David Denby of The New Yorker takes a look at the career of the Coen brothers and he seems to come to many of the usual critical conclusions that have dogged them over the years. Here are some of his observations:
In the past, Joel and Ethan Coen have tossed the camera around like a toy, running it down shiny bowling lanes or flipping it overhead as naked babes, trampolined into the air, rise and fall through the frame in slow motion. Now they’ve put away such happy shenanigans. The camera work and the editing in the opening scenes of “No Country” are devoted to what the hunter sees and feels as he inches forward: earth, a brush of wind, and the mess in front of him, the remnants of a drug deal gone bad. So powerful are the first twenty minutes or so of “No Country”—so concentrated in their physical and psychological realization of dread—that we are unlikely to ask why Chigurh kills with a captive-bolt gun (the kind used in killing cattle) rather than a revolver, or if it makes any sense for Llewelyn, a likable welder and roughneck, to return to the scene with water for a wounded man after he’s made off with two million dollars in drug money. “No Country” is based on Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel, and the bleak view of life that has always existed in the Coens’ work merges with McCarthy’s lethal cool. After these initial scenes, Chigurh poses hostile and unanswerable questions to the baffled owner of a roadside gas station (Gene Jones), and the mind games are prolonged to a state of almost unbearable tension. Watching the movie, you feel a little like that gas-station owner—impressed, even intimidated.
Here's a dismissive judgement of two of my favorite Coen films that are often criticized for being "too stylized" that I find hard to swallow:
If “Blood Simple” suggested that the Coens didn’t want to make a thriller so much as tease one into existence, “Miller’s Crossing” (1990) sported with the form in heavier and grimmer ways.***
But the situations and the dialogue are so stylized—so manically fretted with crime-genre allusions and tropes—that the Coens killed whatever interest we might have taken in their story or in their hero. Perversely, they invented a new form of failure, acting in bad faith toward themselves.
Does every film have to be The Shawshank Redemption? Typically he has some nice things to say about No Country For Old Men, Fargo, and Raising Arizona. Surprisingly he has praise for The Big Lebowski. Overall, I think he's too critical, dismissive, and possibly oblivious to what the Coens were trying to achieve in their films.
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