Jackie Brown

December 16, 2018 / andrewmisk / Leave a comment

Jackie Brown (1997)

Dir. Quentin Tarantino

Written by: Quentin Tarantino (from the novel Rum Punch by Elmore Leonard)

Starring: Pam Grier, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Forster

Watching Jackie Brown so shortly after watching and thinking deeply about Inglourious Basterds will likely lead me to shortchange the former film. Among the Tarantino movies that I have in my collection, and in his filmography, generally, Jackie Brown has always felt like an outlier. It’s the only Tarantino movie to be directly adapted from another source, its visual style is more coherent and it’s far removed from the pastiche style that Tarantino typically employs, and its narrative feels somewhat more conventional than the cartoonish, over-the-top filmic universes that Tarantino often explores. It’s a true crime thriller like Pulp Fiction, but it feels grittier, lacking much of the humor and miraculous coincidence that that film traffics in. Jackie Brown is a movie that I’ve owned since I started seriously getting into movies, and during high school it was a movie that I watched frequently, maybe even more so than Pulp Fiction, but like many of my favorites from that time, it’s a movie that has fallen by the wayside for me. Watching Jackie Brown again, for the first time in at least a decade, it doesn’t quite hold up to my lofty memories of it but I still came away from my viewing greatly enjoying the movie.

The titular Jackie Brown (Grier) is a middle-aged flight attendant who supplements her income by smuggling money and drugs for Ordell (Jackson), an LA gun runner and smuggler. Jackie is caught arriving in the United States with $50,000 and some cocaine, and is arrested by ATF agent Ray Nicolette (Michael Keaton), who is building a case against Ordell, and who tries to compel Jackie to testify against him. When Jackie refuses, she’s sent to jail, and Ordell subsequently bails her out, introducing her to bail bondsman Max Cherry (Forster), who is immediately struck by Jackie’s beauty and her personality. With Jackie out of jail, Ordell considers killing her to protect himself and prevent her from cooperating with the ATF, but she convinces him to go along with a scheme that will allow him to smuggle enough money out of the country to retire. Jackie pretends to work with Nicolette in a sting to catch Ordell, while telling Ordell that she’ll use the cover of the sting to smuggle a much larger amount of money right under Nicolette’s nose, however unbeknownst to everyone else, Jackie and Max have devised a plan to double cross them all.

Tarantino, a filmmaker who even at this fairly early point in his career was defined by his auteur status and his desire to work exclusively with and from his own scripts, found a perfect match in choosing to adapt Elmore Leonard. Leonard’s work is characterized by its fascination with crime, street-level characters, and punchy dialogue, and all of these are regular themes in Tarantino’s screenplays. Tarantino makes some meaningful changes to Rum Punch, most significantly changing Jackie’s race, but Leonard stated that he felt Jackie Brown was the best adaptation of any of his work, and it’s hard to see a director more suited to filming this story than Quentin Tarantino. He crafts a Gordian knot of a caper, with so many double crosses and characters whose allegiances seem to be constantly shifting that it’s an easy movie to lose track of on an initial viewing. Repeat viewers, however, will find a great deal to enjoy in this lesser-regarded Tarantino film, as the early rush of following the film’s complex heist narrative gives way to the simple pleasures of getting to know these characters and watch them interact in a pressure cooker of a situation. While the film’s third act gets as action-packed and murderous as a typical Tarantino film, its earlier sections are much more discursive and find Tarantino writing some of his strongest dialogue. He has always been a master at capturing modern conversational parlance, but Tarantino’s keen ear combined with Leonard’s knack for words makes for some really well-written characters and fun verbal sparring, throughout.

This cause is helped by the assemblage of talent on display in Jackie Brown. Even for a Tarantino movie, this cast is ridiculously stacked. Combining A-listers like Samuel L. Jackson and Robert DeNiro, who plays Ordell’s friend and fellow criminal, Louis, with genre stars ripe for a career resurgence in Pam Grier and Robert Forster is a recipe for success. DeNiro plays rather against type as an incompetent lay about, but his performance is far from phoned in. Keaton is typically wry and sardonic, nailing the condescension and attitude of a career-minded cop. Even actors who have bit parts in the movie, such as Chris Tucker, who plays one of Ordell’s smugglers, Beaumont, nail their scenes. Tucker only has one scene in the movie before he is murdered by Ordell, but his character sets into motion the events of the rest of the film, and Tucker brings his usual manic energy to that scene and makes it incredibly memorable. Tarantino is a director who consistently proves that there are no small roles, and the types of star turns and comeback performances seen in his films help reliably dictate that he is rarely at a loss to cast his movies with huge stars.

While the entire cast of Jackie Brown is worthy of mention, the movie really belongs to its three principles who each turn in inspired and unique performances. Forster’s lonely bail bondsman is an all-time great performance and he was recognized with an Academy Award nomination for it. Early in the film, his entire being exudes regret and heaviness, but after Cherry meets Jackie, Forster starts to light up. He maintains a gruff exterior but his performance becomes airier, and perhaps more assured. Ordell is one of my favorite Samuel L. Jackson characters, alongside Jules Pitt in Pulp Fiction, and he informs the character with the same sort of fury. Ordell is a memorable villain, ruthless and charming, and Jackson’s own additions to the character only make him more memorable. He’s equally capable of spitting convincing profanity and vitriol, soothing assurances, and genuinely funny asides, and he often peppers single conversations with all three. Samuel L. Jackson often gets oversimplified as an actor, but even in a performance that is very clearly on brand for him, and which helped to craft the stereotypical Jackson performance, he displays the true dynamism that makes him a great actor. Of course, though, it’s Pam Grier who really steals the show. The movie was practically written for her, and she turns back time to the 1970s with a vintage performance. She’s poised, cunning, smart, tough, and sexy, and she gives the character a world-weariness that she needs. Jackie finds herself caught up in bad situations, but she never loses control, consistently maintaining the upper hand, and Grier’s performance speaks to that level of even-keeled mastery of self. Grier’s Jackie Brown is iconic, and it introduced her as an actress to an entirely new generation.

