Our sick civilization has recently entered a new stage of illness. While there are myriad signs of this new and alarming era— children raised by machines, an infuriating political stalemate, an unprecedented environmental crisis, a majority-obese population, rapidly vanishing public services, a collective inability to concentrate on anything for more than eight seconds, etc—the most disturbing may be our inability to recognize utter horseshit when it’s right in front of our eyes.
Let’s start with something simple. The Wolf of Wall Street. One of the worst movies spectacles ever to be vomited onto the big screen. Three hours of wall-to-wall voiceover narrating exactly what’s being shown on screen…a flatline of a plot devoid of surprise, drama, tension, or even change…tedious and unnecessary scenes that you forget as soon as they’re over. Did I miss anything? Oh yeah, it looks like shit, and the period details (something even a superficial film can nail) are way off. The result: it’s nominated for Best Picture, and called “Martin Scorsese’s crowning achievement!!” by a writer for a major newspaper. His crowning achievement. Yeah, fuck Taxi Driver and Raging Bull with all their nuances and gradually unfolding menace. Just get right to the cocaine and hookers, tell me how I should feel by cueing up another fucking rock song, and tell me exactly what’s going to happen so I don’t have to think.
Then there was American Hustle, a fucking chore of a movie that managed to be significantly shittier than that dude’s last picture, the labored, phony-as-a-three-dollar-bill Silver Linings Playbook. How bad is American Hustle? Well, for starters it has the word “American” in the title, to force a kind of “larger meaning” down your throat along with the non-stop fluff and bullshit. So that tells you something. It’s disjointed and flat, has a nauseating visual style and a drama-free story that you will forget as soon as you walk out. And surprise! Its 138 minutes are also laid out for you in voiceover! It’s saddled with Bradley Cooper, who has now been exposed as an out-and-out fraud, straight from the Watch Me Act With my Earnest Puppy Dog Expressions and Manic Energy, Can I Have an Award So I Can Cry School of Acting. Forget about deeper meanings or astute observations of society– this movie doesn’t even know how to have fun. The result: it’s nominated for Best Picture and ten (10) other Oscars, including Cooper for Best Actor. As a dear friend once said, “And for what? For a little bit of money. There’s more to life than a little money, you know. Don’tcha know that?”
The assholes have crossed the Rubicon, folks. Critics, even respected critics, can no longer discern great from grating, sublime from sub-par. We’re on our own.
But we’re not here to fret over David O. Russell, who only had one great film in him anyway (The Fighter) and one fun romp (Flirting With Disaster, nearly 20 years ago). Nor am I concerned with the hollowed out husk of what was formerly Marty Scorsese, who, as we’ve pointed out elsewhere, hasn’t made a great movie in 24 years.
But I am concerned with America’s cinematic bards, the poison poets of sound and vision known as the Coen Brothers. Close readers of The Overrated Times have probably noticed subtle homages to the life of the mind of Joel and Ethan Coen peppered through our pages. We’ve held The Big Lebowski above Citizen Kane. Back in August, while mired in the muck of Zero Dark Thirty, we even counted down the days to when we could see a real movie, in the form of the Coen Brothers’ next offering: Inside Llewyn Davis. Man, we were pumped for this one! Salivating reviewers screamed across two-page ads: this was the Coens’ best picture yet! Holy shit, really? Better than Fargo or Barton Fink? Our excitement only grew upon learning that this was to be a music-driven movie, like O Brother Where Art Thou?, and that it would reunite the Bros with John Goodman for the first time since said picture.
So imagine our mounting surprise and dismay as we sat quietly through the small, shallow, sour and almost supernaturally underwhelming Inside Llewyn Davis.
You’ll forgive me if I forget what I didn’t like about Inside Llewyn Davis, since it’s one of the most forgettable movies I’ve seen in years. But here’s what I remember.
