THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS (2018)

Through the title character, aka the San Saba Songbird, the West Texas Twit (or Tit) and, most troubling to himself, "The Misanthrope," Joel and Ethan Coen address some of their critics.

'Misanthrope?'  I don't hate my fellow man, even when he's tiresome and sulky and tries to cheat at poker. I figure that's just a human material, and him that finds it cause for anger and dismay is just a fool for expecting better.

Perhaps feeling less capable of telling a feature-length story lately, the Coens reportedly contemplated embarking on series television. It was announced that they were creating a western anthology series for Netflix, but instead, apparently quitting while they were ahead, they delivered a feature-length collection of six stories: five of their own and an adaptation of Jack London's "All Gold Canyon." There's a variety of tone to the anthology that belies any stereotype of the Coens' character or philosophy and makes it truly reminiscent of the Twilight Zone of western anthology TV, Zane Grey Theater. It opens with a trolling provocation featuring Buster Scruggs (Tim Blake Nelson), a seemingly invincible and suprisingly lethal singing cowboy who ultimately yields, in the most cartoonish fashion, to a harmonica-playing stranger presumably representing a later era of westerns. It's a combination of what some may enjoy most and what others despise in the Coens' work, but as the film moves from episode to episode it grows less predictable, veering from the fateful absurdity of "Near Algodones," in which James Franco's hapless bank robber escapes one hanging only to be doomed to another, to the utter nihilism of "Meal Ticket," in which Liam Neeson exploits a limbless savant who performs recitations and murders him when he fails to draw crowds anymore, before following London in a more hopeful direction.

The longest episode -- or so it seemed, though not in a bad way -- is both the most romantic and the most tragic. "The Gal Who Got Rattled" is a wagon-train story of the deliberate courtship of a suddenly penniless pioneer woman (Zoe Kazan -- a veteran of Meek's Cutoff, by the way) and a wagonmaster's lieutenant (Bill Heck), as much motivated by monetary concerns as by feelings of ardor. There are elements in the story -- a dog with a maddening bark, a bankroll left in a corpse's clothes -- that lead you to suspect an absurdly happy ending until the story takes a twist out of nowhere when the girl and the wagonmaster (Grainger Hines) are caught alone by an Indian attack. The Coens have set up an archetypal frontier scenario of the sort that might get them scolded for their portrayal of Native Americans, down to the wagonmaster giving the girl a gun so she can kill herself if the Indians get him, in order to spare herself the fate worse than death, which here gets described in some detail. In a brilliantly swervy climax, it looks like he's driven the war band back only to get tricked by a seemingly riderless horse. The Coens keep our eyes on this scene, as the Indian moves in to take a scalp, only to get killed by the possum-playing wagonmaster. Hooray! -- except that the girl was just as fooled as the Indian was, and the finish could be considered an indictment of the mortal terror of Indians the old tales induced. This is a great piece of filmmaking on its own, but it could only happen in an anthology format, since it's too short to be a feature and a standalone story won't go on series TV nowadays.

The film ends on an eerie note with a story that's part Stagecoach, part Samuel Beckett, with a typical Coen cast of eccentrics and grotesques sharing a ride with two men who may be bounty hunters or may be far more sinister than that. On paper it's little more than an opportunity for a lot of newcomers to the Coens' world to tuck into their meaty flights of rhetoric, especially Chelcie Ross as an interminible trapper. One thing you can depend on, no matter what the content or tone of the tale, is that these westerners won't sound just like the people next door today; it's of a piece with their True Grit in many ways, and maybe meant to show that they weren't just mimicking Charles Portis's prose. While they portray The Ballad of Buster Scruggs onscreen as an old hardcover book with color illustrations, it reminded me more of the western pulp magazines I've come to enjoy reading in its simultaneous variety and consistency. The finished product may or may not count as a salvage job, but it still plays to the Coens' strengths while minimizing their weaknesses in a way that makes it a vast improvement over the tedious Hail Ceasar! The brothers may well have found the right medium in Netflix for this point in their career. Had it been packaged as a series, that would only have made it more clear, as it was clear a century ago, that great filmmaking isn't restricted to feature-length storytelling.

