Fargo - Too Good to Be True

Sometimes I write scripts in my dreams.

It usually happens figuratively - my brain screens a near-complete movie for me that I then spend the next dozen waking hours attempting to transcribe (and yes, more often than not, it dissipates in the growing daylight as my less-easily-impressed conscious mind sees through all of its holes and flaws). Occasionally, however, I will dream that I am literally sitting in front of a notebook or typewriter, suffering over dialogue and story beats in a way that is only marginally more successful than my conscious attempts.

During one such dream, I wrote what was unquestionably the best work of my life. It was tightly-plotted and yet also managed to follow the awkward rhythms of real life; it saw both the inherent humor and inevitable tragedy within the unrelenting violence and ugliness of the world; it was just as strange and outlandish as I could make it while also feeling wholly honest, natural, and lived-in.

It was the perfect script. 

It was my masterpiece.

It was Fargo.

That realization slowly dawned on me as I rolled out of bed and scrambled for the nearest pen and I had to concede that not only had my nocturnal masterwork been written already, but long-since fully produced to near-universal acclaim.

Flashback to the summer of 1994. Me and my brother are being led by our grandparents through Mackinac City, a tiny tourist hamlet at the top of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. Ensconced within naively uninterrupted tranquility, we begin to wonder what the police force here would do if they were ever faced with a truly dangerous breed of criminal. To this day, my brother playfully rues the fact that we weren’t able to capitalize on that premise first.

It is partly the simplicity of that “what if?” that makes the film so successful - a crime story unraveling within a society that exists in hilariously quaint contrast to the more grisly machinations of its antagonists. We are able to both laugh at and yet also identify with the homespun simplicity of the main characters just as we are able to loathingly enjoy and yet also sympathize with Jerry Lundergaard’s frantic attempts to keep his boneheaded schemes from falling apart around him. That duality, the fact that we are rooting for Lundergaard to both be caught and to get away with it, speaks to the genius of the film. And yet the true stroke of brilliance is the (fictional) opening title assuring us that the film is based on a true story. Aside from giving the Coens carte blanche to follow their plot down any road they could possibly dream to take it while still maintaining narrative credibility, it gives the gruesomely hilarious proceedings the air of that great American pastime of true crime schadenfreude while also lending even the most despicable of its characters a human core that makes it difficult to hate them even when they're laughing as their helpless victims attempt futile escape in the snowy wilds or hacking their partners into bits and shoving them into wood-chippers.

The setting of the story in such a specific place, aside from lending comedic heft to the proceedings, also helps the film to achieve a universality that speaks towards its popularity and continued endurance. This is a world so removed from most viewers' that it may as well take place on a different planet, and yet the corners are painted in with such intricate detail that anyone who watches it can relate. We may think that we're laughing at these goofily polite Minnesotans, but we're really laughing at ourselves, struggling with tireless, often witless fortitude against the cold indifference of the universe to the erosion of even our best-laid plans.

It's possible that, had me and my brother struck a deal to sell or develop our idea right there on the shores of Lake Superior, we may have been able to craft a finished product so nuanced, so profound, and so entertaining.

On the other hand, it's probably a good thing that the Coens got to it first.

- cs

Christopher Sailor is the Programmer of Education for the Atlanta Film Festival. He also waxes cinematic at chrissailor.com  

 Fargo screens this Thursday, October 17th at 9:30pm and Sunday, October 20th at 1:00pm as part of our Fall Focus on Directors. Members get free admission to every screening in this series, so if you're not currently a member, be sure to rectify that.

Blood Simple - Death and Texas

When deciding what story would be most fitting for their low-budget debut feature, the Coen Brothers claim to have taken a very pragmatic approach - a seedy erotic noir-tinged thriller seemed like the best way to make a mark with very little resources. Both the high passions of the lustful leads and the sweaty machinations of their grimy antagonists lent themselves to stylistic flourishes that would immediately signal the Coens as a filmmaking duo to be taken very seriously.

Drawing equal inspiration from James M Cain and EC Comics, the film is intensely atmospheric, all neon, sweat, and blood. It was while serving as Assistant Editor on his friend Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead that Joel got the idea for he and his brother to self-finance a feature of their own, and indeed the older brother's time in the trenches of low-budget horror flicks shows in such details as the seemingly invincible Loren Visser's stalking of Abby through the film's climax, or the grisly fate of Julian Marty (whose overall battering throughout the film is the first example of the typically beset Coen lead character, a progenitor of Jerry Lundergaard and Larry Gopnik). 

