PERSONAL CANON: NOTHING MORE FOOLISH THAN A MAN CHASIN' HIS HAT

Miller's Crossing may or may not be the Coen brother's "best" movie. I think that argument exists to be made, but it's hard to get all the way through it with Barton Fink and Fargo over there in the corner, flexing their muscles. It is, though, almost certainly their most complicated and dense movie, both as a narrative and a character study - I have found it uniformly necessary to see Coen movies twice to fully suss out everything they have going on in terms of mood, symbol, and theme, but Miller's Crossing is unique in that it me two tries just to understand what was happening in the story. There is and has always been a subset of critics that view this complexity as a blind, disguising what is ultimately just a particularly elegant genre riff without much meat on its bones, and that's not a completely baseless accusation; certainly one of the reasons that the film is extra-hard to parse is entirely a function of how much of a genre film it is. It's something of a mash-up of Prohibition-era storytelling with '80s American indie filmmaking (though this film, the Coens' third, was their most studio-bound to that point), and the most obvious element of a very idiosyncratic screenplay is a exuberant passion for '20s slang used in a way that's not exactly period-correct, but is also much too brittle and artificial for it to come across as in any way timeless or fresh, no more in the 2010s than at its debut in 1990.

The most useful way to think of it, in my estimation, is not as a faithful recreation of a vintage gangster picture, nor as a faithful (and uncredited) adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's 1929 novel Red Harvest and 1930's The Glass Key - it's not really "faithful" in either of those capacities - but as something like a performance piece based on those ideas. It is a wildly artificial, mediated thing: nobody has every talked or acted like this in reality, nor even in any other movie. Perhaps the right way to describe it is as pageantry, an act of recreating the idea of a gangster story in a way that calls maximum attention to the artifice of it; other Coen films function in a similar way, as heavily abstracted ideas of a genre film rather than an actual version of a genre film (especially early on - The Hudsucker Proxy, from 1994, is the other clearest example of this tendency), but Miller's Crossing is probably the film where this trick pays the most dividends. It is to a great degree a film about performance, for its central character is a man whose entirely personality is mostly a matter of what he chooses to show to other people, and the somewhat arch brittleness of the whole exercise is a good context for that character to exist in.

That's another point of distinction: Miller's Crossing was the first Coen film that was primarily a character study, though like everything else about the film, it's not immediately apparent that this is the case. But what else do you call a movie in which every scene but one is told from the perspective of one man, Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne, in what is by miles and miles the best performance I've ever seen of his), and whose final shot openly invites us to apply what we've learned about him to a stunningly enigmatic expression on his face? It's a character study through and through, and that's not even the weird part; it's also a love story in which this same man devotes all his energy to protecting, destroying, and redeeming the only human being for whom he feels any demonstrated kind feeling. But we'll get there in a minute.

Miller's Crossing is, at its simplest, a Red Harvest-esque tale of a gang war, in which the vivacious Irish mobster Leo O'Bannon (Albert Finney) decides against the strenuous suggestions of Tom, his closest adviser and seeming best friend, not to let the Italian gangleader Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito) kill a chiseling Jewish bookie, Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro). This is in part because Leo doesn't want to let the uppity Caspar get his way; it's also because Bernie's sister Verna (Marcia Gay Harden), a noted piece of Bad News, is currently sleeping with Leo, and making him awfully happy. Once Tom fails to keep things from escalating, he splits with Leo and joins up with Caspar, apparently in the hope of entrenching himself high up in the trust of the city's new mob boss, but it's immediately clear that whatever game Tom's playing, Caspar's success and well-being are of only incidental concern.

