humorous laugh comes when Schlutz, after laying out his papers and pencils methodically, keels over dead from a heart attack (not meant to reflect his nature as a lawyer).
Later in the film, Gopnik’s brother Arthur has necessitated use of a criminal attorney, as advised by Arkin’s divorce lawyer. The attorney the divorce lawyer refers Gopnik to is “Ron Meshbesher [phonetic spelling]”—he is “not cheap,” the divorce lawyer says. By the way, Meshbesher’s is a name I understand is derived from the real firm that lent the movie crew the office in which Arkin’s character appears. (Another “by the way”: Gopnik’s eccentric—but apparently harmless—brother Arthur, who appears several times in the film, is played by Richard Kind, a New York
Toward the end of the film, Gopnik receives Meshbesher’s bill for services for Arthur—and it is quite chunky, at $3,000—which obviously was hefty for 1967, the year in which the movie is set.
In all these cases, lawyers are part of the infrastructure of American life, there to help in situations in which people can’t fully help themselves, which is how they are generally regarded in real life on a good-faith level. What the films remind us of is how the spider web of lawyers’ involvement in our lives is so often there, stretching out to be seen in various directions, run into sometimes unexpectedly like a real spider thread on a summer morning.
Perhaps the Coens, in these later films with their fairly realistic streak, were atoning for their portrayal of lawyers in Intolerable Cruelty, which seems an exemplary case of extreme satire of this type of professional. This will be the topic of Part 2.
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