I don’t know that enough people think about Jackie Brown anymore. It’s over 20 years old, and I think that it has gotten vastly overshadowed by Tarantino’s other films. I would say that it is likely the film of his that I, personally, think about the least other than Death Proof, and that’s really a shame. Jackie Brown was a box office success, and a major critical success that only continued Tarantino’s stellar run in the 1990s, and despite this it doesn’t seem to carry the same sort of cache or prestige as the rest of his body of work. I imagine that that probably has something to do with the fact that the movie is an adaptation, but mostly to do with the fact that it followed up a movie as radical and popular as Pulp Fiction. Jackie Brown is a great thriller packed with excellent performances, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the kind of narrative reinvention that its predecessor represented. That isn’t to say, though, that Jackie Brown isn’t a stellar thriller that masterfully blends elements of blacksploitation and noir, and that it isn’t absolutely worth seeking out. I think that Tarantino is a filmmaker who almost always makes extremely fun movies, and the experience of sinking into the world of Jackie Brown is an unquestionably fun cinematic undertaking. I’m really glad that I was able to revisit it for this project, because there was so much about it that I had elided in my memory, and because it was just a really, really fun movie to watch. If I’m being honest, it’s probably the first Tarantino that I’ll return to once this project is finished, as well.

Following

June 3, 2018May 30, 2018 / andrewmisk / Leave a comment

Following (1998)

Dir. Christopher Nolan

Written by: Christopher Nolan

Starring: Jeremy Theobald, Alex Haw, Lucy Russell

I’m always a fan of going back to a director’s debut film, or at least their very early work, to see how many of their directorial traits and tics are on display from the inception of their film career. Even if I’m not a huge fan of a filmmaker’s body of work, I think that it’s a neat exercise to go back and explore some of their early films just to get a sense of how they’ve developed as an artist, and maybe why I never developed an affinity for their work in the first place. Christopher Nolan is one such filmmaker, for whom the bloom came off the rose with me relatively quickly. Although I do really enjoy a handful of his films, overall I’ve never really understood what all the hype was about. I feel that Nolan’s early work is still his best, with Memento certainly standing out as my favorite film of his, and that his output has suffered greatly from the popularity and public intrigue he gained after filming the massively popular Dark Knight trilogy. As such, I enjoyed going back to Following to remember the qualities that I really enjoyed in Nolan’s work before his films became maximalist puzzles. I appreciate the miniscule scope that he works on in his debut, and the way that this cloistered aesthetic helps to build a sense of tension and anticipation. Though it doesn’t always deliver in the way that Nolan’s next couple of films do, Following is, nonetheless, a well-crafted and original neo-noir thriller, and an obvious indication that Nolan would go on to perfect some of the techniques he tries out in this small film.

Following tells the story of a young aspiring writer (Theobald) who decides that he will begin following strangers throughout London in order to gain insight into their daily lives and to gain inspiration for his stories. He establishes rules for himself to minimize his risk of being caught, and, likely, to assuage his own fears of his latent voyeurism, but he quickly starts to break these important rules. The first rule that he breaks is that he begins to follow a particular man, Cobb (Haw), for several days in a row, which leads to Cobb cornering him and demanding to know why he is being followed. After a brief discussion, Cobb reveals to the young man, who tells him his name is “Bill,” that he is a burglar, and he invites Bill to join him in breaking into a home. Cobb rarely takes anything of value, instead preferring to use his burglary as a way to insert himself into his victims’ lives, shaking up their sense of normalcy and security. This approach to breaking and entering speaks to Bill’s desire to peep into other people’s lives, and he quickly takes to the job, forming a sort of partnership with Cobb. Bill quickly gets in over his head, becoming involved with a woman (Russell) whose apartment he and Cobb have burgled, and offering to steal some photos that a gangster is using to blackmail her. However, in this duplicitous world, no one is who they seem to be, and Bill begins to realize that he’s a pawn being used in a larger scheme.

Narratively, Nolan does a great deal with a fairly straightforward premise. He shows an innate understanding of how to create tension and suspense by harnessing a particular visual aesthetic, filming his subjects in a near documentary style, utilizing a lot of handheld shots and close up framings. Following is proof that necessity is the mother of invention, as Nolan shows great creativity and resourcefulness in achieving a coherent vision despite his film’s paltry $6,000 budget. He uses the grainy look of 16mm film stock to his advantage, evoking a sort of realism and heightening the film’s sense of place by giving it the look of a newsreel. Shooting on location also serves to increase this verisimilitude, with the apartments that Cobb burgles feeling like real, lived-in spaces, increasing the queasy feeling of violation that the film induces. It’s truly impressive how affective Following is, with its ripped-from-the-headlines style inducing major paranoia, while the pleasures that Cobb gets from rifling through his victims’ possessions is truly perverse and unsettling. Nolan achieves all of this while exhibiting an extreme and necessary minimalism in his shooting style, choosing to capture these sick acts simply, allowing the mundane to become foreign and alarming before the audience’s eyes.