It was everything that a Coen Brothers movie is not. It was not funny. It was not exciting. It was not challenging. It was not weird. It was not pleasantly disorienting or sneakily revelatory. It was not even interesting. It was not convincing in its time or place—Greenwich Village in the early 1960s. It did not upset any of the conventions of moviemaking. (Unless they were purposefully trying to make the most conventional movie possible just to fuck with us. Hmmmm….) And, despite what the critics (more on them later) are saying, the music was mediocre.
Most galling of all, the dialog was flat. The bitchy chatter between Llewyn and his ex-girlfriend sounds like it was written in a ‘90s rom-com factory. The Coens took a stab at giving the folksinger/soldier character a bit of depth… and failed. John Goodman’s eccentric music impresario seemed to offer an interesting branch to grasp at, but then his character disappeared after ten minutes. Oh well, guess we’re back to the unrelenting flatness.
Even a middling Coen Bros. flick crackles with exceptionally well-written dialog that inspires both the actors and the audience. If Burn After Reading didn’t add up to a whole lot, the scenes were individually hilarious. Each line of dialog made you smile and took you deeper into one eccentric character or another. Same with A Serious Man: Saul Goodman destroying his friend’s marriage with sensitive-guy platitudes… the old rabbi reciting the members of “The Airplane”… the adorably foul-mouthed Hebrew school kids acting tough on the school bus. And those screenplays are comparatively lesser efforts. The scripts for Lebowski, Fargo, O Brother, Blood Simple, Barton Fink, and Miller’s Crossing are among the best written by anyone.
We’ll stop there with the post-mortem because it hurts, frankly.
So how to explain the obnoxious and egregious overrating of Llewyn Davis? It goes like this: think back a few years, to the days of Barton Fink and The Big Lebowski. The Coen Brothers were hardly critical darlings. (And their movies barely made a blip in the box office). A few of the good critics got it (and thankfully, the smarter actors and producers got it) but most reviewers accused the Bros of immature, indulgent, brash filmmaking. The Coen Brothers existed– and thrived– in an artistic ghetto.
The Academy, meanwhile, was busy giving out Best Picture statuettes to the likes of Forrest Gump, Shakespeare in Love and Crash. This was when the Coens were making some of their greatest films! Eventually, films like O Brother (which was simply too beautiful and entertaining for even a simpleton critic not to notice) put the Coen Brothers into the good graces of the chattering class. Their big budget epics, No Country for Old Men and True Grit, sealed the deal. Critics, now properly conditioned, shat themselves overrating No Country and True Grit, which were great movies, but, despite their grandeur, were small pictures compared to the Coens’ best work.
Now they’ve made it easy for the critics. You see the names Joel and Ethan Coen on your press package, and you can already start typing your glowing review. Along with burrata cheese, pinot noir, Greek yogurt, Martin Scorsese and kale salads, the Coen Brothers have joined the ranks of products that are just assumed to be AMAZING all the time. (Until they’re declared passé, like merlot or pesto).
Who gives a shit about the critics? Well, critics can, with enough effort, keep the hucksters of pop culture at bay long enough for a few good artists to slip through. And we’re all the richer for that. When the critics begin to lose their critical faculties entirely (which is happening– I blame smart phones, Facebook, Twitter, etc, etc.) we will be the poorer for it.
But we’re more concerned about our favorite movie makers. We miss Joel and Ethan Coen. We miss that Barton Fink feeling. No one else in film, and very few people in any art form, can walk their fine line, giving full voice to arch cynicism, while somehow telling soulful and life-affirming stories. No other filmakers can harmonize comedy and tragedy into such a cathartic and kinetic experience. Theirs is the eye of the jaded and beaten-down artist who stubbornly sees the art in everything and knows how to manifest it.
The Coen Brothers never gave a shit about the critics back in their golden age. Now that they’re universally worshiped by critics, perhaps they’ll wise up: we must be doing something really wrong if these same fools love us.
Based on the three new movies discussed here, you can say the same thing about our society in general: if all the critics are proclaiming the genius of a movie or band or book, and you think it sucks, you’re not crazy. They’re crazy. They’ve crossed over to the other side.
The Coen Brothers are dead! God save the Coen Brothers!