1984
Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen
Starring John Getz, Frances McDormand, Dan Hedaya, Samm-Art Williams and M. Emmet Walsh
I've got a long, bloody history with the Coen brothers. Just as long and bloody as a lot of their films. There are segments of each one that I've seen that I absolutely love, but most of them seem to have a way of ending in a way that leaves me very cold. No doubt this is by design, as the theme in a lot of their work seems to be how simple events can set off a wave of murder, robbery and crime, and these situations rarely wrap themselves up in a neat little bow. Sometimes, it can work out great, as it does with Fargo and the remake of True Grit. Sometimes it's The Big Lebowski and its cult status that I've never understood or No Country for Old Men, which had me walking out of the theater royally pissed off.
So where does Blood Simple fall on this spectrum? Well, as the first in what would be a long, storied filmography, it does pretty damn well. Amazingly this was another film that I remember reading about in Roger Ebert's "13 for Halloween" list, which is yet more proof that this guy did not have the greatest taste when it came to horror movies. I mean, Halloween? Seriously? All of that aside, this is a neo-noir crime film - a genre that I'm not exactly fond of - at its finest. While it's far from perfect, it does a lot of things right and hits its various story points with occasional laser-like precision.
The movie opens up and immediately establishes the dark mood that will permeate the whole 96-minute running time. In the pouring rain, bartender Ray (John Getz) is driving Abby (Frances McDormand in her big screen debut) home. Abby is married to Marty (Dan Hedaya), the owner of the bar that Ray works at. Suffice to say, the marriage is going through some very rocky times. So rocky, in fact, that Abby is driven into Ray's metaphorical arms on this drive home and the couple wind up going to a hotel to paw each other. However, seemy private detective Louis Visser (M. Emmet Walsh) has been hired by Marty to follow them and takes photos of their love-making session.
While Ray and Abby are the characters who get much of the screen time in this film, it's the film's darker characters who really drive the plot forward. Marty isn't able to accept his wife leaving him so easily, and he decides to hire Visser to kill Ray and Abby. It turns out to be a mistake that Marty eventually pays for in the most excruciating fashion, as the extremely snakey Visser stages the murders of Ray and Abby before shooting Marty in the chest, planting a gun that he stole from Abby on the scene to frame her for the killing.
The best stuff in the whole movie ensues as Ray arrives at Marty's bar and finds the dead body, believing that his lover was the one who pulled the trigger and hastily cleaning up the crime scene. It's gut-wrenchingly tense, containing some great acting by Getz in the farthest possible thing from the Stathis Borans character that he would eventually be best-known for in David Cronenberg's The Fly. We see the close calls at the bar itself as Ray removes Marty from the scene...and then that immortal highway sequence that begins when Ray finds out that Marty isn't quite dead yet.
The script becomes a little contrived from this point on. The third act of Blood Simple is based largely around a series of misunderstandings. Like, Three's Company level of misunderstanding, the kind of thing that could have been solved by either Ray or Abby asking one more question of the other. I'm also a little hazy on why Visser didn't think to look for his doctored photos immediately after shooting Marty; maybe some well-meaning reader can inform me, maybe I missed something, maybe I'm a moron, it's all up in the air.
Alright, so, what works about this film? It was the launching point for the Coen brothers for a reason, because their execution of this simple setup - an unhappily married woman shacking up with a well-meaning guy - is pretty damn good. I've completely left out one detail of this movie so far, and that is the Texas setting. A Coen trademark is amplifying the stereotypes of the locals of whatever film they make, and this is no different, with accents so thick that I actually had to turn on the subtitles. The mood, atmosphere and even music of the film all amplify that setting, with the oppressive Texas heat, honky tonk bars and back country houses trapping the characters in a vice. Oh, and M. Emmet Walsh? What a performance. This guy is sleazy in the best possible way in this movie, and I love it.
Those strengths are indeed so strong that I can overlook the weaknesses. Those weaknesses would be the AFOREMENTIONED occasional illogical plot points and a third act that kind of drags before its epic climax. By the way, said climax isn't shocking if you've seen other Coen brothers movies; I'm sure that it was in 1984, but these siblings made a career out of doing unexpected things. Thus, unpredictability is often predictable in the Coen brothers canon. Nevertheless, the final bit of cat-and-mouse contained within Blood Simple is fantastic.
Rating time: *** 1/2 out of ****. It made GREAT watching on a hot summer night. But it's the last freakin' thing I would ever dream of popping in on Halloween. For a true Coen Brothers masterpiece, look no further:
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