The sense of disorientation and unease is furthered by Nolan’s now familiar trope of telling his story out of order. The narrative jumps around, beginning at the end as Bill is recounting his story to a police officer, hoping to absolve himself of a murder. Like Memento after it, Nolan uses a nonlinear structure in Following to represent the main character’s state of mental unrest, but unlike that later film, which unfolds in reverse, Following presents its story in a jumbled mix of cut scenes, with past, present, and future colliding haphazardly. This structure is representative of Bill’s own inability to process and make sense of the double cross that has been played on him by Cobb and the woman whose apartment they burgle; the audience is witnessing his attempt to shuffle through the events of the previous few days, trying to find the reason that he was chosen as a patsy. Nolan’s use of nonlinear narrative structure would become more nuanced and layered as his career would continue, but it is nonetheless incredibly effective in its nascent form in Following. The randomness of the story’s unfolding keeps the audience lurching and confused, requiring close attention to detail until all of the film’s principals have been introduced, and the broader strokes of the timeline have been established. Though the film does settle into a bit of rhythm by its midpoint, its twist ending is still a sharp left turn that makes perfect sense in retrospect, but is nearly impossible to really see coming. I normally hate films that incorporate a hard twist in their final act, because it is so rarely achieved gracefully in the context of the narrative, but rather than depending on its shocking ending, Following incorporates the ending into the larger disorienting context of the narrative, providing one last, satisfying, gut punch to the audience’s sense of narrative surety.

What I think I appreciate about watching Following after having seen Nolan’s career unfold in the ensuing 20 years, is the surehandedness with which he wields his nonlinear structure to bolster the effects of his simple narrative. As his career continues and his films become more complex and maximalist, I’ve started to feel that his narrative twists and turns have become more gimmicky and less in service to constructing a compelling narrative. In his earlier pictures, up to and including The Prestige, it felt to me that Nolan’s use of novel storytelling techniques was in service to constructing a larger structure. It was a great suture of form and content, with the storytelling devices informing the overall narrative and vice versa. Unfortunately, over the last decade, I feel like Nolan has been falling into a trap that seems to befall many artists who become overly associated with a particular style. His films have become less formally innovative while relying on convenient “twists” or storytelling peculiarities, such as concurrent narrative threads, or the nesting doll structure of Inception, to increasingly disappointing results. I feel that Nolan has started making films with a “gotcha” premise or a superficially confusing structure, which lend his newer films being thought of as “smarter” than his earlier output. I don’t think that movies like Inception or Interstellar are bad, but I think that their cinematic importance has been overrated, while his taut, more narratively interesting earlier films like Following aren’t nearly as celebrated.

I imagine if I had seen Following when it was released in the late 1990s, I wouldn’t have at all predicted that Christopher Nolan would become one of the most successful and critically acclaimed filmmakers of his time. The debut certainly points to his ability to craft a compelling story and capture memorable visuals, but it really doesn’t indicate the rapid and tremendous rise to fame that Nolan would soon embark on. Even after seeing Memento, which I loved at the time and, disappointingly, won’t be writing about for this project, I would have assumed that Nolan would go on to become a respected indie auteur rather than the creative mind behind some of the 21^st century’s biggest blockbusters. However, that’s exactly what Nolan has become, for better or for worse, so going back to watch a tiny movie like Following feels highly anachronistic. There are definitely seeds of Nolan’s style at work in the movie, but it feels divorced from nearly everything that he has made since taking on the Batman license. Nolan’s career path has pushed him to making bigger and more ambitious films than Following or Memento, but I’d be very interested in seeing him return to his gritty roots and strip away some of the high production gloss that he’s enjoyed for his most recent projects. Clearly, he has an affinity for pulp, so a return to the noir genre would be an unsurprising and welcome turn for his career, in my opinion. I maintain a respect for and an understanding of the craft that Nolan brings to his films, but they’ve rarely connected with me in meaningful ways, and I think another hardboiled narrative that drips grit and realism like Following might be the thing that I need to bring me back into the fold.

Brick

August 6, 2017August 6, 2017 / andrewmisk / Leave a comment

Brick (2005)

Dir. Rian Johnson

Written by: Rian Johnson

Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Around the time that Brick was released, I really wasn’t watching a whole lot of contemporary movies. In 2006, I was just starting to settle into my life in Pittsburgh, having moved here permanently that fall. I was gearing up for my final few semesters of college, and most of my movie watching was done for classes. At that time, I was watching mostly classics and genre films in school, but I still kept my Netflix account for newer movies. Although I wasn’t using it nearly as frequently as I had been in the first couple of years of college, I still made the time squeeze in movies for pleasure, watching them late at night on a laptop, often with a buzz on. This is how I first experienced Brick: receiving a disc in a little red envelope, watching it somewhat distractedly, and sending it back quickly. It didn’t make a huge impression on me that first time, but I did appreciate its transition of a classic noir narrative to the seemingly more benign setting of a high school. I thought it was a good movie, but I didn’t quite agree with the universal fawning over the film that I had read on most of the film and pop culture websites I was following at the time. However, it stuck around in the back of my head long enough that I eventually picked up a used copy of it at the Exchange a few years later. I’m glad I did because Brick is the sort of movie that rewards close watching and gets better with repeated viewings.

