The Coen Brothers at their Best

Rating: 9/10 (24 January 2008)

I have to admit that I am not the biggest fan of the Coen Brothers. Though I enjoyed the BiG Lebowski and Fargo, I didn't think that they were the greatest pieces of cinema. But what I have noticed in their work is an exploration of the idea of characters existing in a moral miasma, where their sense of morality does not quite fit, or where there is none altogether. We see the comedy of a man with simple morals in The Big Lebowski, a man with dreams of raising people to greatness in a world of distanced mediocrity in Barton Fink. Fargo and Miller's Crossing come closer to this work, the former being trying to be not too bad in an immoral world, and the latter just trying to have things turn out alright in the same. All of these films however missed out on something which I think they capture incredibly well in this film; I just don't think it's any one thing. This is a pure exercise in existential cinema, and every feature contributes towards it.
The first thing I took note of was the character of Anton, who immediately struck me as a sort of Hannibal Lector type character. He is so exceptional at what he does that the wise know they cannot beat him, and the foolish fail in trying. Yet Lector cannot sustain believability because he is not human; he is so good that he never gets hurt. The Coens did exceptionally well at showing that he is not invincible, and in the end it is the simplest scenarios that challenge him the most, as shown in the story told by the Sheriff about killing the steer. Even something as simple as his haircut, which is so boyish, is used to great effect. He is simultaneously real and unreal.
The Sheriff and Moss are both excellent counter-points to the world in which they live in. Anton is an amoral killing machine, and these other two could hardly be considered moral. Moss knows that what he is doing is wrong, and yet he never feels any guilt for having done it. In this situation he is thrust into the raw need to survive. And the Sheriff, despite being a man of the law, has no lofty principles. His only concern is to protect a man who isn't even his friend because he can. All of the characters, and the actors who portray them are terrific in this film.
The pacing contributes to this film brilliantly. In an amoral world no event is more important than another. Nothing is built up, and nothing is lingered upon. In a film with a high body count every death, though gruesome, seems to be just a matter of fact. This person dies for this reason. Whether this is a shame or not is not really at issue. The audience, not the movie makers, choose whether to care for the drug-dealers who come after Moss, or the man in the truck he asks for help, or many of Anton's innocent victims. The Coens seem to have taken a page from Kurosawa and Leone by not lingering on violence itself, but they seem to go a step further and not linger on the build-up. Violence occurs as paced and as simply as the horse-ride or the hunt in the mountains.
The visuals provide an interesting contribution to the film. The landscapes are sweeping and desolate, as are the gritty urban scenes, where caravan upon caravan, bungalow upon bungalow flow into the horizon. This is the world in which the action takes place, and it is a world in which monumental events are shocking up close, and yet lost in the horizon. The lawmen never have a chance of catching Anton because he destroys everything near him, and then disappears into the distance. HIs weapons capture this perfectly, being silent and quick, leaving no further evidence that the bodies they leave behind.
Everything in this film contributes towards this being a truly inspired piece of cinema. I recommend that everyone watch this!