Coen Brothers Enjoy the Inside Joke

By Jeff Simon

Now it can be told: the Coen brothers are jerks.

Hand to God. If I’m lying, I’m dying.

Or at least so I thought both times I’ve talked to them — once in a one-on-two phone conversation before the release of their first movie “Blood Simple,” and once in a room with seven other journalists before the release of “The Big Lebowski.”

Not that I’d be likely to be much better, no doubt, under meet- the-press circumstances if I were they. What you have to realize, though, is that they’re the sons of Minneapolis academics (father an economist, mother an art historian) and, if you can imagine the worst, that’s how they used to come off. In other words, they seemed the snotty, alienated, wretchedly superior children sometimes disgorged by the intellectual classes — guys who take refuge in their understanding of each other and their godawful ability to giggle at everyone else and put them on.

Talk to actors who’ve done such amazing work for them and, with far more indulgence and compassion, that’s the tale they tell, too – - of Joel and Ethan Coen chortling to each other for mysterious private reasons behind the camera after every good take.

The trouble is that everything that is so brilliant and even devastating about their work is irretrievable from the snotty dysfunctional drift of their personalities.

Never mind that it can also result in the long, almost-inhuman mega-smirk of “O! Brother Where Art Thou?,” it is what makes their films, at their best, some of the best and most radical commercial films we’ve seen in almost 25 years. And “No Country for Old Men” was assuredly one of those.

It’s also what made Sunday’s Oscars one of the great recent exercises in award-show suspense in the modern movie era.

Would the Coens win big? When and if they did, would they be able to scour their personalities for the kind of humility and generosity and Daniel Day-Lewisness we like to see in people who are suddenly standing on top of the world and looking down on all the peons and little people? Or, if not, would they at least be able to fake it? (Ancient show business truism: The secret is honesty. Once you learn how to fake that, you’ve got it made.)

While waiting to find out if they’d win really, really big, we discovered that, sure enough, as recipients of an adapted screenplay Oscar, they were, well, true to form. Brother Joel allowed that maybe their success in adaptation may be because they’ve adapted so few things in their careers. “We’ve only adapted Homer and Cormac McCarthy.”

When it was Brother Ethan’s turn to face his admirers, lovers and benefactors he said, “we, uh . . . (long pause) thank you very much.”

Clearly, there is an art to the award acceptance speech. They probably don’t teach it yet at the Actor’s Studio or NYU Film School (where Joel went) or Princeton (where Ethan did) but they probably should. (It couldn’t hurt.)

For every Steven Soderbergh in the past who speaks to every hopeful heart in the room, there’s a Sally Field, turned into a 7- year-old on her birthday and screaming, “You like me, you like me!” For every Helen Hunt who really was “As Good as It Gets” in her year, there’s a Tommy Lee Jones to snarl a “thank you” that sounded like a rattler’s hiss.

Even host Jon Stewart had to admit “that’s a moment,” when the Coens’ sure-thing best supporting actor winner Javier Bardem for “No Country for Old Men” apologized to 800 million viewers for dedicating, in Spanish, his Oscar to his mother in the front row, whereupon, the handsome woman who brought him into the world practically melted right before our eyes before her son even got to “para ti.” (The Yiddish word for what she was doing was “kvelling.”)

Even better was Tilda Swinton, a surprise supporting actress winner for “Michael Clayton” who found the time to say that her agent’s head and buttocks were spitting images of the Oscar statuette and that everyone on the film had a great time reminiscing about the rubber nipples on George Clooney’s Batman costume. (Clooney himself has cheerfully admitted that he single-handedly almost killed the franchise — an entirely unnecessary bit of of blame-hogging from Joel Schumacher if you ask me, but then I was paid to sit through the film.)

Best of all, though, was Marion Cotillard who illustrated just how important acceptance speeches are. If Julie Christie hadn’t so patronizingly offered crumbs to those in “tiny roles” in previously winning a SAG Award she might have won.

Instead, it was Cotillard for “La Vie en Rose” thanking, in order, life, love and the city of Los Angeles.

At least she got the order right.

e-mail: jsimon@buffnews.com

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