Indeed, many of the Coens' hallmarks are very much present in their debut. Hapless would-be criminal masterminds instigating and then being overrun by plots that become much too complex and chaotic for them to navigate.  Colorfully venal, yet compellingly likable supporting characters. And perhaps most importantly, a very specific sense of tone and place. The backwoods Texas of Blood Simple may be one that is indebted more to the illusory cultural construction of the Lone Star State than to any tangible reality, just as the plot takes all of the necessary tropes of the genre (a macho loner with a blemished past, the jealous restaurant/bar owner with the sex-pot wife who has long since grown tired of him, the seedy, low-rent private eye) and turns them on their heads and making them new all over again by fleshing them out in ways somehow both broad and incredibly detailed. 

Not every aspect of the Coens' style is fully formed just yet. Some of the actors seem stuck somewhere between stylization and realism, and the line readings sometimes work towards accentuating the more baroque moments rather than downplaying and contextualizing them within the heightened reality. Equally refined later on would become the stylistic nuances - while there are hints of humor both black and absurd here, it feels a bit more tentative than in later efforts.  Yet these are nothing more than the blips of a very assured pair of artists taking the first step towards translating their vision into cinematic reality (and indeed by their next feature, the madcap Raising Arizona, everything would be quickly locked right into place). As the opening statement of a career, and as a rough map of everything that would follow, Blood Simple is nothing less than one of the most remarkable debut films of all time.

Blood Simple screens tonight at 9:30, and again Sunday at 1:00, as a part of our Fall Focus on Directors. don't forget, Festival members get into all screenings in this series for free. Buy tickets in advance or at the door.

Christopher Sailor is the Programmer of Education for the Atlanta Film Festival. He also waxes cinematic at chrissailor.com

Fall Focus on Directors - Joel & Ethan Coen

Joel (l) and Ethan Coen (r) have been successfuly making highly original films on their own terms for nearly thirty years.

Upon accepting one of the three Oscars that he and his brother would each collect for their 2007 masterpiece No Country for Old Men, Joel Coen harkened back to some of their earliest childhood efforts - including "a movie about shuttle diplomacy called Henry Kissinger: Man on the Go" - and confessed, "what we do now doesn't feel that much different."

There is no further explanation than that needed for the enduring cinematic success of the Brothers Coen. Indeed, the pair cannot help but frustrate the critics and interviewers who would attempt to glean some explanatory insight into their process, some trick for keeping their cinematic odysseys from ever growing stale or uninspired, because there is no secret. They are merely a pair of brilliant and talented guys who have honed their storytelling gifts and followed their own interests without deviation for the entirety of their lives, let alone for that of their 30-year careers as filmmakers. They are a testament to the fragile promise that if an artist stays true to their own vision, no matter how personal or specific, the audience will not only find you but follow you anywhere. 

You will be hard-pressed to find filmmakers with an output that has been, by every definition of the word, as consistent as that of the Coens. At an average of one film every other year, with only one arguable stumble during that whole span (Ladykillers defenders, make your presence known in the comments!), the Coens are mystifying in their ability to hop so effortlessly over lines of genre and tone while maintaining a level of quality that leaves their fans in constant awe and delight . 

And they're only getting better. 

Atlanta Film Festival 365 is proud to present local cinephiles a chance to view a sampling of the Coens' best films on the big screen. We're starting with their debut feature, Blood Simple, this Thursday at 9:00 with an encore Sunday afternoon at 1:00. An equal mix of James M Cain and EC Comics, the film shows how fully-formed the skills and sensibilities of the brothers were right out of the box. It's also the first instance of the duo giving their unique twist on the Film Noir genre, a thread that continues through the rest of the series as we present No Country for Old Men on October 10th and 13th, Fargo on October 17th and 20th, and The Big Lebowski on October 24th and 27th.

Showtimes for all screenings are 9:00pm for Thursday shows and 1:00pm for Sunday matinees. Don't forget that members get in free, so tell all of your non-member friends to buy a pass to this year's festival and enjoy some of the best movies of the last 30 years on us. I'll be in the center row, grinning like an idiot the whole time, and I hope to see you there.

- cs

Christopher Sailor is the Programmer of Education for the Atlanta Film Festival. He also waxes cinematic at  chrissailor.com. 

Spielberg at AFI

Apropos of tonight's screening of Close Encounters of the Third Kind at 9:30 at the Plaza Thetre, here is a selection of clips from an AFI seminar held by Steven Spielberg shortly after the film's release.