On the Big Screen: HAIL CAESAR! (2016)

Hail Caesar! may be Joel and Ethan Coens' most infuriatingly lazy film. They've been lazy before, but their laziest effort heretofore, Burn After Reading, was redeemed by hilarious performances from George Clooney, John Malkovich and Brad Pitt. Clooney's along for the ride again, in his fourth film for the brothers, but this time he has pathetically little to work with. You can sum it up as "dumb actor" or, at most, "impressionable actor." He never gets to go over the top as he did in Burn After Reading, nor does anyone else in the overcrowded cast. The problem may be that the picture isn't about Clooney's dumb actor nor any of the other eccentric contract players at Capitol Pictures. Instead, it's left to Josh Brolin to hold the picture together as Eddie Mannix, Capitol's "head of physical production." Named after the nearly legendary M-G-M fixer who figures in many Hollywood myths, Caesar's Mannix is a hustling, guilt-haunted manager who answers reverently to the unseen and also-based-on-reality moneyman Nicholas Schenck. Along with tracking down or ransoming his kidnapped actor -- I assume everyone knows that detail from the commercials -- Mannix has to create a cover story for the impending birth of an illegitimate child to his squeaky-clean swimming star (Scarlett Johansson), smooth the transition of the studio's singing-cowboy star (Alden Ehrenreich) to drawing-room dramas, and secure the approval of Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox and Jewish leaders for the Hail Caesar! picture within Hail Caesar!, a mash-up of Sam Zimbalist's M-G-M epics Quo Vadis (1951) and Ben-Hur (1959) in which the Clooney character stars, and all while placating, stalling or lying to rival gossip columnists who are twin sisters (Tilda Swinton x2). On top of all that, he has to consider a promising job offer from Lockheed that could save him from a doomed business while trying (and failing) to quit smoking. All this results in an amusing satirical scene with the religious leaders, in which the Jew is perhaps more mocking than he might have been at the actual time, and a framing gag about Mannix's obsessive recourse to the confessional. The joke here is that Mannix lives by lying, or at least by making promises he's not sure of fulfilling, yet the lies he confesses to have to do with his promise to his wife to quit smoking. It's as if he doesn't recognize most of his own lies as lies, but that's par for the course in Hail Caesar!, where the main thematic subtext is a human capacity for self-delusion that found midcentury expression in both Hollywood bible epics and the International Communist Conspiracy.

This is a meta movie in which the film itself and the film within the film are both narrated by Michael Gambon. That's meant to call our attention to the essentially mythic nature of the main story, in which a more malevolent version of the Hollywood Ten carries out the Clooney kidnapping and at least one major studio star is an active agent of the U.S.S.R. I'd like to assume that the unreality of the whole thing is obvious enough that no 21st century leftists will cry foul, though they may resent the parallels the Coens present between communism and Christianity. They're more amused than we are, I suspect, by the idea of Clooney being more or less converted by the commies, if only because he's so sociably impressionable, while he's such a bad actor that he can't sell the spiritual experiences of his movie character, a Roman converted to Christianity. But the way they film both the argument of the religious leaders over the nature of Jesus and the doctrinal bickering of the commies suggests that they view both Christianity and communism with their characteristic, much-deplored distanced disdain. Let's put it this way: I was never so conscious of how dialectics almost rhymes with dianetics as I was while watching this film, though that may have a lot to do with the time period Caesar! is set in, c. 1956. This is all rather interesting, but after a certain point the Coens give up on using the story to demonstrate the argument, and give up on the story as well.