Brick’s convoluted plot is a classic noir detective story, inspired by the work of Dashiell Hammett, and featuring the classic tropes of the gumshoe, the damsel in distress, the femme fatale, and the shadowy underworld figures. Johnson chooses to resituate these familiar elements in a new setting, however, placing his mystery in the sunny setting of a southern California high school. Brendan (Gordon-Levitt) is investigating the disappearance of his former girlfriend, Emily (Emilie de Ravin), who he fears has gotten mixed up in some trouble involving a local drug ring. Brendan is a loner, modeled on the classic noir detective, but he is assisted in his investigation by his friend, the Brain (Matt O’Leary), who helps Brendan track down loose threads and connect the dots in the search for Emily. Brendan is able to arrange a meeting with Emily where she tells him that he has to let her go, and to stop trying to save her, but of course he can’t. Brendan steals a note of Emily’s which leads him to a drainage ditch near the high school where he finds her dead body, and he takes it upon himself to find her murderer. Along the way, he meets Laura (Nora Zehetner), a high school socialite who was friends with Emily and who takes in interest in Brendan, though she may be playing both sides. Laura is also friendly with The Pin (Lukas Haas), a local heroin dealer who Brendan believes may have been involved in Emily’s murder. Brendan is able to infiltrate the Pin’s gang and after doing so he’s able to unravel the mystery of Emily’s murder, but the film forms a tightly wound knot that he must unwind to do so. Brick ends like so many classic noir films, with its detective standing alone, having tracked down the answers he wanted, only to be confronted with whole new questions and problems.

One of the most memorable and immediately conspicuous elements of Brick is its script. The film’s dialogue is anachronistically hard boiled, with its teenaged protagonists spouting rapid-fire line after line of tough talk. At first, the wordiness and odd phrasing of the dialogue can be a little tough to adjust to, but it quickly develops into beautiful, florid prose. Johnson wrote the script (originally conceived of as a novella) as a tribute to the work of Hammett, and he captures that authorial voice perfectly. Inserting period dialogue into a modern setting could have come off as a gimmick or a crutch, but the performances of the young cast sell it as authentic. In fact, the dialogue helps to define and create a unique sense of place in the film, creating a sort of fantasy world that these characters are inhabiting. Although it is very clearly set in the real world and its tone and subject matter are dark, Brick also has the feeling of a teenage fantasy, where the adults have vacated and left the children to their own devices. The dialogue enhances this sense of fantasy, giving the impression that Brendan is playing detective, mimicking his favorite films and pulp novels.

The other thing that helps make Johnson’s unusual dialogue choices work is Gordon-Levitt’s strong performance as Brendan. He appears in every scene of the movie, and he carries the movie admirably in a breakthrough performance. Aside from just embracing the period dialogue, Gordon-Levitt embodies the noir detective in other ways. He does a good job of portraying Brendan’s mental processes in a physical, observable way. The viewer can see the wheels turning in his head as he and the Brain meet up behind the school to discuss the details of their case. Although Brick uses a flashback structure, the audience is asked to unravel much of the mystery at the same time as Brendan, and watching Gordon-Levitt portray that discovery is part of the film’s appeal. Gordon-Levitt plays Brendan as doggedly persistent, hell-bent in his pursuit of the truth about Emily’s murder. His performance is equal parts verbal, playing the role of both the conman and the wise guy, and physical, though he isn’t necessarily a man of action. His physicality comes more in his ability to portray a kid who can take a beating. As the movie goes on, Gordon-Levitt often adopts a hobbled gait as Brendan’s frequent encounters with school bullies and lowlifes leaves him on the wrong end of a lot of punishment. Johnson often chooses to focus on his feet as he creates a sort of shambolic ballet, seemingly out of control but all the while possessing a dancer’s grace.

Focusing on characters’ feet is just one of the bold stylistic choices that Johnson makes throughout the film. If the film’s script is totally indebted to hardboiled fiction, its visual aesthetic is something far afield from the typical noir aesthetic. For the most part, Johnson trades in the chiaroscuro and cramped interiors of the classic noir for sunny, wide open exteriors. He frequently chooses to frame his subjects in cutaways, focusing on shoes or eyes, but he returns often to long master shots that dwarf the characters against their environment, be it a parking lot, a drainage ditch, or the startlingly empty high school. If the typical noir used its visual aesthetic to present a world closing in on its protagonists, Brick presents us with a world that is wide open, but rather than representing a freeing experience for the film’s characters, that wide open space seems like a challenge too daunting to overcome. Overall, the film has a kinetic visual style, often employing smash cuts and quick zooms and pans to imply violence or narrative action. The decision to tie narrative point-of-view so directly to Brendan also helps to drive tension, as the audience is left in the dark and has to take the ride along with him. There are several zigs and zags along the way to the discovery of Emily’s killer, and many of the film’s revelations are truly shocking, including its pseudo-twist ending.

