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Most directors have a signature. When you go to a Robert Altman movie, you can be fairly sure there's going to be a sprawling cast of excellent actors, playing out scenarios of weary resignation to a cruel world. When you go to a Martin Scorsese movie, you can be fairly sure you're going to see some insight into the Italian-American experience -- sometimes criminal, sometimes not. When you go to a Woody Allen movie, you can be fairly sure you're going to see Woody Allen getting it on with a woman who wouldn't look at him twice if he weren't famous. Joel and Ethan Coen -- collectively The Coen Brothers -- have a recurring premise in kidnapping, but style, setting, and mood change from film to film.
We're neither film students nor film critics, so that's about as much as we can say about their directorial style without getting in over our heads. If pressed, we'd say that the one thing all of their movies have in common is that they tend to be pretty good. Even when they release one we don't quite love enough to embrace to our bosom, buy on DVD, and watch a dozen times, we can still appreciate the effort. We can distinguish between what self-indulgence looks like in the hands of, say, Kevin Costner -- who not only directed and starred in the bloated, boring, ill-conceived, and generally ridiculous monstrosity that was The Postman, but also saw fit to sing its theme song -- and the Coen Brothers -- whose O Brother, Where Art Thou? wasn't entirely to our liking, but at least was recognizably the work of two artists who were challenging themselves by producing a risky story that was different from everything they'd done before, instead of settling into a comfortable groove and spending the rest of their careers making lookalike follow-ups to the crowd-pleasing Fargo and The Big Lebowski.
There is, we'd imagine, a particular kind of film snob who resent the success of the two above-named movies, for making the Coens household names to an audience that will never see Blood Simple or Barton Fink. And yet, the fact is that none of the Coens' pre-Fargo movies is stereotypically "artsy." Most of their movies, in fact, are influenced either by '40s noir films (Blood Simple, Miller's Crossing) or by screwball comedies (Raising Arizona, The Hudsucker Proxy). Because they've made most of their movies outside the Hollywood studio system, they've been lumped in with snootier filmmakers, but their films are actually, for the most part, very crowd-pleasin' and -- theoretically, at least -- accessible to all sorts of audiences.
So let's recap the story so far. They're talented directors who've maintained creative control throughout their careers, with nothing but interesting films -- even interesting failures -- to show for it. As artists, one would think they've pretty much met or exceeded all their goals, and are working at the top of their game. But what's their status as celebrities?
It's always difficult to gauge the fame level of a director. You rarely see a director, say, photographed for InStyle unless he has a really, really nice house; you're more likely to see him on the pages of the Enquirer unless he's married his wife's adopted daughter, or getting deported for sleeping with a thirteen-year-old girl. Sure, you can measure a director's fame, to some degree, by the awards and honours that get showered upon them, but then again, it's not like Martin Brest, Jim Sheridan, Michael Radford, and Krzysztof Kieslowski are particularly well-known personages as far as most Americans are concerned, and they're all Oscar-nominated directors.
How famous are the Coen brothers? We reckon they're famous enough that marketers make sure, in print ads, TV spots, and movie trailers, to let us know that they're promoting "A Film By Joel And Ethan Coen," giving the brothers Coen nearly equal billing with such unimpeachably famous capital-C Celebrities as George Clooney or Billy Bob Thornton. We reckon they're famous enough that they can make just about any movie their heart desires -- and get someone else to pony up the bankroll for it -- even if that movie is a sepia-toned, Depression-era, racist-heart-of-Mississippi-set riff on Homer's Odyssey that goes on just about half an hour too long. We reckon that their famously uncompromising reputation is still sufficiently intact that they're mentioned in the same breath as younger upstarts like Paul Thomas Anderson and Steven Soderbergh -- only the Coens managed to do it without making any films about porn or based on nearly forgotten Rat Pack outings. Joel and Ethan Coen may not be as famous as Francis Ford Coppola or Ridley Scott, but we reckon that -- since they had nothing to do with movies like Jack or Hannibal -- Joel and Ethan Coen are probably fine with that, and probably also sleep a lot better at night. We reckon Joel and Ethan Coen are just about exactly as famous as they should be.
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