Internally Frayed

Rating: Null/10 (18 August 2006)

The Coens are masters of the tease. By that I mean they'll find a closely embroidered dress and then goof with its perfection. They'll pull this and that element of the colored threads out so that its frayed, disturbing the scene so carefully constructed by the original craftswoman. Superficially it looks more homemade, more genuine this way. But if you look closely you'll see that what they've done is a matter of orchestrated destruction. Things defined by their distance from other things.
Past that point it is merely a matter of whether the teasing engages or not.
Their previous movie was not well received. The original garment was a combination of a mild Capra screwball and a 30's newspaper fold of a sassy woman detective. The noir mechanics were made explicit, as were the cinematic components.
The audience  by this I mean the general paying audience  stayed away. They just weren't in the mood for clever deconstruction, no matter how polished.
This is a reaction. Its a wonderful project, just wonderful in its way, but also sad in the implied tightness behind the decisions you see.
What they've done is frayed the garment on the inside. Everything is sparse, bleak. All the camera setups are overly simplified, all the emotional mechanics understated. Most of it is buried in the snow.
If this movie were made by anyone else, it would just be amusing, a calm sketch of a deliberately uncaffeinated selling itself as if it were a chain of simple products.
But it isn't. Its a suppressed visit by extremists pretending to not be extreme. Its Lynch doing "Straight Story" and not asking us to know that over every dusk hued horizon is one of his ragged unreal movies.
Because of this, we see small gateways into the world of the Dude, or the Sirens. The unborn child will enter a different world. The postage stamp will fly to a different world (when the rates change).
Watch it for the simple garment, a dress covered by a coat. Watch it for the fraying and teasing on the inside, and imagine the colorful embroidery disturbed on the out.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.