If I had any complaint with Brick, it would probably be that, aside from Gordon-Levitt, the rest of the cast isn’t given enough to work with. Obviously, the film is highly tied to Brendan’s point-of-view and his experience of the world, but that is at the detriment of fleshing out the supporting cast. Haas does give a somewhat interesting performance as the Pin, playing the character with a quiet intensity. However, costuming decisions with the character (he wears a cape and has one leg that is significantly shorter than the other) may be more subtly interesting than anything Haas does with the performance. Emilie de Ravin just isn’t in the film very much. She has an early scene with Brendan where she tries to convince him to forget about her, but otherwise she mostly appears in dream sequences as a silent, reanimated corpse. She was doing good work on LOST as a damsel in distress type of character around the same time that Brick was made, but she simply doesn’t get the opportunities in the film to fully flesh out the role. Nora Zehetner’s Laura should be the most interesting supporting character, as she is ostensibly the film’s femme fatale, and her motives are possibly duplicitous from the start, but she is often reduced to pretty screen filler. She helps Brendan with his investigation and hints that she may be doing so because she’s always had her eye on him, but she rarely rises above the trope of the popular girl who wants to manipulate the class oddball. Ultimately, that’s the biggest weakness of the film. Johnson has created a complicated, nuanced character in Brendan, and that character is brought to life by Gordon-Levitt, but the rest of the cast rarely rise above the standard teen movie tropes of the popular girl, the burnout, the jock, etc. It’s a shame because the film offers up a wholly original take on both the teen movie and the noir, only to be largely peopled with cardboard cutouts.

Overall, though, Brick is a winner. It’s a movie about teens that doesn’t dumb itself down to its audience, instead offering a glimpse into high school life that is artful and fantastical. If you remove the murder from the film, it becomes about a young man trying to come to terms with his girlfriend dumping him and his inability to move on. That’s a relatable subtext for any young person, and it serves as the film’s emotional heart. The bones around that heart are the complex murder mystery that Johnson weaves, and then dresses in the trappings of the film noir. There are a lot of constituent components to Brick, but they ultimately combine to form a film that embraces and elevates its influences. It’s full of subtle allusions to classic films, but it is never derivative thanks to Johnson’s kinetic visual style. The director’s continued stylistic evolution, genre experiments, and knack for storytelling and world building has now landed him a spot helming the next film in the Star Wars saga, but his debut is still probably my favorite film of his. Despite its small budget and relatively unknown cast, Brick had all the indications that its director and star would be on to bigger things very soon.

Blood Simple

June 18, 2017June 18, 2017 / andrewmisk / Leave a comment

Blood Simple (1984)

Dir. Joel Coen

Written by: Joel & Ethan Coen

Starring: Frances McDormand, John Getz, Dan Hedaya, Samm-Art Williams, M. Emmet Walsh

I’ve written before about the breadth and depth of Coen Brothers’ filmography. Blood Simple is a perfect example of that depth. Their debut film, it serves as an artistic statement that would define the scope of their career. It finds the brothers arriving on the cinematic scene, nearly fully formed. Though later works would achieve more popularity or prestige, Blood Simple stands out as one of the great debuts in all of film, resembling more the work of an established filmmaker at the height of his or her powers than the first offering from a couple of neophytes. It establishes their interest in genre filmmaking, and many of their trademark cinematic devices appear in the film, at least in rudimentary forms. Far from serving as a still-developing sketch, or an indicator of potential artistry, Blood Simple is a fully formed near-masterpiece in its own right. It’s a dark tale of murder, adultery, and deception set against the backdrop of the Texas desert that winds itself up to a frenzy by the third act and maintains a breakneck pace towards disaster. An unyielding thriller that can keep an audience on the edge of their seat for the duration, the film stands up among the best work that the Coen Brothers have done in their long and fruitful career, despite still being somewhat underseen when compared to their more popular works.

The film opens with Ray (Getz) and Abby (McDormand) driving down a Texas highway at night. Their conversation concerns Abby’s failing marriage to Marty (Hedaya), who also happens to own the bar that Ray works at. Though their stated destination is Houston, the two pull into a motel and spend the night. Marty, suspecting their affair, has hired a private investigator, Loren Visser, (Walsh) to follow them, and he snaps a few photos of them in their hotel room as proof of the affair. When he provides this proof to Marty, the detective implies that for the right price he’d be willing to eliminate Marty’s problem, though Marty initially turns him down. Eventually, though, Marty seeks out Visser, hiring him to kill both Ray and Abby for $10,000. Rather than go through with the hit, Visser breaks into Ray’s home and steals Abby’s gun, then takes photos of them sleeping again. He returns to Marty with doctored photos, depicting the sleeping couple as corpses riddled with bullet holes, and after receiving his payment he double-crosses Marty, shooting him in the chest with Abby’s gun and leaving him to bleed out. Later, Ray returns to the bar to find an unresponsive Marty and Abby’s gun. Thinking that she has killed Marty, he decides to cover up the murder. The ensuing cover up leads to miscommunications between Ray and Abby, with each thinking that the other is responsible for the killing of Marty, while Visser engages in a deadly pursuit of the couple, hoping to erase any link to his crime.

Blood Simple is a master class in economical storytelling. At its core, it’s a straightforward revenge story, and even as its narrative gets more complex with the added double-crosses and misunderstandings, it doesn’t lose any focus or narrative momentum. The film essentially has only five characters, the previously mentioned four, plus Meurice (Williams), the other bartender at Marty’s bar, who finds himself tangentially caught up in the murder plot. Largely though, the film revolves around the principals in the love triangle and the murderous Visser, as they play out a savage game of cat and mouse in the Texas back country. With a few notable exceptions, the Coens eschew narrative ambiguity or overarching mystery as drivers of tension in the film, instead letting the audience in on all of the details of the story. Watching the characters make questionable decisions and wrong assumptions about one another heightens the tension for the audience, as the spectators are able to see the Greek tragedy unfolding in front of them, even as the characters are blind to their surroundings. In fact, the title comes from a turn of phrase in which someone is said to be “blood simple” after being rendered incapable of higher thought or decision making in the face of violent surroundings. The film makes the viewer want to reach through the screen and shake Ray and Abby, warning them of the impending doom that’s closing in.