Another germ of an idea is Caesar!'s use of the singing cowboy character. Presumably inspired by John Mack Brown, a retrospectively implausible leading man for Greta Garbo, and Tim Holt, who actually acquitted himself admirably in The Magnificent Ambersons, Hobie Doyle seems intended to emerge as the true protagonist of the film and a sort of amateur detective. His insight about extras being more suspicious than regular crew members is proven correct by what we've already seen of Clooney's kidnapping, and it's Hobie who follows the money to Clooney's place of comfortable confinement. One can imagine the fantastic or satirical potential of a singing cowboy solving the mystery, but the Coens clearly were uninterested in making the sort of comic action picture that would have resulted. Similarly, Hobie has a charming first date, arranged by the studio, with a Carmen Miranda-esque musical star (Veronica Osario), but the Coens aren't interested in following up on it. Likewise, the identity of a commie spy within the studio is clearly meant to surprise us, but since the Coens couldn't be bothered to build that character up as a person rather than a mere performer, the revelation leaves us indifferent. The brothers reject every opportunity to create thrills, and might argue that they never meant to make a thrill picture, but when the potential is so obviously there you can't help seeing the end result as slapdash and half-finished. For almost the first time I could believe the libel that the Coens are self-satisfied and contemptuous toward their audience, given how half-assed Hail Caesar! is. Maybe they got distracted by the writing for hire they've done lately for Steven Spielberg and Angelina Jolie, but none of that justifies the mess they've dumped on us. There's still just enough comedy to keep this from being their worst film -- their 2001-4 run remains the trough of their career -- but knowing what the Coens are capable of when they really care, I suspect I'll dislike this one more than many films that are objectively worse. Some people can't help making bad films, but when the Coen Brothers do it, it's like they're ripping you off. Perhaps they'd like to confess something now, but I doubt it.

On the Big Screen: BRIDGE OF SPIES (2015)

Steven Spielberg now directs movies for old people. It was an overwhelmingly gray-haired crowd at the neighborhood art house where I saw his newest film -- and I'm not exactly young myself. You could believe that these people have grown old with Spielberg, and you could more easily believe that only they could have much interest in Bridge of Spies. It was a good-sized crowd of old people, but I don't know what the screenings look like at the malls where the kids go. Spielberg isn't the brand name he used to be. That's partly because Spielberg has strayed more often recently from special effects and pre-sold genre material. Bridge is another of his adult pictures, another attempt to reach beyond his supposed limitations. As if acknowledging a need for help in this venture, he reached out to the Coen brothers, of all people, to re-write Matt Charman's original script. They make an unlikely team: the arch manipulator of emotions and the brothers often accused of cold, contemptuously satiric superiority to their subjects. Then again, Spielberg took it upon himself to make a Stanley Kubrick movie once, so maybe he recognizes an affinity inside himself with the "cold" auteurs that others miss. I'm guessing that he called the Coens in to give the dialogue some period authenticity as well as a certain snap that the brothers alone, arguably, can supply. They were certainly a gift to Tom Hanks, and perhaps they owed something to him after putting him through The Ladykillers. Hanks has a field day here in a role that's half lawyer, half salesman, and his crafty glibness as James Donovan plays well off the laconic stoicism of Mark (Thomas Cromwell) Rylance as Rudolf Abel, the Soviet spy Donovan is recruited to defend in a U.S. court. Acting isn't the problem with Bridge of Spies; if it had been the two-hander it appeared to be initially everyone probably would have been better off. But whatever the Coens did to polish the script, they were apparently of no help with a story structured to subvert its intended moral.

