Abiding in the world of Craving and Delusion

Rating: Null/10 (6 June 2016)

Blood Simple introduced the combination of mood and noir karma from above, the key was in making the first long, the second precise.
Arizona went two steps further, supplying the multitudinous desiring mind that makes reality bubble up, Ozzie and Harriet through HI's mind.
Miller's tried to do both the karmic noir while toying with 'the world of the mind' in the forest. They made Barton Fink that film about the mind instead, in a most obvious way by that point, rooms mapping to mind, wallpaper coming unglued.
So by the time the Coens made this, there was already a clear blueprint of inclinations. Once more a film noir about a schmuck whose desire makes the skies cave in on him. Once more about the life of the mind, the mind dictating egoistic desire and greed, less obvious than Barton. Along the way we get quirky staples, dry gaffe, guns, blood, a satchel of money, to offset the frigid pace in the broad audience's mind.
But although Macy's desire makes all sorts of accident and chaotic whimsy bubble up in the world, a softly maintained order straight from Frances' calm Minnesotan mind prevails. The film offers in fact a perfectly centered metaphor of the Coens at work and their larger blueprint. It's a cold world out there, with broken people and human ego and desire creating inane anxieties, but it hasn't numbed the heroine's soul who calmly goes through a narrative, piecing it together, to save a mirrored wife from danger and restore order in the world of the film.
It's fine work to see on your first rounds. Methodical, exact, clean, some of the cleanest work you'll see anywhere.
But clean logic comes with a tradeoff in unfettered intuition that can slip ahead of you into places you didn't know or can't explain. It takes a parting of this logic to give me the great stuff that go beyond ideas; Lynch's whole career has been a creative journey of this. I miss this here. Still, the entry points are there to see and imagine from. The kidnapping plot as a thought that wafts from his mind before he could keep hold of it, herself woken up in the middle of the night by nightmare.
The Coens must have been aware of this fettering. They would drop a bomb on the logical mind with their next one.
Noir Meter: 3/4 | Neo-noir or post noir? Neo