I recently rewatched Burn After Reading, a film that I saw when it was in theaters and only moderately liked. I have watched every Coen Brothers film at least twice (with the exceptions of Raising Arizona and Intolerable Cruelty, which I was so unimpressed with that I didn't even bother). The Coens' intricate craftsmanship requires multiple viewings, and at several points I have found myself turning around on the Coens' films after a second viewing--it wasn't until the second viewing until The Big Lebowski clicked. Burn improved a bit on the second viewing--I laughed more, and I appreciated the jabs at D.C. society, which were certainly sharp and well-aimed. However, my overall feeling was the same: the movie was a little lazy and should have been much funnier.
This got me to thinking about the Coens in general. They are two of the best filmmakers around, without a doubt, and they have a formidable catalog that contains the likes of Blood Simple, Miller's Crossing, and Fargo, not to mention No Country for Old Men and The Man Who Wasn't There. I realize that Barton Fink is more polarizing, but I tend to think it's a genius movie that is mostly a character study, done in a particularly meta way that doesn't really lend itself to easy explanation. But all those films are "serious" films, in the sense that they are primarily dramatic, though all are laced with dark humor and funny dialogue. Indeed, it occurred to me that the Coens generally succeed when attempting drama though they fail when they try to do comedy. Their comedy catalog contains little to love: Intolerable Cruelty, The Hudsucker Proxy, Raising Arizona (which some people adore but I never really cared for), The Ladykillers (which most people didn't care for and I actually liked) and now Burn After Reading. In fact, the only triumphs that I can see are The Big Lebowski and, to a lesser degree, O Brother, Where Art Thou, and there are some trends to be noted here. Cruelty, Ladykillers and Burn all felt like lazy pieces of filmmaking--at best, uninspired films that have their moments. Ladykillers has more than a few good moments but I am not sure it works as a film. Hudsucker, on the other hand, tried much too hard and wasn't too funny either. So it was a sort of counterreaction to the prevailing trend among Coen comedies. Brother succeeds, though its success owes much to its ramshackle energy and driving soundtrack and not to its overstuffed plot and overdone Homer references. Subplots involving Robert Johnson and a bipolar bankrobber barely register as the movie is too busy and has too much going on. It works, but the pacing could have been better, which is rare indeed to say about a Coens film.
Lebowski, on the other hand, is a triumph, and one of their very best. The Coens managed to include one of their typically overstuffed plots, but the plot is countered by the lethargic energy of The Dude, as played by Jeff Bridges. Bridges is the major reason why the story works: the plot unfolds around him, but he only barely understands it (like us) and he is reluctantly pulled along with it. It doesn't hurt that Bridges puts in one of the all-time great film performances, and it is seriously a thing of beauty. But Bridges is balanced by the Coens going all out in their usual plotting and dialogue tricks. The film never feels like it is just going through the motions, and the comedy is never left on the table. Ultimately, though, it isn't the plot that is funny so much as the characters, the dialogue (which is infinitely quotable) and the individual scenes.
So, on a fundamental level, I think it makes some sense to say that the Coen Brothers are simply better at doing drama than they are doing comedy. This isn't to say they aren't funny, but that they don't excel at telling funny stories, as Intolerable Cruelty will inform you, again and again, if you were to watch it, which I don't recommend. In Lebowski they manage to make the most of it by downplaying the impossibly complex story and focus on making the scenes, characters, and dialogue as funny as possible, but the humor is in the approach and not in the story. One could simply have cast different actors, trimmed out some of the dialogue, and tweaked the scenes and the film could worked just as easily as a drama. Now, I wouldn't like that one bit because I happen to think that Lebowski is near perfect, but I don't think it's an unfair thing to say.
I suppose this is another way of saying that Lebowski is basically just a drama with comedy sprinkled on top, which is fine by me since the comedy is so good. But it illustrates the lack of versatility of the Coens' approach. In retrospect, it makes sense that Burn wouldn't really work as a comedy, as the Coens have yet to demonstrate that they can master the rhythms of the comedic feature film. They've pretty much mastered drama at this point, and the critique that they're nothing but recyclers of old movies seems to have passed into obvlivion following the nonstop parade of awesomeness of No Country for Old Men, clearly a career watermark that showed that they could tackle someone else's source material and adapt it compellingly to the screen. Not that I'm going to stop watching their comedies, and I'm hoping for a No Country-level comedy from them at some point. At this point, though, they have yet to deliver one.