The moral seems to be that every person counts. Donovan is reluctant to take on Abel's defense for any number of reasons, but once he accepts the task he goes beyond the call of duty -- by which I mean he gives Abel more of a defense than the government actually intended. A demonstration was intended to show that in the U.S. everyone gets a fair trial, but all that's really expected of Donovan is a "capable defense" that won't change the obvious outcome. The outcome should be obvious because there's no doubt that Abel was a spy, but Donovan takes his work seriously and looks for irregularities that might get Abel off, only to find that the courts aren't interested. Even after Donovan persuades the judge to spare Abel's life with the pragmatic, prophetic argument that he could be traded down the line for some captive American spy, he carries the appeals process all the way to the Supreme Court, losing his ultimate appeal by a 4-5 vote. For this, the film tells us, Donovan was vilified and threatened by a hysterical public. Spielberg almost certainly overdoes this, to the point of having someone fire shots through Donovan's window, frightening his children, when in fact Donovan was so far from vilified that in 1961 he became vice president of the New York Board of Education. Presumably Spielberg exaggerates Donovan's ordeal in order to make him an exceptional figure, a heroic exception to the era's Cold War hysteria but also an exception that in inverse fashion vindicates his country. As long as the exceptional man lives up to the principles that presumably justify the Cold War, even when the majority seems to fail, he still affirms Hollywood's version of American exceptionalism. Through Donovan Spielberg (and the Coens) can affirm American exceptionalism while maintaining an ambivalent attitude toward the Cold War. On the one hand, to get ahead of myself, Donovan witnesses the Soviet Bloc at its worst when people trying to jump the Berlin Wall are mowed down mercilessly. On the other, Bridge of Spies is determined not to make Rudolf Abel a villain. We're clearly meant to accept Donovan's apolitical assessment of Abel as a "good soldier" -- one who never says an ideological word in the entire picture -- over the bloodthirsty indignation of his fellow Americans. We're also meant to see Abel as a political if not moral equivalent of Francis Gary Powers, the downed U-2 spy pilot for whom he's eventually traded through Donovan's negotiations -- and Spielberg's attempts to illustrate that equivalence just about sink his movie.

Spielberg's attempt to make Powers (Austin Stowell) a character in the story is a classic case of too much and not enough. Abel may not have much of an internal life apart from his hobby of painting, but Rylance's mannered stoicism bring the character to life, while Powers is never more than a cipher. But once Donovan raises the possibility of trading Abel for a future captive American Spielberg introduces the cipher and keeps going back to him, developing the character not at all and killing much of the dramatic momentum the Hanks-Rylance team had built up. At his worst, he crosscuts between a Powers takeoff and Donovan arguing before the Supreme Court for no sensible reason. The inevitable destruction of Powers's plane and his narrow escape by parachute is spectacularly pointless; the plot would be served as well if the pilot's capture and trial were reported to our protagonist as a fait accompli. An interesting point is raised when Donovan observes that he, Abel and Powers are three of a kind, the most hated men in America -- Powers joining the club because he'd gone against orders and allowed himself to be captured and used in a presumed show trial -- but neither script nor Stowell do anything to make that observation meaningful.

Worse still, Spielberg compounds his error once Donovan goes to Berlin, ostensibly unofficial but at the government's behest, to negotiate the Abel-Powers exchange. In Berlin Spielberg introduces another major character, the American student Frederic Pryor (Will Rogers), who gets arrested in East Berlin for trying to smuggle his German girlfriend to the West before the Wall is finished. Learning of Pryor's plight, Donovan is determined to get him released along with Powers in return for Abel, without considering that the East Germans who hold Pryor have different priorities from their putative Soviet masters, who hold Powers. If anything by virtue of having a girlfriend in East Berlin Pryor is instantly a more interesting character than Powers, but he still isn't interesting enough to justify looking in on him, much less Powers, when we want to stick with Donovan. The movie tells us that these two matter, but fails to show it. Neither Powers nor Pryor is part of the real story, which is Donovan's often desperate, always cunning dealings with the Communists, but Spielberg thinks differently. They're his proof that every person counts, but at the same time they're exceptions in a way we've seen before in Spielberg's serious pictures. Because for Spielberg the exception is the essence, he can affirm human goodness in a Holocaust picture because one guy saved some Jews, and he can make Saving Private Ryan  a victory because a bunch of guys die to send Matt Damon home. I don't bring this up to denounce two of Spielberg's best pictures, but I'm pointing out why some people do denounce them and may also denounce Bridge of Spies. If I've correctly diagnosed a Spielberg Fallacy in all these films, I find it most glaring in Bridge because his superfluous preoccupation with Powers and Pryor, or else his (or the Coens') complacent failure to earn concern for them, mars the dramatic balance of this picture more severely.