There's so much going on in the script, in the performances, and in the aesthetic that it's almost impossible to synthesise it all into one simple reading, so I won't pretend that any of what I'm about to say is definitive, but to me, Miller's Crossing is above all about Tom's love for Leo, which doesn't necessarily have a homoerotic tint to it at all, though that's certainly a common enough reading among academic critics. Certainly, Miller's Crossing is unusually concerned with homosexuality, with three men identified as being involved in a destructive love triangle - the centrally problematic Bernie among them - and the word "queer" appearing in the dialogue far too often for it to simply be for period color. After all, while "queer" simply meant "odd and dysfunctional" in the '30s, by 1990 it had definitively transitioned into a synonym for "not-heterosexual nor traditionall-gendered". If the word was merely peppered in for flavor, like plenty of other archaisms, there'd be no point in digging in further, but "queer" is used a lot in Miller's Crossing; it is easily the most common obsolete slang term in dialogue. And with the obvious foregrounding of the gay supporting characters (which could simply be seen as literalising the coded homosexuals in movies like The Maltese Falcon or The Big Combo) in concert, it's really hard to doubt that the Coens meant for the audience to have gayness much on their mind in watching Miller's Crossing.

None of which proves, or even implies, that Tom is lusting after Leo, or that his affair with Verna is sublimating his desire to sleep with Leo, though that's a fine and durable reading. What it does absolutely demand is that we look at the film and see in it a muddying of gender constructs, and this is certainly something that we can see in Tom, right there on the surface. Compared to the usual gangster picture or film noir hero, he's not very "masculine": one of his defining traits is a tendency to be badly beaten in any physical altercation, even those with old men and women, not least because he typically doesn't even move to defend himself. He's a spectacularly incongruous figure in the hard-boiled surroundings, with people spouting out florid lines of dialogue that verge on self-parody, and multiple people dying in wide-eyed, unblinking machine gun barrages. He's passive, thoughtful (the only character who both thinks clearly and comes to the right conclusions), soft-spoken, and turned off by violence, none of them "tough guy movie hero" tropes, and certainly none of them shared by the other straight men in the movie. Even Verna (the only prominent women) and two of the three gay men act in more traditionally-male ways than Tom does.

This leaves him a dislocated protagonist, genderless and sensitive and physically weak in a genre that is one of the most quintessential masculine in the history of American film - doubly so if we allow that this is as much a noir pastiche as a gangster film pastiche. It is a universe which Tom can manipulate more easily than any other character, filling the role of a seer or wiseman or god among the rest of the cast (the much-repeated phrase "Jesus, Tom" is irresistible in suggesting that he is in but not of the world he walks in); but it is also a universe where he doesn't fit and isn't happy. Leo is a protective figure and focus of Tom's kindly feelings - prospective lover, prospective father, prospective friend, it's largely immaterial. Leo is the thing that enables Tom to function well in this environment, and he repays Leo with all of his love. The tragedy of the thing - and it depends a lot on how one reads the hugely ambiguous final scene, but it fits my interpretation - is that by fully giving himself over to Leo, Tom enables the exact unconscious betrayal by Leo that leaves him without a home or meaning in the end.

It's a sign of how much Miller's Crossing has going on that I can have wandered about for that many words and said so little about so much of it. Not even a word about the exquisite craftsmanship! That includes an absolutely perfect opening scene that rivals only the mini-movie at the start of Raising Arizona as my favorite sequence in the Coen filmography, a perfectly-timed tour of Polito's sweaty anxiety and Finney's blunt authority (both men are terrific throughout the film, but at their best in this scene), introducing Tom slowly and methodically; the sound design guiding our attention with laser precision; the dialogue warming up the film's strange vocabulary, plunging us into it but not without a guidemap; the driving editing by the film's namesake, Michael R. Miller (I believe this was the last Coen film that the brothers did not edit themselves). The Carter Burwell score is hands-down my favorite of his many glorious Coen soundtracks, drawing from Irish folk music, traditional Hollywood, and Italian influences to tell the entire emotional story in a way that you can follow without any other cues. And Barry Sonnenfeld's luminous cinematography is both beautiful and psychologically flawless, depicting the claustrophobic city with menacing but chiaroscuro-free shadows, and reaching masterpiece-level work in the nightmare setting of the eponymous woods, a hazy place of flatness and danger that deliberately quotes The Conformist without in any way copying it. It was his second to last project as director of photography, before jumping into the director's chair; and as much as I love some of his movies (and despise others) Miller's Crossing is all the evidence we need to know what a fantastic alternate career was cut short.

