The fun thing about ranking Coen brothers’ films is that people have wildly different opinions and no one is wrong.
Over time I’ve come to realize that there are a number of broad categories that the Coens’ movies fall into, and I gravitate most toward a few of them.
Here’s my personal Top 5 Coen Brothers movies of all time:
1. Fargo
2. The Hudsucker Proxy
3. Blood Simple
4. Miller’s Crossing
5. Raising Arizona
Before we get to those, I do want to give some praise to some of the Coens’ output that I admire greatly that didn’t quite make my Top 5 list. First, the Coen Brothers are outstanding at directing Westerns, whether they are straight ahead popcorn flicks (True Grit) or more bizarro and experimental in construction (I was completely dazzled by The Ballad of Buster Scruggs).
And Burn After Reading is a razor-sharp satire and arguably Brad Pitt’s all-time best comedic performance amongst a jam-packed incredible cast.
I revisited Fargo recently for the first time in many years, and I was stunned by every inch of it. Every shot was interesting – the bleak winter landscape, the rolling highway (calling back to Blood Simple), each gesture from Jerry Lundegaard or Marge Gunderson.
The very best movies – Goodfellas, Boogie Nights, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – work on multiple levels and can be watched in different kinds of ways. On one level, Fargo is a fabulously entertaining and darkly funny modern noir. Its pace absolutely cooks along, even when we go on at first seemingly odd side quests like when Marge meets up with an old high school classmate who reaches out to her.
But as with so many Coen Brothers movies, Fargo is saying something more for those who want to seek it. And man, this flick is packed with fascinating things to say about the modern condition and humanity.
What Fargo is saying can be interpreted in different ways. I see something in Lundegaard (brilliantly portrayed by William H. Macy) that is inherently evil – but it’s an unconscious evil, nearly a casual evil, which somehow makes it worse and more sinister. We don’t even know the core reason why he elected to have his wife kidnapped in the hope of scoring ransom money from his father-in-law (beyond pure greed and some likely financial imbroglio that he’s desperate to escape) – the Coens are relaying that that’s not the important bit.
Lundegaard kicks the dark farce into motion, and there will be a trail of dead bodies by the end of the film. However, there’s also good in the world …
Perhaps Fargo touches me so deeply because Stephen King is my favorite author. The worldview of Fargo tracks with many of King’s tales, though often the main characters in King novels represent the forces of good and humanity.
I’ll now hop down to the second and third choices on my list. I’m a sucker for a great gangster flick, and boy do both Blood Simple and Miller’s Crossing qualify. The former is an exquisitely taut “small” modern noir set in a corner of Texas while the latter is an epic tale of ambition and betrayal circa Prohibition.
The Hudsucker Proxy, my number two choice, is probably the biggest outlier in terms of what film critics would likely collectively consider to be the Coens’ best films. I have a special affection for Hudsucker because it was one of a handful of movies (PCU and Billy Madison are other examples to give you a sense of the Gen X collegiate experience of it all) that my college friends and I would watch constantly during those wonderfully stretched out late college days when it seems like the future is forever away, so why not do absolutely nothing but watch the same movies over and over while chattering away and laughing all the while?
Anyway, Hudsucker is a tightly constructed satire of black-and-white era screwball comedies, while holding its own deeply quirky and fundamentally Coen-sian sensibilities. The movie works because Tim Robbins’ performance as Norville Barnes works: we buy into his earnest rube character and are carried along through his being selected as a useful idiot (to borrow the Russian KGB term that may or may not but probably does apply to our current president of the United States) and his transformation because of it.
But all told Hudsucker is the Coens having a fine light touch and feel for comedy, with the satire saying some provocative things about corporatism and greed that are quite prescient these days under the dark shadow of the Trump 2.0 era.
A discussion of Raising Arizona could easily demand its own full-blown piece – let’s crudely bucket it under the comedy and satire realm of the Coens’ universe so that we can transition to looking at the Coen Bros movies that I personally just don’t connect with the most.
Let’s start with Lebowski, which ranks way up there in my personal I Should Really Love This Movie But I Just Don’t canon. A few others in this group, for what it’s worth, include Heat and The Phantom Thread.
Generationally, The Big Lebowski falls right into my wheelhouse, but I didn’t see it in the theater and missed out on the hype with it overall. I was traveling a lot during that period, eventually moving from New York to the Bay Area, which may have had something to do with it. But I distinctly recall one of my friends in New York City having taken to ordering White Russians at bars in honor of The Dude and noting that this movie had indeed become a Thing.
When I did finally catch Lebowski on cable or VHS at some point, it just didn’t land for me. I knew it was supposed to be a fun movie, an offbeat Coen bros movie, and a good hang, but more than anything I just didn’t really connect with the story or the characters – even The Dude himself.
Over the years, I began to realize that everyone with any serious interest in movies had opinions about Coen Bros movies. Now to be clear, I’ve never really met anyone who didn’t like any Coen Bros movies – and the wonderful thing is that their collective output really does have stuff that appeals to nearly every kind of taste.
Moving on to a pair of Coen flicks I flat out didn’t like: Hail, Caesar! which some see as a delightful romp, and The Ladykillers, which I think it’s fair to say is generally viewed as the Coens’ worst film (and the same goes for Tom Hanks, I’d think).
Then there’s a specific class of Coen Brothers films that we might call the “cosmic shrug at the universe” movies, or if we’re being less generous, simply ponderous. This group includes critically beloved films like Inside Llewyn Davis, A Serious Man, Barton Fink, No Country for Old Men, and to some extent, Lebowski.
I’ll readily admit there are outstanding elements to all of those movies, and don’t begrudge those who revere them. It took me some to realize that the reason I don’t connect with these kinds of movies is that they are more about concepts and theses than about characters and story.
Let’s take Inside Llewyn Davis as an example. The titular Llewyn (Oscar Isaac, who is terrific in everything) is trapped in a cycle of failure as a struggling folk musician in the very early ‘60s Greenwich Village scene that Bob Dylan was destined to break out of to become a worldwide sensation.
But Llewyn is more of a stand-in, a concept, versus a character. Nothing changes for him, though a “bunch of things happen” in the meanwhile – most involving losing and finding a cat and futile attempts to drum up gigs during a freezing winter.
It’s completely fair to counter that I just don’t have the patience to fully understand and appreciate movies like that, but for me character and story are the driving elements that hook me in. I always think about the old line from American Bandstand: the song’s got to have a beat that I can dance to.
I revisited No Country for Old Men recently, a movie that many would easily place as the Coens’ very best film, and did come around to it to some extent. It was more character and story driven than I had initially realized – maybe I was overwhelmed by Javier Bardem’s relentlessly evil Anton Chigurh? – and I even had an appreciation for its strange and dreamy ending.
So perhaps I’m ready to let some of the universe’s cosmic shrug in to some extent?