Joel and Ethan Coen
Joel and Ethan Coen are acclaimed filmmakers and screenwriters known for their distinctive blend of originality and dark humor in American cinema. Raised in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, the brothers developed an early interest in filmmaking, leading to their debut with the critically acclaimed "Blood Simple" in 1984. Their filmography includes a diverse array of genres, from the screwball comedy "Raising Arizona" to the neo-noir "No Country for Old Men," the latter winning multiple Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
The Coens are recognized for creating complex narratives and memorable characters, often exploring themes of morality, identity, and the American experience. They have a unique collaborative style, frequently sharing writing, direction, and editing responsibilities, and they often work with a stable of recurring actors and crew. Over the years, they have maintained artistic freedom while achieving commercial success, appealing to a loyal fan base both in the U.S. and abroad. More recently, the brothers have begun pursuing solo projects, marking a new chapter in their celebrated careers while continuing to leave an indelible mark on the film industry.
Joel and Ethan Coen
FILMMAKERS, SCREENWRITERS, AND DIRECTORS
The Coen brothers have created a number of classic Hollywood films that possess the originality of independent cinema and capitalize on the distribution potential of major studios.
Early Lives
The sons of an academic couple, Joel and Ethan Coen, were raised in St. Louis Park, a middle-class suburb of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Joel was born on November 29, 1954, and Ethan was born on September 21, 1957. Their father, Edward, an economist at the University of Minnesota, was born in the United States, but he was raised in London. Their mother, Reba, an art historian, came from an Orthodox Latvian family. In their early teens, the boys developed an interest in popular culture and began making amateur versions of Hollywood films with a Vivitar Super 8 camera.
After graduating from St. Louis Park High School, they both attended and graduated from Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Subsequently, Joel majored in film at New York University and continued his film studies for one semester of graduate school at the University of Texas, Austin. Ethan studied philosophy at Princeton, writing his senior thesis on Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Several years of apprentice film work in New York City preceded their startling, self-financed debut feature, Blood Simple (1984). The originality, striking visual style, and violent black humor of Blood Simple took audiences and jurors by surprise at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, and the USA Film Festival in Dallas, where the film won grand jury prizes and launched the Coens’ professional career.
Filmography
In the last years of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, an era characterized by big-budget Hollywood sequels, the Coens released a steady stream of features, typically produced on small budgets, usually based on their highly original screenplays and their explicit storyboards: Raising Arizona (1987), Miller’s Crossing (1990), Barton Fink (1991), The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), Fargo (1996), The Big Lebowski (1998), O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001), Intolerable Cruelty (2003), The Ladykillers (2004), No Country for Old Men (2007), Burn After Reading (2008), A Serious Man (2009), True Grit (2010), Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), Hail, Caesar! (2016), and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018).
Through their films, the Coens have created a rich, idiosyncratic map of the United States: Blood Simple is a Texas tall tale of violent betrayal; Raising Arizona (1987) is a screwball comedy that places a quirky couple on Arizona interstate highways; Miller’s Crossing imagines the gang wars and corrupt politics of New Orleans during Prohibition when the sale of liquor was illegal; Barton Fink explores the mind-numbing 1941 Hollywood studio system; The Hudsucker Proxy satirizes the corporate world of 1958 New York City; O Brother, Where Art Thou? follows three Depression-era Mississippi chain gang escapees in a hayseed Odyssey; Santa Rosa, California, in 1949 is the setting for the black-and-white neonoir The Man Who Wasn’t There. The Ladykillers, a remake, moved the 1955 English classic to rural Mississippi. No Country for Old Men depicts the violent west Texas-Mexican border of the 1980s and is based on the 2005 novel of the same name by Cormac McCarthy. The goofy spy comedy Burn After Reading spins its circles in Washington, DC. The Coens return to the setting of their youth—St. Louis Park, Minnesota, in the 1960s—and to a small budget and largely unknown actors for A Serious Man (2009), in which a long-suffering Job-like academic seeks wisdom from a series of rabbis, in vain, as his life falls apart. In The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, a Western anthology that takes the form of six short films, the Coen brothers apply their trademark dark humor to visions of a nineteenth-century American frontier. Distributed by Netflix, the film was nominated three times at the 2019 Academy Awards.