The Coens also heighten narrative tension through the film’s masterful appropriation of classical noir visual style. The Coens have transported their crime drama from its usual urban setting to the middle of nowhere in the Texas desert, but they otherwise retain many of the stylistic cues of the genre. Aside from a few sunbaked exteriors, the film is dark, scenes often employing contrasting chiaroscuro lighting. Shadows are extreme, with characters’ faces often partially or totally obscured by darkness as they issue straightforward, hardboiled dialogue. There is more than enough visual information in the frame to make up for the paucity of verbal context. The shadows reflect both the dubious nature of the characters’ morality, and their duality. In this film, there are no true heroes; everyone is kissed by darkness in some way. Borrowing a trick from Sergio Leone, the Coens frame their characters in claustrophobic close-up, highlighting every pore and bead of sweat. At times, lazy flies are allowed to buzz in and out of the frame, crawling along Visser’s brow while he meets with Marty to discuss their dirty deals. To say the film is atmospheric would be an understatement, as its mise-en-scene does more than suggest the seediness of its environs, it insists upon the palpability of the griminess of this universe. At times, the desperation practically leaps from the screen.

In addition to successfully adapting the tropes of the noir film, the Coens begin to establish their own unique visual and narrative style in Blood Simple. The slow burning tension of later films like Fargo and No Country For Old Men is on display here, with the brothers already proving to be masters of pace and timing. The film’s first two acts are languorously paced. Scenes of dialogue are allowed to play out slowly, either unexpectedly erupting into acts of violence, or, rather, expected violence is denied. The Coens punctuate their shot/reverse shot with stylish tracking shots and rapid zooms that force the viewer to take notice. The final third of the film boils over with tension as Visser closes in on Abby and Ray, stalking them through her apartment. The characters have all gotten on a runaway train, and they’re forced to pursue the ride to its logical end. The violence in the film, as in most of the brothers’ later films, is matter-of-fact, an unfortunate consequence of the corrupted world in which these characters live. It seems that the Coens enjoy spinning yarns about everyday people who find themselves embroiled in larger schemes, and the roots of that narrative preoccupation are in Blood Simple.

The performances in the film are all top notch, with the Coens already showing a deft hand at directing actors. In what was her first ever film role, McDormand is perfect as Abby. Her performance gives the character just enough subtle edge to keep her true nature in the dark until the film’s end. It’s hinted that Abby might be some sort of femme fatale, but her actual level of duplicity is hard to pin down. She’s a woman torn between a man she loves and one she fears, but McDormand never plays her as a dependent. She has steely resolve, and agency, that grows to a lethal capacity in the film’s final showdown with Visser. She’s able to balance manic outbursts of emotion and quietly determined acts of violence, and remain convincing in both circumstances. Neither Getz nor Hedaya are given much dialogue to work with, but they embody both of their roles with a lived-in physicality. Hedaya’s Marty haunts most of the film as a dead or dying presence, his body often visible on the edges of the frame as a reminder of the murder that has embroiled all of these characters. Getz plays Ray as a working stiff who’s simply in over his head, but his workmanlike approach belies a darker side to the character. When it comes time to dispose of Marty’s body, Ray drives him out to the desert where he finds out that Marty is mortally wounded, but not dead yet. He proceeds to bury him alive in a harrowing, slowly-paced scene that escalates the stakes and the tension in the film. There is no dialogue, but both actors give memorable performances, with Hedaya struggling mightily to stay alive while Getz slowly, steadily shovels dirt into his face.

It’s Walsh, however, who steals the film with his unhinged portrayal of the sleazy detective, Visser. Unlike the other characters in the film, there is little duality to Visser. Walsh plays him as purely evil, and in fact, he seems to enjoy and revel in his impurity. He breathes malice and corruption into his words, and his physical performance is palpably slimy. Visser seems to ooze into locked apartments, snapping his covert photographs and stealing bits of evidence, his stealth belied by the actor’s large stature. When it is time for him to pursue his quarry in earnest, Walsh plays Visser as a ruthless, efficient hunter, stalking Abby through her apartment until she is finally able to get the drop on him. Walsh’s performance is similar to John Goodman’s performance as Charlie Mundt in Barton Fink. Both characters come to symbolize evil incarnate in their filmic worlds, but unlike Mundt, Visser is rotten to the core. Where Goodman’s good-natured charm shines through some of Mundt’s cracks, Walsh never allows any light to permeate Visser’s dark patina. Even his humor is black as the Texas asphalt over which he tracks Ray and Abby.