That's a shame because Bridge sure is a lovely film to look at. It's another pictorial triumph for Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski. Just about every frame here is a thing of beauty, for which production designer Adam Stockhausen deserves a fair share of credit. The film isn't quite so easy on the ear; while John Williams arguably hasn't contributed much to Spielberg's movies in quite a while, his absence for the sake of Star Wars is felt if only because Thomas Newman's score is banal rather than merely predictable. Overall, I'm tempted to credit the Coens with whatever dramatic energy or occasional wit the picture has, though they should also take the blame for including or failing to remove some corny bits. Was giving Abel "Would it help?" as a catchphrase whenever Donovan asks whether he worries about things their idea? What about that supposedly soul-stirring story Abel tells about a man getting beat up by partisans but earning their respect, that you know as soon as you hear it will payoff later in the picture, as it does when Abel comes to Donovan's aid in a standoff? I suppose the brothers couldn't rewrite every word, but surely they could have done more with this script, or else the dramatic structure determined by Spielberg was irreparably flawed. For all that, I can't help imagining that had they directed it Bridge of Spies might have been a less compassionate but better picture.

On the Big Screen: INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS (2013)

The Coen brothers' first film in three years is a tricky piece. Because of their collaboration with T-Bone Burnett and an invocation of the Odyssey, it might seem closely related to O Brother Where Art Thou, but its closest kin in the Coen filmography is really Barton Fink. Set in 1961, it explicitly offers the Disney animal adventure The Incredible Journey as a cinematic reference point, but when I think of a cat lost in New York City in 1961 I think Breakfast at Tiffany's, and there's probably more room for illuminating comparisons in that direction. The title itself is deceptive, as is, presumably, the title character's record album of the same name, since we never truly get inside Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) and may leave the theater thinking there'd be nothing there if we got inside. The picture's a period piece with little appeal to nostalgia; since the subject is folk music and some of Davis's songs were created for this movie, we don't hear the usual pop tunes that define the decade if not the particular year. It doesn't seem to be about 1961 or the folk music scene on the brink of Dylan's emergence. Instead, it's about failure and frustration, if not a will to failure or self-frustration, but Davis must have enough talent to keep the film from becoming the wrong kind of comedy. That makes his failures as an entertainer and a person more mysterious, if not more tragic, but the Coens give us no Rosebud to account for them. That's only fair, since it's not as if these are problems only Davis can have or get.

We know his weakness; Llewyn doesn't "connect with people" the way some of his rivals do. But that begs more questions. How much of his dysfunction have to do with the suicide of his singing partner, for instance? But the Coens resist the temptation to show that person in flashback, and we never learn why he jumped off the George Washington Bridge. How much of Llewyn's conflicted attitude toward music, not to mention his sometimes-horrifying irresponsibility, has to do with his relationship with his father? He seems to resent having to play music, treating performance as an onerous job, while the only time he performs unbidden, or not for money, is when he visits his father in a nursing home. Llewyn reminds his dad that he'd always liked the particular song he plays, but the Coens undermine the sentiment of the moment by having the father soil himself in apparent response to the music. The brothers strive to maintain a comic tone, and some bits like the song "Please Mr. Kennedy" are hilarous, yet Inside Llewyn Davis is in some ways their darkest film. Davis is definitely their most unlovable protagonist. He is contemptibly irresponsible, reaching bottom when he abandons a dying or dead John Goodman and a live cat in a car on the highway on a wintry night. Bruno Delbonnel's cinematography is at its best and bleakest as Davis quits the car and hitchikes for Chicago, and later, when Davis fears he may have hit the same cat with another car on the return trip to New York. These are dark nights for Davis's soul, or what passes for it, and Oscar Isaac conveys convincingly both the character's moral agony and his inability to do anything about it -- both feelings compounded by his recent refusal to take the exit into Akron to find a child he'd only just found out about, the result of an aborted abortion.

