Film: Dark Victory

Dark Victory

SHOULD we take the Coen brothers seriously? This may seem a strange question to ask of two brothers whose joined-at-the-hip filmmaking has been sending cinephiles into raptures for more than 20 years, ever since Blood Simple, their shoestring-budget Texan noir, first put them on the highbrow map. But the Coens have a combination of gifts that’s rare in modern American cinema: They’re technical masters with a taste for the outlandish and the picaresque, and as a result a certain suspicion attaches to their efforts, along with all the plaudits – a nagging sense that the brothers don’t take the art of filmmaking as seriously as their admirers think they should.

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Ross Douthat

Ross Douthat is a former National Review contributing editor.

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Dark Victory

SHOULD we take the Coen brothers seriously? This may seem a strange question to ask of two brothers whose joined-at-the-hip filmmaking has been sending cinephiles into raptures for more than 20 years, ever since Blood Simple, their shoestring-budget Texan noir, first put them on the highbrow map. But the Coens have a combination of gifts that’s rare in modern American cinema: They’re technical masters with a taste for the outlandish and the picaresque, and as a result a certain suspicion attaches to their efforts, along with all the plaudits – a nagging sense that the brothers don’t take the art of filmmaking as seriously as their admirers think they should.