In the first clip, Spielberg talks about the importance of getting the film's groundbreaking special effects just right, and how his original concept of the mother-ship featured in the film's climax had to change for the better of the movie.

Next up is a quick breakdown of his process with actors, particularly in a film in which they spend a large deal of time interacting with elements that will not be added until much later.

Followed by a glimpse into his storyboarding process.

And finally, on what it was like to work with co-star (and future Focus on Directors subject) Francois Truffaut (all the more poignant due to the fact that the legendary auteur's life would be cut tragically short a mere six years hence).

The major take-away from all of these clips is not only the remarkable level of procedural assurance held by such a young director (only 32 years old at the time), but the fact that a big part of that process was being open to the changing demands of the film as it evolved over time, as well as an openness to the input of his collaborators. It's this looseness and fluidity, filtered at all times through an unshakable vision of the final product and dedication to the story above all else, that made Spielberg's films so successful dramatically - paving the way for their immense popularity. They were more than spectacle-delivery systems - they were stories about real people experiencing the spectacle along with the audience.

 Close Encounters screens as part of our Fall Focus on Directors tonight at 9:30 at the Plaza Theatre, followed by an encore showing Sunday afternoon at 1:00.

- cs

 Christopher Sailor is the Programmer of Education with the Atlanta Film Festival. He also waxes cinematic at  chrissailor.com.

Close Encounters: Spielberg Makes Contact

And this is only the second kind ...

In early 1976, while still riding high off of the enormous critical and financial success of Jaws, a young Steven Spielberg, anticipating the impressive haul his epochal film was sure to receive, invited a camera crew to film himself and two friends (one of whom was future Maniac and former Corleone family button-man-turned-fink Joe Spinell) watching and reacting to that year’s Academy Awards nomination announcements. He wanted to be seen live on national television being nominated for his first Best Director Oscar.

Here’s how that worked out:

We can talk about what an obscenely stacked group of Best Director nominees that was at a later date, but what's more important for our purposes is that while Jaws ended up with four nominations (including Best Picture, which was the only category in which it didn’t win) its boy genius director was "overlooked" in favor of a more respected, more artistically relevant veteran. Hardly a lamentable fate, especially for a 27-year-old who was in the process of changing the movie landscape as we knew it by virtue of his unparalleled success and could now write his own ticket, and yet Spielberg’s “snub” was the beginning of a narrative that would largely define his career for nearly two decades - the director perhaps more commercially beloved than any in history and yet consistently overlooked by the more serious artistic establishment.

He would, in fact, be nominated for his very next film, and while there’s nothing to indicate that Close Encounters of the Third Kind was a stab at seriousness from a director spurned, the movie nonetheless represents a bold early step in his career towards more personal blockbuster film-making. Using the clout he had gained from directing what was up to that point the most successful film of all time, Spielberg sought to finally tackle a concept which he had been developing in various forms since childhood.

The intensely personal nature of the film is evident everywhere from Spielberg's solo writing credit (the only one he would take in his career) to the multiple revised versions he would later release in an ever-evolving attempt to get the final cut to match his original vision (these reissues, the first instance of a director releasing his own preferred cut of a film after the official release, were indicative of the growing power that the filmmakers of Spielberg’s generation were beginning to achieve), and yet no more so than in the fabric of the story itself. While he had dealt with broken families before, this would mark the first time he married that emotional core to a high science fiction concept. It’s the first chapter in a loose trilogy that would continue through E.T. and War of the Worlds, in which interplanetary visitors are catalysts for both the destruction and ultimate healing of suburban families. Here, the director creates an elaborate rationale for a father’s abandonment of his family, a paternal absence that he would continue to struggle with throughout the rest of his career.

While more of a modest success when compared to the runaway commercial dominance of some of his other work, it is arguably the most transcendent moment in Spielberg's filmography, and along with Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, it is one of the few science fiction films bold enough to portray an extraterrestrial encounter as one that carries the promise of elevating and enriching humanity rather than threatening its very existence. During the same year in which Star Wars imprinted itself upon the imaginations of children the world over by filling in the corners of a galaxy far, far away, Steven Spielberg, for so many decades labeled to both his credit and detriment as a child who never grew up, appealed to the unsatisfied longing of adult suburban malaise by suggesting a sense of pure wonder at the glorious mysteries of our own universe.

- cs

 Christopher Sailor is the Programmer of Education with the Atlanta Film Festival. He also waxes cinematic at  chrissailor.com.