In lesser hands, a movie like Blood Simple might add up to just another paint-by-numbers pot boiler. The familiar elements are all present here: a spurned lover spurred to murderous rage, cases of double-cross and mistaken identity, a Chekhov’s gun which fulfills its narrative promise. However, the Coens routinely elevate basic subject matter and genre filmmaking to the level of complex, high art, and that streak is begun with their debut. They take a very straightforward story in Blood Simple and filter it through excellently realized character work and impeccable visual style to produce an end result that is engaging and visionary. Most of their films are genre experiments, but rarely are they as pure as Blood Simple. The film sets out to deliver a compelling tale of murder and do it in a suspenseful manner, despite removing narrative ambiguity, and it succeeds entirely. Like the characters in the film, once things start to break bad, the audience is simply along for the ride, hoping to survive to the end. When that end arrives, the audience has been taken on a sickening ride that explores the depths of moral depravity and human capacity for malice. Many of the Coen Brothers’ narrative and stylistic obsessions are on display here, so it is a must watch for any fan of their corpus, as well as any fan of well-realized suspense and crime films.

The Big Lebowski

May 21, 2017May 21, 2017 / andrewmisk / Leave a comment

The Big Lebowski (1998)

Dir. Joel & Ethan Coen

Written by: Joel & Ethan Coen

Starring: Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Julianne Moore

I wrote a good bit about how much I enjoy the Coen Brothers in general when I was writing about Barton Fink last month, so I’ll keep this post more limited directly to The Big Lebowski. However, I will say that the movie’s immense mainstream popularity undercuts the fact that it’s one of the brothers’ deepest dives into filmic nostalgia. Lebowski is a celebration of old Hollywood, a deconstruction of the detective genre and film noir mode of storytelling, with shout outs to classical Hollywood pictures throughout. The nuances of the film are probably overshadowed for a lot of audiences by the story of what has become one of the classic characters in all of cinema. The Big Lebowski is a film that is equally as quotable as it is esoteric, a film with many layers, and standing tall above them all is Jeff Daniels’s iconic portrayal of Jeffrey Lebowski, the Dude, an armchair philosopher and hero for the slacker generation, one of God’s own prototypes, too weird to live and too rare to die, out there taking it easy for all us sinners.

For those who may have not seen the film yet, The Big Lebowski centers on a case of mistaken identity, in which The Dude (Bridges) is mistaken for the identically-named Jeffrey Lebowski (the titular Big Lebowski, played by David Huddleston) an aging millionaire whose trophy wife, Bunny (Tara Reid), owes money all over town, including to pornographer Jackie Treehorn (Ben Gazzara) who sends two thugs to beat the money out of The Dude. When The Dude fails to produce any money, pointing out that it’s fairly obvious a millionaire would not live in his tiny one bedroom apartment, one of the thugs proceeds to pee on The Dude’s rug. The Dude seeks out The Big Lebowski hoping for recompense for the soiled rug, which really tied the room together, and this sets the events of the plot into motion. After their initial meeting, The Big Lebowski contacts The Dude, telling him that Bunny has been kidnapped, and he needs The Dude to get her back. In turn, The Dude enlists the help of his buddies Walter Sobchak (Goodman) and Donny Kerabatsos (Buscemi), who are happy to help out in between games of bowling. Along the way, The Dude encounters German nihilists, a militant feminist artist who wants him for his seed, and is forced to abide countless acts of aggression. The film takes a lot of its cues from The Big Sleep, a famously inscrutable noir, and The Big Lebowski certainly doesn’t disappoint when it comes to weaving a tangled narrative web of deceit and double cross.

If that narrative seems somewhat complicated, that’s because it is. Raymond Chandler, who wrote the novel upon which The Big Sleep is based on, famously said that even he wasn’t sure who committed one of the murders in his book. The Coens take this idea and run with it in Lebowski, creating a stylized, contemporary noir in which the detective is constantly travelling through the world in a fog, unsure of which side of each uneasy alliance he finds himself at any given moment. The film is packed with subtle allusions to the films of the 1940s, containing oblique references to Double Indemnity and The Maltese Falcon, but also to 42^nd Street and other Busby Berkeley musicals. As much as they are filmmakers, the Coens are also film historians, with their films often referencing favorite classic filmmakers such as Howard Hawks or Billy Wilder. All of their films dabble in this kind of pastiche, using film references as a shorthand language, but Lebowski is probably the most overt. As in Barton Fink, the Coens suture a fantastical version of Hollywood onto an actual time and place, in this case the immediate aftermath of the first Gulf War. In both films, the real life setting only serves as an anchor, and the action of the film is largely contained in its own world. The characters in the films occasionally reference actual events, but the Coens are largely free to create a universe of their own definition, and in The Big Lebowski, that universe is heavily filtered through the experience of American cinema of the 1940s.

Of course, this being a Coen Brothers film, those influences are scattered throughout The Big Lebowski, but they’re turned on their head, repurposed for a new generation and skewed in the process. The film uses many of the familiar tropes of the noir. It offers up two femmes fatales in Bunny and in The Big Lebowski’s daughter, Maude (Moore). It’s Bunny’s disappearance that kickstarts the film, but Maude is certainly the more interesting character. She appears halfway through the film, introducing herself to the dude by having her henchmen knock him out and take the rug that he had chosen to replace his originally soiled rug. She asserts that her interest is in preserving the Lebowski Foundation’s money, one million dollars of which her father has put up as ransom money for his missing wife. However, in classic femme fatale fashion, Maude’s motives are more duplicitous than they might seem on the surface. Her real interest in The Dude is procreative. While most classic femme fatales attempt to ensnare the detective using their sexuality, Maude enlists the Dude to the case before seducing him. After gaining The Dude’s trust, Maude beds him and makes known her desire to have a child with a man who will have no interest in raising it, or in being a partner to her. She’s fingered The Dude as just the deadbeat for the job, interested in him not for his bravado or his cunning, but for his biological ability to help her conceive. While I do think that a lot of classic femmes fatales could be seen as feminist characters, or at least female characters with agency in an era during which there weren’t so many such roles, I think that Maude’s overall character in Lebowski very deliberately marks her as a feminist. The shift in power dynamics marks one of the ways that the Coens are playing with the tropes of the noir mode.