Llewyn Davis is alienated to an extent fatal to whatever artistic ambition he has, but I don't think the Coens mean to say that this alienation is his crucial flaw. They may mean to show that such alienation and ambivalence is close to the surface of many artists, not just the failures -- their own reputation for misanthropy is probably relevant here, and for some Inside Llewyn Davis will only reconfirm that reputation. But Llewyn Davis rings too true as a type to be dismissed as a misanthropic caricature, though some of the supporting cast may seem like more typical Coen caricatures, and the most disquieting thing about the movie is the extent to which we find ourselves empathizing with this apparently repulsive person as everything goes wrong for him. He may seem exceptionally rotten in may respects, but let's face it: sabotaging one's own ambitions, perhaps misunderstanding them in the first place and failing to become famous are not exceptional at all.

A WOMAN, A GUN AND A NOODLE SHOP (2009)

Zhang Yimou didn't hide the fact that this film, also known as A Simple Noodle Story, is a remake of the Coen Brothers' debut movie Blood Simple, which I guess makes the period Chinese setting the most unlikely setting for a film noir since Anthony Mann set The Black Book in Revolutionary Paris. With Zhang at the helm, it may as well have been David Lean's version of Blood Simple. Older fans and history buffs will get my point. Lean made some great films, with some saying his black and white British films from the Forties are even better than Bridge on the River Kwai or Lawrence of Arabia. But after a certain point Lean seemed unable to tell a story simply, and his comeuppance came with Ryan's Daughter, a film that seemed appallingly overproduced by the standards of 1970. After the global success of Hero, House of Flying Daggers and Curse of the Golden Flower, Zhang seems to have reached that point. Noodle is a visual overdose that swamps mood with spectacle. When characters chase each other through the desolate hills, the hills are so gorgeously desolate that they dwarf the actors in every way. Zhang may have a narrative point to make about the characters' pettiness, but that point also gets dwarfed by the hyperaesthetic location cinematography.

I suppose Zhang has earned the right to make films his way, and we definitely should be grateful that he kept martial arts out of this one -- though now that I think of it, some slam-bang wirework might have accentuated the intentional absurdity of the piece. The closest we get to that sort of thing is an utterly gratuitous noodle-making scene in which three employees pass a pie of dough back and forth, each spinning and spreading it out until it's like a tent over their heads. Zhang piles the silliness on early, introducing a flamboyant "Persian" merchant who sells the Frances McDormand counterpart a gun and tries to sell her a cannon. For some reason the Persian and the Chinese woman haggle partly in English, and of course the cannon must be fired. The noise of the explosion introduces the soldier who'll play M. Emmet Walsh's part in the story. The first third of the movie is broadly comic, as if Zhang were remaking Raising Arizona by mistake. Everything is over the top, from the mere presence of a fat bucktoothed oaf of a noodle chef to the usual Asian indulgence of crying and screaming. The plot of Blood Simple is being followed fairly closely, but the tone is totally off. Zhang isn't necessarily obliged to reproduce the original's tone, but his own tone seems off. He can't balance plot, performances and visuals in a way that rings true, at least for American viewers.

An unfaithful wife...

A vengeful husband...

A man who kills for money....

Past the halfway point, however, as Noodle grows more recognizably imitative of Blood Simple, Zhang's commitment to reproducing the original's suspense brings the film under greater control. Things slow down as Zhang ratchets up the tension, putting his soldier over as a convincing menace to set up the final showdown with the wife. Apart from the aesthetic excess of slow-mo shots of arrows flying through the house, the climax works nearly as well as it did the first time around. The Coens wrote a strong scene, and I was tempted to say that it works in spite of Zhang, but I realize how easily it could have been botched. Zhang deserves credit for reclaiming suspense and some entertainment from what looked like a lost cause.

Anyway, it's nice to see the influence running the other way for once. We're so used to seeing Hollywood poaching foreign cinema for story ideas that it's almost reassuring in a backhanded way to see foreigners borrowing from American movies. Of course, Zhang didn't make Noodle to preempt Blood Simple from Chinese screens, so it's not quite the same thing that Hollywood usually does. Since the Coens themselves aren't above remakes, and even did a good one last year, seeing one of their own films remade is kind of like the circle of life in motion, to be sappy about it.