Two of the Coens’ many unforgettable characters, the perpetually dazed Dude (Jeff Bridges) and his bowling buddy, the combustible Vietnam vet and Jewish convert Walter (John Goodman), move through 1990s Los Angeles locked into 1960s attitudes in The Big Lebowski. Although set in the present, Fargo evokes an earlier time of innocence in the Midwestern character of Marge (Frances McDormand), the practical, optimistic, and pregnant policewoman faced with a series of hideous murders.
Coen films have not always made money. Their most expensive production of the 1990s, The Hudsucker Proxy, and of the next decade, Intolerable Cruelty (2003), both farces with big stars (Paul Newman and Tim Robbins; George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones) whose presence bloated the pictures’ costs, were financial flops. Other Coen productions have also lost money; however, intermittent and solid financial successes (Raising Arizona; Fargo; O Brother, Where Art Thou?; No Country for Old Men; Burn After Reading), a loyal and growing fan base in both the United States and Europe, and the accumulation of major awards have kept the Coen brothers viable. They have won major awards—among them, Academy Awards for Best Screenplay (Fargo) and for Best Picture and Best Director (No Country for Old Men), and Best Director prize at Cannes (The Man Who Wasn’t There)—and in 2010, True Grit opened to acclaim and earned ten Academy Award nominations. They also earned an Academy Award nomination for their screenplay, written with Matt Charman, for Bridge of Spies (2015), which was directed by Steven Spielberg.
The Coens both receive writing credits, and although Ethan was often credited as producer and Joel as director (before 2004), they share these responsibilities and also co-edit under the pseudonym Roderick Jaynes. Adding to the family atmosphere are regular crew (cinematographers Barry Sonnenfeld and Roger Deakins and film editor Tricia Cooke, who married Ethan in 1990) and cast members (John Turturro, Goodman, Steve Buscemi, and McDormand, who married Joel in 1984). In 2000, the brothers launched their own company, Mike Zoss Productions, headquartered in New York City, where both Joel and Ethan live with their families.
The brothers’ irreverent sense of humor frequently catches film reviewers and interviewers off guard. The Coens dismiss the intense academic interest in their films and mock such attention by creating fictional interviewers and commentators who introduce published versions of their screenplays and offer dim, self-important analyses.
The brothers began working separately in the late 1990s and 2020s. Ethan began a solo career as an author with the publication of a collection of his short stories, Gates of Eden (1998). Three of his plays—Sawbones (2005), Almost an Evening (2008), and Offices (2009)—have been produced. Joel's The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021) was the first film directed by a single Coen. Ethan directed Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind (2022) and Drive-Away Dolls (2024).
Significance
The Coen brothers have brought a quirky, literate, ironic, and often shocking sensibility to their unique versions of American genre films, from the screwball comedy to the film noir. Having worked with studio support financially but with a free rein artistically, the Coen brothers have surprised and delighted audiences with their outrageous sense of humor and their wide-ranging originality.
Bibliography
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Doom, Ryan P. The Brothers Coen: Unique Characters of Violence. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2009. Print.
Falsani, Cathleen. The Dude Abides: The Gospel according to the Coen Brothers. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008. Print.
Formo, Brian. "Why the Coen Brothers Are Our Most American Filmmakers." Collider. Complex Media, 30 May 2016. Web. 22 June 2016.
Itzkoff, Dave. "Watch the Throne: How Joel Coen Came to Make 'The Tragedy of Macbeth.'" The New York Times, 28 Jan. 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/01/28/movies/joel-coen-tragedy-of-macbeth.html. Accessed 2 Sept. 2024.
Levine, Josh. The Coen Brothers: The Story of Two American Filmmakers. Toronto: ECW, 2000. Print.
Robson, Eddie. Coen Brothers. London: Virgin, 2003. Print.
Rowell, Erica. The Brothers Grim: The Films of Ethan and Joel Coen. Lanham: Scarecrow, 2007. Print.
Sims, David. "The Coen Brothers' Split Is Working Out Fine." The Atlantic, 21 Feb. 2024, www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2024/02/drive-away-dolls-review/677514/. Accessed 2 Sept. 2024.
Yamato, Jen. "The Coen Brothers: 'The Oscars Are Not That Important.'" Daily Beast. Daily Beast, 4 Feb. 2016. Web. 22 June 2016.