Another modal shift takes place in the film’s style. Though its narrative is decidedly noir-influenced, the film’s visual style rarely quotes from film noir. They had already explored the visual aesthetic of noir in their debut Blood Simple and would return to the genre with a very explicitly noir-influenced aesthetic in The Man Who Wasn’t There, but The Big Lebowski is a much brighter, color-saturated film. Its hallmark visual sequence, the dream sequence that The Dude experiences after being drugged at Jackie Treehorn’s party, is an homage to the classic Hollywood musicals of the 1930s and 40s. The sequence is choreographed just like a Busby Berkeley musical number, with The Dude descending a black-and-white checked staircase to be greeted by a dozen beautiful dancers with tiaras made of bowling pins. He shares a dance with Maude and then floats down a bowling lane through the straddled legs of the dancers. The dream devolves into a nightmare after The Dude crashes through the pins at the end of the lane and cascades into blackness where he meets the three German nihilists, who are wearing red form-fitting suits, and who chase him through the nothingness with oversized scissors, presumably hoping to “cut off his johnson.” While this sequence marks just the most striking departure from the established visual style of noir, the film’s style overall is a bit more dreamy and subjective than a typical noir. That mode established the use of evocative chiaroscuro lighting and adopted the subjectivity of the canted angle, but the Los Angeles of Lebowski is characterized by bright lights, loud noises, and a slow-moving camera that often takes in the world through a gauzy filter.

The biggest departure of the film from a traditional noir detective story, of course, is in the character of The Dude. The prototypical noir detective is personified by Humphrey Bogart: serious, square-jawed, able to take and deliver a punch. The Dude is decidedly none of these things. He is a self-described pacifist who only gets caught up in this whole mess through a case of mistaken identity and a desire to get back a rug that really tied the room together. The Dude trades in Bogart’s ever-present scotch and cigarette for a white russian and a joint. He has reached a level of Zen that Bogart’s restless men of action could never hope to achieve. He treats the whole caper involving Bunny, the nihilists, his missing rug, and his perpetually battered car, as a cosmic inconvenience rather than a case to be solved or a mission to accomplish. The Dude would rather be left alone to listen to his tapes and bowl in the next round robin. If Bogart was the masculine ideal for a post-war generation, then Bridges’s performance as The Dude served as an inspiration and a rallying point for a certain type of counter cultural slacker in the late 90s and early 2000s. He is the Coens most enduring and endearing creation.

I first watched Lebowski around 1999 or 2000, a couple of years after it was released in theaters. I was instantly taken in by the characters and the dialogue. The film is simply hilarious and Bridges, Goodman, and Buscemi have unbelievable chemistry as The Dude, Walter, and Donny. Their lines are delivered lightning quick, one on top of the other, just like the conversation of real-life friends who know each other intimately. The film is endlessly quotable, with many of its turns of phrase having entered the cultural lexicon, but it is so densely written that it’s also easy to miss off-the-cuff lines on the first couple of viewings. The humor and the characters were what initially drew me into Lebowski. The interplay between Walter and Donny was so funny, and The Dude was one of the coolest characters I’d yet to encounter. Over time and additional viewings, I found new things to enjoy about The Big Lebowski and if you had asked me 15, or even ten years ago, it might have ranked up in my favorite movies of all time. It isn’t up there for me anymore, but it’s still a film that I love and probably one that I watch more frequently than some that might be in my “top ten favorite” films.

Though it started out as a cult film, the influence of Lebowski has spread far into the mainstream. As I mentioned, many of its lines have become instantly recognizable lingo, and you’d be hard pressed to find someone in 2017 who hasn’t seen the film. Bridges’s performance is now iconic, and many people would probably most readily associate Goodman with his portrayal of the bombastic, Vietnam vet Walter Sobchak. Screenings of the film have taken on a Rocky Horror Picture Show sort of tenor, with audiences often attending in costume and bringing props with them. An entire religion has sprung up centered on The Dude as a spiritual figure, with proponents of Dudeism embracing The Dude’s laissez-faire attitude and rebel shrug. Over the last 20 years, The Big Lebowski has graduated from film to full blown cultural phenomenon and while I’m happy that a great film is getting the attention and fanfare that it deserves, I would still rather appreciate it as a film text, devoid of any of the larger cultural trappings that it has come to be associated with. As a progressively-leaning, cannabis-advocating bartender who can often be found wearing a robe until mid-afternoon, and who is trying his hardest to take a “first do no harm” approach to life, I understand that the Dudeist lifestyle is probably perfectly suited to me. However, I still watch The Big Lebowski once or twice a year because it is a film that I really love, not because I hope to emulate its style or glean life wisdom from it. It never fails to make me laugh and pick up my spirits, and every time I watch it I seem to find some new little homage or hear a throwaway line that I had forgotten about. I can understand why someone might choose The Big Lebowski as the cultural artifact upon which they model their personal ethos, but even for those who choose to just enjoy it as a film, it’s an undeniable classic.

Drew's DVD Project

12 Monkeys to Zodiac

Film Noir