Straight from Sony Pictures Classics, here's the American trailer, for which the film's unoriginality is its main selling point.

On the Big Screen: TRUE GRIT (2010); or, The Dude of Death

The most famous moment in Henry Hathaway's 1969 film version of the Charles Portis novel True Grit is one of those moments of cultural transgression that could only take place at that time. In his Oscar-winning portrayal of Rooster Cogburn, John Wayne declares his intention to kill or capture the Ned Pepper gang. As Pepper, Robert Duvall says those are big words coming from "a one-eyed fat man." Wayne, the self-conscious symbol of traditional American manly conduct and right living, replies: "Fill your hand, you son of a bitch!" Those are Charles Portis's words, presumably. Jeff Bridges says them in the Coen Bros.' new version of the story, but the effect cannot be the same. So what if he cusses? It isn't like he's never done it before.

The moment doesn't seem different enough to justify re-doing it; yet the scene has to be there. It isn't meant to be the biggest moment in the new movie, anyway. The Hathaway film was an event in the career in John Wayne, a movie made to win him the Oscar. Bridges has his already, finally, and has nothing to prove here except that, on this occasion, he can fill Wayne's big boots. On this occasion, he certainly can, but the Coen film isn't about him the same way the Hathaway is about Wayne. The Coens' Cogburn is less hero, though hero he is, than a classical curmudgeon; in some mad alternate universe, I could imagine W. C. Fields playing the role and having a blast insulting the stuck-up Texas Ranger played previously by Glen Campbell and now by Matt Damon. Some of my favorite parts of the new film are the dialogues of Bridges and Damon, which dig up details about the characters neglected in the original film, if I recall right. Of the main actors, Damon impressed me the most, unrecognizable as he nearly was with his moustache and hat. He's clearly the biggest improvement on his predecessor. Bridges sometimes seems sealed within his alienating accent, though his work grows on you, while the infant phenomenon Hailee Steinfeld actually seems a bit mechanical in her admirable but uninflected doggedness as Mattie Ross. There's a certain strangeness in Kim Darby's performance, however overaged she was, that I missed from the new girl. Whether Steinfeld's interpretation is more authentic I can't say. She grew on me, too, but I think she's being overrated just a little. As her enemy Tom Chaney, Josh Brolin is underused, but considering what we see of him, that might have been for the best. The normally reliable actor blusters a bit too much in the little time he has, and the part is really beneath him -- though those who saw Jonah Hex may think differently.

Meanwhile, I notice some disappointment that True Grit hasn't panned out as a Coen Bros. statement on the Western, or even a satire on the genre. Had they wanted to make a statement, I suspect, they would have written an original story. Nevertheless, they have their fun. I'm not the first to suspect that the Coens are biting a hand that fed them a bit, the hand being Cormac McCarthy's and the movie seeming sometimes like an affectionate parody of the No Country for Old Men novelist's Blood Meridian mode. I might be the first to call them out on an elaborate in-joke at the expense of executive producer Steven Spielberg and Saving Private Ryan as Matt Damon (Pvt. Ryan himself) utters a prayer while drawing a bead on Barry Pepper (quite good as Ned Pepper, by the way), who played the prayerful sharpshooter in the Spielberg film. At the same time, whether the effect was intended or not, I found myself reminded of Unforgiven often. Seeing True Grit redone may simply have made the novel's influence on the Eastwood film, or the latter's grimly satiric echoes of the former, more apparent for me. The Coens have made a playful film, albeit with a sting at the end for those who know True Grit only by the first movie. I enjoyed its eccentricities most, from the mock-formal dialogue to the weird sequence of events involving a corpse hanging from a tall tree branch. Maybe the most playful thing is Carter Burwell's prominent inclusion of a hymn in the soundtrack that has all the movie buffs babbling about The Night of the Hunter. I suspect it's just the Coens jerking the critics' chains, though I wonder whether Burwell was parodying the Ken Burns style soundtrack on purpose at points or simply came too close to the TV documentary mode for comfort.

