They Probably Didn't Get It

Rating: 10/10 (12 August 2019)

I read a bunch of the reviews below on this movie, and I was annoyed because I didn't see one of them who seemed to get what the story was really about. In my opinion, it's a scathing indictment of communism specifically, but it also hints at the immorality of statism in general. While others were annoyed by the silliness of the communists losing the briefcase, I found it to be a deeply satirical representation of the only thing the communists were ever good at: destroying wealth and everything that is good with it, and all for an apparition of an ideal that's as silly as the toy dog it was sacrificed for in the film. The cherry on top for me was when he blames the dog for the mishap, highlighting how willfully ignorant and dense these stubborn adherents are to their own folly.
The story finishes off with what I view as an allusion to the immorality of the state as the protagonist confesses his sins and asks for advice from his priest on whether to take a job. He ultimately takes the road less traveled, the one that is right, or moral as it were, and ultimately chooses what is right over what is easy by continuing to work in films. Before I watched this movie I would say it would be a tall order credibly painting a deceptive film-making enterprise as the moral choice, but when it's compared to selling your wares to the military-industrial complex and communist chicanery, the Coens resoundingly convinced me of it.
Something I've enjoyed over the years watching Coen Brothers movies is that as I unpeel the onion revealed in each story, upon repeated viewings of course, I notice constant references to philosophy. While I'm not sure based upon their movies that we would see eye-to-eye on philosophy and morality, I'm appreciative of how they subtly discuss them in each film, letting the results of the characters' frequent ignorance of these matters, and the ensuing tragedies that befall them, speak for themselves rather than preaching to the audience what one should do. In other words, it's not prescriptive, but allegorical.
Finally I'd like to say that I found the movie to be wildly entertaining. I laughed out loud several times and almost woke my kids up in the process. The spoofing of all those old movies, only some of which I'm familiar with, came through in a very obvious way for me. You can't have seen any of those films and not enjoyed this one poking fun at them. This is storytelling at its finest. Pay attention or you might miss it.