It is, if I may crudely try to wrap things up, the most thoroughly inexhaustible movie the Coens have ever made. It says less about humanity than Fargo, explores the boundaries of cinema less than Barton Fink, and is less altogether flawless than No Country for Old Men, but I'd reach for it ahead of any of them. It is complex and deep and slow to reveal its secrets, but I have consistently been thrilled to do the work necessary to pull them out, and am wholly content to call this my favorite, if that has any value, among all the Coens' films.

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MEAN GREENWICH TIME

The thing about Inside Llewyn Davis is that it has a phenomenally interesting narrative structure. That sounds like a euphemism, but it really isn't; among the many things the film is doing well, its structure is easily the most unmistakable and probably the most important. This is a story about a man in his late 20s trying to scrape out a living in the folk scene in New York's Greenwich Village in 1961, that pivots to a great degree on the question of whether the man in question - Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) - is capable of shifting who he is and how he behaves enough to break out of a cycle of disappointing himself and others that has been going on for quite a long while. Nor is it any spoiler to say that it looks like it will be going on for a while yet, as the film reaches its conclusion. And what screenwriters/directors/greatest living American filmmakers Joel & Ethan Coen do to explore and expand upon this theme of perpetual stasis, of being so comfortable a failure that one happily continues along in self-defeating paths in the full knowledge that they are self-defeating, is to build the entire shape of their film around it.

It becomes overt in the final scene, which I will not further discuss because the experience of seeing it for the first time is too special to spoil it, but by the time we get that far, it's already quite clear that this is the idea behind scenes which consistently interrupt narrative momentum rather than advance it, and the presence of conflicts that either resolve or die off before they're able to supply the film with a dramatic spine that it never acquires. It is a film about being stuck in a rut that places itself in exactly that situation. Llewyn can't escape his situation, because the very narrative concept of his universe denies the possibility of sustained change. It bears a significant resemblance to A Serious Man, most of all of the directors' films, though without quite such intense narrative nihilism; the feeling here is more that life keeps trudging without beginnings or endings, not that it slams into a brick wall and explodes. But the itchy sense of pointlessness in the character's life (not in the film, please understand!) is the same.

To anyone not automatically on the Coens' characteristic wavelength, I suppose this must look like the same stuff that people always accuse them of: punishing a character they think they're better than, by building a movie around him specifically designed to humiliate him and thwart him. For myself, I find this to be the single best argument they've ever made against that well-worn claim: Llewyn is a largely unpleasant and solipsistic person, the most readily unlikable protagonist in any Coen film since Barton Fink, but he's also probably the character for whom the filmmakers have demonstrated the most obvious sympathy throughout their career.

That, as much as anything, I believe to be driven by the other thing about Inside Llewyn Davis, which is that it's only the second Coen film in 23 years that hasn't been shot by cinematographer Roger Deakins. And while 2008's Burn After Reading found Emmanuel Lubezki funneling his own characteristic style into a channel that was, if not exactly faux-Deakins, still within the general neighborhood of his work with the Coens, Inside Llewyn Davis finds Bruno Delbonnel shooting a Bruno Delbonnel movie (incidentally, the fact that my favorite working directors have now worked with my three favorite working cinematographers gives me all kinds of fanboygasms).

