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Stacked on top of each other in chronological order right now, a plastic orgy. A dozen DVDs starting with "Blood Simple" and ending with "Inside Llewyn Davis." I'm missing "The Big Lebowski," but I've seen it so many times that it's like I have it in the collection. Paradoxically, I'm a bit reluctant to buy something that has lodged itself so well in my mind and that I already consider as mine, just like my arm. Now that I've gotten closer, I also see that sooner or later I will have to go reclaim, perhaps with a baseball bat, "Raising Arizona" and "Miller's Crossing," which some bastard friend of mine must have borrowed indefinitely. I run my finger over the covers of these works, and dozens of characters flash through my mind, often brilliant exaggerations of daily life’s contradictions. With sharp sarcasm, the two directors have managed in thirty years to ridicule the tragic, spanning genres light-years apart (I think of the differences between "No Country for Old Men" and "Intolerable Cruelty"), and they are among the few able to write their original scripts and change film types without ever being afraid to experiment and maintaining an average quality level that has few equals in contemporary cinema.
We're in Hollywood, inside the Hollywood studios, to experience a couple of crazy workdays of the protagonist Eddie Mannix. A pious and fervent Catholic handyman manager forced to babysit an almost infinite number of human cases. An exaggeration of the past that fits well with what is happening now: the eccentricity of directors, the vices of stars, the gossip crafted on purpose, having to patch all their childish whims and excesses, their stupidity making them vulnerable to continuous manipulations, hiding their profound professional incompetence to keep afloat a mad system, with a bottomless business cycle, that nobody knows how it manages to stand. Welcome to Hollywood. The world tests hydrogen bombs, but it's here that true money is made. Mannix has no schedule or social life and can’t even enjoy a couple of cigarettes without feeling the need to atone for his ridiculous sins with a confession in the middle of the night. Yet he loves this job to madness; creating stories from nothing and giving them a visual form, facing continuous contingencies and managing to have things squared away by the end of the day is a total fulfillment, a drug to which he can't say no. Could it be a declaration of love that the Coens want to offer to their crazy work? I believe so.
You laugh heartily, with a very complicated screenplay that takes the shape of a paella with bits of musical elements, apparently out of context, and theological/political/materialist discussions that only masters could sustain thanks to witty, quick, and startling dialogues. Anticipation is created with a first act where it's not clear where they want to go: many open doors, an intricate plot with hints of promising characters like quick sketches with pencil strokes that are, in my opinion, set aside too hastily. Scarlett Johansson and Frances McDormand are sacrificed and relegated to a sparse handful of minutes and seconds. Photography at the usual sublime levels, capable of playing with lights to recreate and alternate theatrical atmospheres and old films and make us enter a post-World War II film set.
A peculiar work that only apparently seems easy. On the contrary, I'm convinced it's one of their most complex works, operating on many levels, and with so much going on that it deserves a couple of viewings to be fully appreciated. Long cinematic life to the Coens. Who knows where you'll take us next time, I will follow you again.
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