In Contention

Tag: Barton Fink

  • “We’re going to be fine.”

    Michael Stuhlbarg in A Serious ManThose of you who enjoy it when Kris and I butt heads over one film or another — as on the two occasions this past week alone that I’ve been unceremoniously fired — will be disappointed to hear that an entente cordiale has arrived in the shape of “A Serious Man.” (Ironic, really — since when did the Coen Brothers make movies designed to bring people together?)

    Anyway, while I don’t know yet whether my passion for the film will run quite as deep as Kris’s by the year’s end, I have no qualms whatsoever about echoing his sentiments that “A Serious Man” is an extraordinary feat.

    Novelistic in its reach and rhythms, but intrinsically cinematic in the way Roger Deakins’s calmly predatory camera investigates physical and personal space, it seems a direct (if deliciously perverse) rebuttal to claims made by the duo’s detractors that their films are overly hermetic, unwilling to engage with the world around them.

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  • The Coens abide

    (from left) Ethan Coen and Joel CoenI’ve been chewing on the Coen brothers’ “A Serious Man” like a thick piece of spiritual jerky ever since I walked out of the Clariety screening room in Beverly Hills yesterday evening.  I’ve retweeted other perspectives, exchanged emails with industry types equally leveled by it and, in my own way, started banging the drum for a film I think everyone should see.

    It’s sticking with me in the best of ways, I guess you could say.  It’s illuminating unexpected corners.  It really is settling in and staying there.

    So I was quick to devour this piece in The Toronto Star by Chicago Sun-Times religion columnist Cathleen Falsani.  Falsani is also the author of the book “The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers,” which explores the spiritual messages found in the Coens’ films.  So she was more than qualified to write up the siblings’ most personal and, certainly, most spiritual film to date.

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