Coen Brothers Project - Blood Simple

"I killed him for money - and a woman - and I didn't get the money and I didn't get the woman." - Walter Neff, Double Indemnity

The funny thing about Blood Simple is that it is steeped in the traditions of film noir, but it takes every opportunity to take those traditions and upend them. Its characters are stock for noir: the adulterous couple, the jealous husband, and the private investigator who is hired to confirm the cuckolded husband's suspicions of adultery. Once those suspicions are confirmed, the husband wants the P.I. to kill the couple. Standard stuff. Usually in these types of movies, the couple finds out about the plot to kill them and they spend the rest of the movie running from trouble that will eventually catch up with them. Not so with Blood Simple.

In fact, the adulterous couple, Ray and Abby (John Getz and Frances McDormand, respectively) doesn't even know the P.I. exists until the last five or so minutes of the movie. After Ray and Abby spend their first night in a motel room together, Ray shows up at the bar he works at, owned by Abby's husband, Julian Marty (Dan Hedaya) to basically own up to the fact that he's been with Abby and quits his job, thinking that will be the end of it. Meanwhile, Marty is eventually double-crossed by Lucien, the P.I. (M. Emmet Walsh), who shows Marty some phony pictures of Ray and Abby dead, then shoots Marty and leaves him for dead.

In Double Indemnity, which I quoted above, Walter Neff is persuaded by Phyllis Dietrichson to help her kill off her husband so the two of them can collect on his life insurance policy and live happily ever after. Needless to say, it doesn't turn out that way. Unlike Walter, Ray never wanted any money (except the two weeks back pay Marty owed him) and he never wanted Marty dead. He thinks that once he's fessed up to Marty about the affair, he can quit his job at the bar and he and Abby can be together. When he returns to the bar one night and finds Marty sitting at his desk having been shot in the chest, he naturally assumes Abby pulled the trigger, since he has no idea that Lucien even exists. See what I mean about the Coens subverting genre expectations?

Since this is the Coens' first movie, there is very little of the stylized dialogue that they would become known for. The characters speak in a very straightforward way that cuts right to the heart of the matter at hand. The movie is rather relaxed. Ray and Abby spend a lot of time just hanging out, as if their affair isn't going to go unpunished. The Coens ratchet up the suspense in two of their signature scenes: one where a character tries to clean up a murder scene and ends up making even more of a mess, and the scene at the end where one character ends up with his body in one room and his hand with a knife through it stuck to a windowsill in another room.

Blood Simple is a strong first showing for the Coens. The movie is stylish, dark and bloody. Ray doesn't get the girl and he wasn't after any money. That's just the way it goes when you're the main character in a film noir.

Coen Brothers Project

The Coen Brothers are, far and away, my favorite filmmakers. I have seen every movie they've co-written, produced and directed, most of them more than once. I've also seen Crimewave, which they co-wrote and was directed by Sam Raimi before he became Mr. Big Shot Spider-Man director AND I've seen Paris, Je T'Aime, which is a collection of vignettes by different filmmakers about Paris, to which they contributed.

I've noticed something about their work though and that is: it usually takes me more than one viewing to really understand what it is I've just watched. The Big Lebowski is my favorite movie, one I've seen easily 50 times or more, and yet, the first time I saw it, I shrugged and said "Eh, it was okay, I guess." The same thing happened to me when I watched Fargo for the first time. I remember it getting rave reviews and then being somewhat underwhelmed after I saw it.

Some of this is probably due to my relative youth when I first watched both of these movies (Fargo came out in 1996 when I was 15 and Lebowski came out in 1998 when I was 17), but even in my adulthood, I've found myself unsure of how I felt about certain Coen films after the first viewing (particularly No Country for Old Men and A Serious Man). I think their extremely dark humor and stylized dialogue just lend themselves rather well to additional viewings. Once you're on solid ground with the characters and you know where the story is going, it's easier to just sit back, relax and absorb everything.

So, spurred on by my recent purchase of The Coen Brothers Collection on Blu-ray (and the release of O Brother Where Art Thou? on Blu-ray later this month!), I've decided to re-watch the Coens' entire oeuvre (God I love that word) in chronological order and write about each movie on this here blog. Hopefully I'll have interesting things to say about each movie and hopefully I'll discover something new about each movie, even the ones I've seen more than a handful of times.