Directions - Coen Brothers Analysis

Joel & Ethan Coen

The Coen Brothers 

Their work:

Zeimers in Zambezi (short) - 1970

Lumberjacks at Play (Short) - 1971

Soundings (Short) - 1980

Blood Simple - 1984

Raising Arizona - 1987

Miller's Crossing - 1990

Barton Fink - 1991

The Hudsucker Proxy - 1994

Fargo - 1996

The Big Lebowski - 1998

O Brother, Where Art Thou? - 2000

The Man Who Wasn't There - 2001

 Intolerable Cruelty - 2003

The Lady Killers - 2004

Paris, je t'aime - 2006 

No Country for Old Men - 2007

World Cinema (Short) -2007

To Each His Own Cinema (segment "World Cinema") - 2007

Burning After Reading - 2008

A Serious Man - 2009

True Grit - 2010

Inside Llewyn Davis - 2013

Hail, Caesar! - 2016

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs - 2018

What's their style?

The Coen brothers have a clear and distinct style when I was watching their films, I noticed how all their stories are told in an open wide country, for example, the opening titles for The Big Lebowski, No Country for Old Men, Ballad of Buster Scruggs, and Raising Arizona. All of these films constantly have these establishing shots of how open their worlds are.

Raising Arizona (1987)

Fargo (1996)

No Country for Old Men (2007)

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)

This is something I really would like to work on trying to attempt at making the world I'm creating seem vast and open. Another style I noticed when looking into some of their films is that they use narration at the beginning of their films, which gives us some information about the protagonist of the film. In The Big Lebowski, the opening narration tries to give us information about the story that's about to unfold and how crazy the Los Angles is with all different variety of people there. Also, the Coen brothers like to write confusing films that sometimes at the end we come out annoyed because we don't have an ending, they all end in a way that they could come back to them. For example, in No Country for Old Men, we as the audience assumes that Tommy Lee Jones' character will find this psychopath, but he doesn't and the story just ends. This has been done in a few other films like The Big Lebowski as nothing is solved by the end of the film they are still in the situation they began the film in and nothing has changed in their development as a character.


How they present characters?
From watching their films we can see a simple set up with their characters by having half-baked heroes. What this means is that the protagonist of their films is not what a normal protagonist would be like. The Dude in The Big Lebowski is not what we would see as the hero of any films due to his laid-back attitude towards everything (as you can see in the clip).

This is not the norm as to what people would assume to be the protagonist, but it works as we fall in love with the dude as we know he is not stupid individual compared to some of the more powerful people he meets.

Another example of a great character in one of their films was in No Country for Old Men, Chigurh. Played by Javier Bardem he does an amazing job at creating a realistic psychopath. Due to the lack of music in this film, it helps create great tension as the audience never know what he's going to do. They do this by using the sound design from the location they are in; they would then amplify sounds around the character, therefore creating a sense of unknown around his character.

Where are their stories set?

I noticed in a lot of their films like like to use a wide open country, the way they do is they use really good establishing shots to give us a sense of how big the world is. Going back on how some of their films opening titles, like The Big Lebowski or Fargo.

Fargo

 This use of a wide establishing shots with simple narration really helps build a sense of this world and the differences compared to ours. Here is the opening sequence for The Big Lebowski and you can see how they use that style to help build their world and key locations that the story takes place.

If this scene didn't have any narration nobody would know what the story would be about, but that helps build where the story will take place.

How they use sound and music?
No country for old men won an Oscar due to the brilliant sound design due to the film's lack of a musical score and use of using ambient sounds and a range of sound effects to really help build the location. You can hear anything whether it be a lamp click, floor creak, glass shattering on the floor, all these sounds help with building up the tension with the lack of music. The use of absolute silence is used a lot in the film this is done when the protagonist and antagonist finally fight for the first time at the hotel.

I found the scene to be very intense because of the lack of a musical score, but because they thought about what sounds to use to make the scene still have that intenseness. Throughout the part when he's sitting in his room we can only hear the faint beeping slowly getting faster louder as our antagonist gets closer. It's a brilliant use of the sound design and also other sounds around the character become more amplified so when he cocks his gun it seems a lot louder due to the character concentrating on not being heard.

How they edit the story?

The Coen Brothers are well known for making weird dream sequences in some of their films, the more well-known film for this would be The Big Lebowski. During the movie The Dude gets spiked and it fades to black and we then watch his dream Gutterballs. The dream has a lot of sexual innuendos relating to the story.

The way they made him fly effortlessly under the girl just shows how well the visual effects were when it was being made.

Another example of a editing technique that they like to use called cutting short. Cutting short is when the edit will cut just bofore revealing something leaving us with the unkown. In No Country for Old Men, this technique is used when our main protagonist dies off camera randomly, when the antagonist goes to meet the wife after he promised and that cuts short and were left with not knowing what happens, and finally when the sherif says his final monologe.

Here is the scene when our antagonist visits the wife and towards the end when it begins to get more intense between their dialogue it cut the front of the building and him leaving. We don't know if she got out alive, but when he looks at his shoes it's a reference to earlier in the film when he killed someone and to avoid his shoes being covered in blood he lifted his feet off the floor. So we can assume that he killed her and was checking to see if he had any blood on his shoe. The use of the technique works so well and it's something I am going to incorporate into my own film so it just cuts to them being in the building rather than seeing then walk in.