The Whole Durn Human Comedy: Life According to the Coen Brothers

by Joseph McBride

The Whole Durn Human Comedy is a groundbreaking, incisive critical study of the Coen Bros., the quirky team of filmmaking brothers who delight in unsettling cinematic conventions and confounding audiences while raising disturbing questions about human nature.

118 pages, Paperback

Published March 1, 2022

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

My review for Book and Film Globe: https://bookandfilmglobe.com/film/let...



Growing up in the 90's, my friends and I always waited for the new Coen Brothers movie with excitement. It wasn't just that they were going to give us a good night out at the movies, it was like someone out there really seemed to get us, what we specifically liked to see. The characters chattered on in the rat-a-tat voice of old timey gangsters, which we loved, the jokes were slapstick and dark, just like we liked them, and the cinematography and the soundtracks were reliably dope.

I think a lot of people felt this way-- especially after the Cannes and Oscar winning Fargo, the Coens became household names. And everyone wanted to see what they would do next. Would it be another romp like Raising Arizona, O Brother (one of my favorites of all time), and Lebowski, or something dark as hell like Barton Fink, No Country, or Blood Simple. You've got to love an artist who can toggle between those two poles and consistently make it work.

It's like the Coens were too smart, too literate, too witty, and too bleak to be held back by the usual conventions. Geniuses that they were, it was like they knew how to break the rules and get away with it. Make the audience and the genre come to them, rather than the other way.

Seeing a new film of theirs felt like we won.

McBride definitely knows his stuff, and he's paid attention to the Coen's filmography.

I agree with much of what he says--for all their obsessions with nihilism and evil, the Coens do have some sympathy for the good people who occasionally appear in their stories. Margie Gunderson in Fargo, The Dude.

But I think he misses the point on a few occasions, as with the great film Miller's Crossing, which he discards as "pretentious." And I think he thinks far too much of the utterly abysmal Ladykillers.

And really, the biggest problem here is that the whole thing is really too brief. A good start, someone should write a longer and more penetrating study of the Coens.

[John Schorg · Rating 4 out of 5]

My only complaint about this look at the work of the Coen Brothers?
It needed to be 350 to 400 pages longer...

[Aaron VanAlstine · Rating 2 out of 5]

The title suggested something different from the drily academic film criticism that it is.