That means a lot of soft focus, extensive color correction, and above all, gradations of soft light rather than sharp delineations between light and dark, and this is hugely important. The overall sense I have in watching the film is that it is hazy and green, not "nostalgic" in the way that a a lot of films use color schemes to look like a photo album, but giving the impression anyway of having come to us from across a long distance of time. More importantly, it is not as precise-looking as a Deakins project (I'm borrowing the word "precise" from a cinematographer friend, who like myself doesn't use it to mean that Delbonnel just kind of slops up his light and camera and wanders off for a sandwich, but that there's a fineness of detail work deliberately eschewed in his work), which also makes it less unforgiving. You can't watch Fargo's hard whites and think of anything besides how mercilessly it leaves its characters unprotected and naked; and you can't watch the fuzzy Inside Llewyn Davis and think of anything besides how gently it's caressing even the most outwardly awful human beings onscreen.

And there are some outwardly awful people, and almost nothing but one-note stock types, though this is certainly not a problem - quite the opposite, in fact. This is, after all, a Coen comedy, and the thing they have long done as well as anybody is to populate their screenplays with well-etched oddballs. Inside Llewyn Davis exaggerates this impulse somewhat, owing to its episode structure, which finds Llewyn crossing paths with a number of people over the course of a very stressful week, many of them symbolic in some way, only one of whom is so symbolic that it trumps character reality. The most screentime is given over to Carey Mulligan's Jean, a shrill harridan who treats Llewyn with undisguised scorn and regret for their ill-advised sexual dalliance, and in keeping with the film's pleasant feeling towards its cast, she's far more than just a nagging scold: for one thing, she's absolutely, demonstrably right about every nasty thing she says, something Llewyn recognises as readily as we do. For another, Mulligan's immensely fun portrayal of the character (who receives all of the very best lines in a film with top-drawer dialogue throughout) is shaded enough that we can detect the wounded inner self that leads her to be so tart and cruel, without either making the scenes about her, or muting their comedy.

But while she's the stand-out in an impressively packed ensemble, there are plenty of memorable figures throughout: John Goodman as a vulgar, imperious jazz snob (hardly subtle, but probably my favorite performance he's given in a Coen film), F. Murray Abraham as a solitary face of sane normality in the film - the only person in the movie, incidentally, who lives in the Midwest, which the Minnesotan Coens may or may not have intended as a commentary on personality types across America - Robin Bartlett and Ethan Phillips as a married pair of pointedly colorless but enthusiastic music aficionados, Garret Hedlund as a surreal but hugely effective parody (probably accidental) of the character he played in On the Road, and thus of the late-'50s and early-'60s intelligentsia generally. None of them make more than a small blip in Llewyn's travails, but all of them leave a huge impression as both caricature and fleshed-out cameo simultaneously. Only Justin Timberlake has a hard time leaving a mark, in no small part because of how impossible it is for him to pull focus from Mulligan, with whom he shares a good deal of his small screentime.

Still it's Llewyn's odyssey (and his Odyssey, which is purposefully alluded to; this is an anti-Odyssey as thoroughly as O Brother, Where Art Thou? is an Odyssey homage), and he's a captivating figure throughout. In a just and fair world, Isaac would now become one of our new great indie stars and character actors, though I'm not dumb enough to assume that it will play out that way; but it's a truly magnificent performance, among the best that the Coens have ever featured in a film, largely because the actor has to carry the whole thing like virtually none of their protagonists ever have. There's a lot of meat to the role: self-loathing, selfishness, transcendent love of art, guilt, impatience, and a peculiar frenemy relationship with a housecat (the best movie cat in years, I might add) and Isaac combines these different emotions in surprising and moving ways, enough to make this irritating, unreliable mess of a man into someone remarkably human.

It's still a Coen movie: there's still sarcasm, dry dialogue, absurd cod-symbolism, and a sense that it's not taking itself nearly as seriously as most of its audience ever will. It's not, like, treacly. But it is one of their warmest films, poking holes in our fantasies about the '60s, artists, and New York City, and refusing to deny that people can be really shitty to each other almost constantly, but doing it from a place of love and understanding. It's not their funniest, prettiest, or best movie, but in a lot of unexpected and hugely rewarding ways, it might be their most mature.

9/10

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