TV Pick of the Week: The Coen Brothers' Story - review by Yvette Huddleston
The Coen Brothers Story BBC iPlayer, review by Yvette Huddleston
The Coen Brothers, Joel and Ethan, have been part of the cultural landscape of American independent cinema for over forty years, yet they have remained fairly elusive characters, preferring to let their work speak for them.
This excellent documentary delves deeper into their personal backstory and examines their top-quality idiosyncratic output as filmmakers. They have a body of work that, because it ranges across a variety of genres, including thrillers, comedies, tragedies, westerns, musicals, is impossible to categorize in any way, other than ‘Coen-esqe’. They burst onto the scene making a big impression with their low-budget neo-noir crime thriller Blood Simple in 1984 and their many films since then include Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, The Hudsucker Proxy, O, Brother Where Art Thou?, No Country for Old Men, A Serious Man, True Grit, Inside Llewyn Davis and Hail, Caesar!
Back in 2000 British documentary filmmaker Sarah Aspinall was commissioned to make a film about the brothers and managed somehow to gain unprecedented access to them for an extended, and unusually candid, interview. Here she revisits that rarely seen encounter, travels to their childhood home in Minnesota and interviews old friends of the Coen brothers and those who have worked with them over the years, some of them several times, including George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, Oscar Isaac, Tilda Swinton, John Malkovich and Kathryn Hunter.
In the archive footage from 2000 the brothers come across as friendly, bright and quick to laughter. While they are happy to talk about their work and their processes, there is a reluctance to analyse it too much. There is certainly no sense of self-importance, and the central tenet of their approach appears to be experimental and playful. They are here to entertain people. That is not to say that their films are lightweight, far from it, many are quite profound, but more than once during their interview with Aspinall, one or other responds: “we just thought it would be fun to do that.”
And that sense of fun is borne out by the present-day interviews with frequent collaborators such as Clooney, Bridges and Swinton who all talk of the joy of working with the Coens, the welcoming atmosphere on set, the quality of their scripts and the clarity of their vision. It is no wonder that A-list actors are queueing up to work with them. This is an insightful, hugely enjoyable glimpse into their world.