If the new film is a statement about anything, it's a confirmation of the durability of Portis's novel. While I found myself wondering at times whether there was much point to remaking True Grit, I realized finally that the point was to give another generation of actors an opportunity to do roles that should prove perennial. Jeff Bridges proves that Rooster Cogburn is a great character and a great role, not just a symbol for one actor for all time. There's no reason why someone forty years from now shouldn't let Rooster strut his stuff yet again, if a director has an actor to fill the character's boots. The Coen Bros. have not so much supplanted Henry Hathaway as they've restored Charles Portis's True Grit as a text that stands apart from any single movie translation. It may be a modest achievement, but it's still a good deed.

In Brief: A SERIOUS MAN (2009)

"Even though you can't figure it out, you'll still be responsible for it on the midterm!" That's Prof. Lawrence Gopnik closing a class on Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in the middle of a midlife meltdown in the latest film from Joel and Ethan Coen. This one has something to do with fables, and it's a kind of fable itself. As his wife leaves him and he lusts after a nude-sunbathing neighbor, as a student tries to bribe him into improving a midterm grade, as a neighbor's boat house encroaches on the property line, as his mad-genius brother gets into ever deeper legal trouble, as the Columbia Record Club calls him repeatedly over unpaid bills on albums he didn't know he was buying, Larry desperately seeks meaning in events. He yearns for a story that will explain things for him, as many people yearned in 1967.

Michael Stuhlbarg finds himself between an immigrant (do the Coens have a thing about Asians?) and a suspicious goy in A Serious Man. Below, he tries to absorb the essence of the historical moment.

In this period piece the Coens use a Jewish community as a microcosm of Sixties America, its slightly alien quality an analogue for a mannered formality in the larger culture that seems alien to us now, but its mystical tradition also symbolizing the stumbling spiritual seeking under way. The connection is most obvious in the tour-de-force "Second Rabbi" episode, in which the rabbi narrates the Tale of the Goy's Teeth to a Hendrix soundtrack. The Coens try the same juxtaposition to more jokey effect when the ancient Rabbi Marshak recites lyrics from a Jefferson Airplane song and the names of the band members -- except that he can't quite remember Jorma's last name. Can these wise men offer any guidance to Larry, his son Danny, or us in the audience? It seems so, though the record is mixed. Some of the advice he gets ("Look at the parking lot, Larry!") is pretty useless. Later, Larry's told, "Doing nothing is not bad," but as a Columbia billing rep explains, doing nothing means you get the Selection of the Month automatically, and you have to pay for it. On the other hand, the moral of the Goy's Teeth story seems to recommend patient endurance in riding out the spiritual storms of the moment, advice virtually borne out by the end as Larry's life seems to turn back for the better. It also seems borne out negatively when one more ordeal causes Larry to at last succumb to temptation and invite almost instant retribution -- including a literal storm that might well prove to be the wrath of God.

By doing without stars this time the Coens' writing comes to the forefront more than ever. They have an able, articulate cast -- almost too articulate. At times A Serious Man comes across like filmed theater, or even a radio play. I'm not saying that the film ever becomes uncinematic -- that'd be impossible for the brothers -- but it often comes out highly mannered, though I think it was meant that way. If the screenplay has a real weakness, it's in the concept of the main character. Larry seems like such a hapless nebbish that you're left wondering how he won a wife and achieved a career in the first place. But at least he has a grotesquely dysfunctional brother to make him look relatively normal. I don't know if it's the Coens' fault or Michael Stuhlbarg's if I find Larry somewhat unconvincing. I can't recall seeing the actor in any other role, so I don't know if he's overdoing the wimpiness or faithfully carrying out a flawed concept.

But because the story is really bigger than Larry, my problems with the character don't really damage my estimate of the film, which is that the Coens are still on their current winning streak (from No Country For Old Men forward) after an early-decade slump. I'll need to see it again a few times before I try to rank it in their overall filmography, but I think I'd agree with the Academy and place it among the ten best American films of 2009.