Gabriel Roth at Slate magazine offers this intriguing posting:
What Is It About The Coen Brothers Movies That Makes Everyone Want to Rank Them?
Gotta admit: I found the posting hilarious and when he linked to so many people/critics who have done just that, I couldn’t help but scratch my head.
Steven Spielberg has made many films, yet I never see people offering a “ranking” of his best films. Similarly, so too has Alfred Hitchcock and Ridley Scott and (the Gods help us) Michael Bay.
Yet with these directors we often simply get a quick listing of the “best” films they’ve made yet never an attempt to list them all as is the case with the Coen Brothers.
I tend to agree with Mr. Roth as to the why: The Coen Brothers have made just enough films to offer a listing but no so many that such a list is pondersome. Further, their films tend to follow the same general storylines (the Coens write their own scripts) and use roughly the same budget with each film. Thus, they do not have a “small” film followed by a huge “blockbuster” film.
I think there’s another factor: They make so many really great films that touch people in unique ways. Mr. Roth notes that many people have “favorite” Coen Brothers films but they may be different for each person. You may like Fargo best while your friend may find Miller’s Crossing the Brothers’ cinematic peak.
As for me? (Come on, you don’t talk about ranking Coen Brothers films without offering your own ranking, right?!)
While I haven’t seen all their films, of those I have seen my favorite is probably Fargo. Truly there has never been anything like it, an absolutely hilarious comedy whose subject matter/plot would have in any other reality been made into a terrifying, bloody crime drama!
I also enjoyed No Country For Old Men but found the ending really bizarre (to be fair, they followed the novel it was based on). I really liked Miller’s Crossing but was uncomfortable with the fact the Coen Brothers were essentially lifting without attribution the plot of Dashiell Hammet’s The Glass Key. I had great fun with Burn After Reading, Raising Arizona, and Blood Simple.
After that…
Well, I liked The Big Lebowski until it got to that bizarre dream sequence and I felt the film kinda fell apart (though I will admit it finished very strong). O Brother Where Art Thou was ok but not my particular cup of tea. Same with True Grit. While I saw both Barton Fink and The Hudsucker Proxy, I remember very little of either and therefore they obviously didn’t make much of an impression on me. The only other film of theirs I saw that’s left is The Man Who Wasn’t There. I left that film for last because to me this was easily the worst Coen Brothers film I’ve seen. It was, IMHO, a stupid, pointless reworking/mash up of The Postman Always Rings Twice and Lolita (I guess!). Boring, to boot.
Your mileage, as they say, may vary.
(For the completist out there, the Coen Brother Films I have not seen are:
Intolerable Cruelty, The Ladykillers, A Serious Man, Inside Llewyn Lewis, and the just released Hail, Ceasar!)