THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, March 20, 1996 TAG: 9603200032
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MAL VINCENT, ENTERTAINMENT WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 111 lines
YOU CAN'T HELP wondering about Ethan and Joel Coen.
Are they misfits or just plain geniuses? Watching their movies - ``Blood Simple,'' ``Raising Arizona,'' ``Barton Fink'' - you seldom know whether to laugh or recoil in horror.
Double-handedly, they have created their own genre, known simply as ``A Coen Brothers Film.''
Now comes ``Fargo,'' about simple folk in Minnesota who get involved in a bizarre, disastrous kidnapping case. It opens Friday. A female police chief who is seven months pregnant investigates the murders, and there are dead bodies everywhere.
Critics are not only raving about it, they're howling with laughter.
``Maybe we should add a laugh track,'' Ethan Coen pondered, with no hint of a smile.
``Wouldn't that make it too easy for everyone?'' countered his equally stone-faced brother. ``Besides, are we sure we want them to laugh at all?''
Joel, 41, directs their flicks. Ethan, 38, is the producer. They write the scripts together.
They were sitting at the Essex House Hotel in New York. With their long hair, flannel shirts and jeans, they look more like college students than director-producers.
And here we are, trying to figure them out. How do two brothers create a half dozen movies and not kill each other?
``Sometimes we do it two ways and then decide later,'' Ethan said.
``One point of view prevails,'' added Joel. ``It's just sort of a discussion, not an argument. We talk it out. Some writers write that we anticipate each other's thoughts. It's not really true. Sometimes one of us will finish the other's sentence, but it's only in interviews.
``In real life, it would be more difficult. It's just that in interviews, we're discussing things we've discussed before.''
For ``Fargo,'' they returned to their native Minnesota, a place they were desperate to escape when they were teenagers. Both now live in New York and are raising young sons.
``We were misfits growing up in a bland, nothing place,'' Ethan said. ``Everyone there just accepts their lives at face value, no questions asked. We were ice dwellers.''
It was Joel, a graduate of the New York University Film School (Ethan attended Princeton), who got into the movie business first. He worked as an assistant editor on several low-budget horror films, including Sam Raimi's ``The Evil Dead.''
Their fortunes changed in 1985 with the low-budget crime melodrama ``Blood Simple.'' It took a familiar plot - a jealous husband hires a sleazy private eye to murder his adulterous wife - and added a jaundiced, different, view.
A cult was born.
They reached mainstream audiences with 1987's ``Raising Arizona,'' a mixture of screwball comedy and action melodrama.
Four years later, the Coens became an international phenomenon when ``Barton Fink'' won the best film, best director and best actor (John Turturro) awards at the Cannes Film Festival - an unprecedented sweep. ``Fink'' was set in the 1940s in a seedy Hollywood hotel where a prize-winning New York playwright is feverishly trying to sell out by writing a B-movie.
More conventional, but even darker, was 1993's gangster melodrama ``Miller's Crossing.''
Their last film, the big-business comedy ``The Hudsucker Proxy,'' flopped at the box office even though it had a $25 million budget and name stars in Paul Newman and Tim Robbins. It was more style than substance.
Fargo'' is ostensibly based on a 1987 Minnesota kidnapping case. According to Joel, it's ``the first time we tried to do something that is grounded in reality. But we're not very good at research. This isn't the the way it happened. It's the way we ended up re-creating it.''
The story concerns a conniving car salesman named Jerry (William H. Macy) who hires two woefully inept kidnappers to whisk away his wife. Jerry owes money and figures he'll collect the ransom from his gruff, foreboding father-in-law (Harve Presnell).
Everything goes wrong. After several murders, the case is investigated by Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand), the local police chief who is so pregnant she can barely waddle to the crime scenes. There's never been a murder in this rural Minnesota town, yet she acts as if it's all routine. The net tightens.
After ``Hudsucker,'' fans are looking at ``Fargo'' as a return to vintage Coen Brothers - quirky, with a mere $6.5 million budget.
``We intend making movies on this level,'' Joel said. ``That way, we'll be making movies for a long time.''
Both say ``Fargo'' has no political or moral messages, and it doesn't satirize the region in which they grew up.
``No, this is not meant to be typical of people in Minnesota,'' Ethan said. ``Our characters are specific, not vague types. They aren't meant to represent anything other than what they are. In `Barton Fink,' critics claimed that we were saying that all Jews were like the John Turturro character. He was just a single, lone character.
``We aren't very good at self-analysis.''
Actress McDormand, Joel's wife of 12 years, has a pretty good fix on the brothers. She said: ``Ethan is the literary one. He began by writing short stories. Joel is the more visual one. His early work as a film editor helped him develop that. They write wonderful roles for character actors. For them, even Paul Newman became a character actor.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
GRAMERCY PICTURES
Police Chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) looks for evidence
in ``Fargo.''
Photo
JAMES BRIDGES/Gramercy Pictures
Producer Ethan Coen, left; director of photography Roger Deakins,
center; and director Joel Coen confer on the set of ``Fargo.''
by CNB