Directed by: Joel Coen & Ethan Coen.
Written by: Joel Coen & Ethan Coen.
Starring: John Getz (Ray), Frances McDormand (Abby), Dan Hedaya (Julian Marty), M. Emmet Walsh (Private Detective Loren Visser), Samm-Art Williams (Meurice).
What
struck me most about watching the Coen Brothers debut film, Blood Simple for
the first time in a few years was just how fully formed the Coens worldview and
style was right from the start. Like many of the Coens films, this is a movie
about characters that sin, and have to be punished for sinning. As the excellent
piece on The Dissolve about Fargo a few months back said “The Coens don’t hate
their sinners, they just don’t let them get away with their sins” – which
pretty accurately describes the characters in Blood Simple. This is also a
movie where, like in many Coen movies, the characters make precisely the wrong
decision at pretty much every point along the way. This is not what Roger Ebert
would define as an “Idiot Plot” – which is basically a plot that could be
solved in minutes if all the characters weren’t idiots – because given the
information each character has at the time in the movie, their decisions make
sense – at least to them. As an audience, we know they are making mistakes, but
the poor dumb bastards in the film don’t know that.
The
story seems complicated but is reality and befitting the film’s title, is
really a simple one. Ray (John Getz) works as a bartender for Marty (Dan
Hedaya) and is having an affair with Marty’s much younger wife Abby (Frances
McDormand). Marty finds this out from P.I. Visser (M. Emmet Walsh), who he then
hires to kill the pair of them. There is a lot of confusion, misunderstandings
and double crosses – so nothing works out like any of its characters plan it
will – and body count rises throughout.
The
Coens don’t waste any real time on the psychology of the characters. The whole
movie is set in motion by Ray and Abby’s affair – and yet we never really learn
how or why their affair started – or for that matter, how Abby got married to
Marty in the first place. Like many Coen brothers movie the plot can be summed
up by the tagline to their great No Country for Old Men – “You can’t stop
what’s coming”. That would work for Blood Simple as well – the characters are
doomed from the outset, but don’t realize that yet. They make decision after
decision that makes complete and total sense to them at the time, but winds up
just digging themselves deeper into a mess of their own making. The film is
masterful in terms of plot construction – every scene leads directly from the
scene that preceded it, and directly into the next one. There is no time wasted
on anything unnecessary to the plot. The film is a modern film noir – but
neatly twists some of the genre’s clichés.
The
film, it must be said, a little rough around the edges at times – this is to be
expected when you’re dealing with first time filmmakers. When the Coens
released a Director’s Cut 15 years after its initial release, the runtime of
the movie didn’t change. They simply tightened a few scenes here and there to
make it flow just a little bit better.
The
performances, for the most part, are good but best of all is M. Emmet
Walsh, who is great as Visser. He thinks he’s smarter than Marty, sizes him up
from the start, and thinks he has to play him so he can get the same money, for
less work, and leave no witnesses against him. It’s a good plan – only it
doesn’t quite work out the way he plans, because others get in the way. Walsh
was a wonderful character actor – often doing good, small roles, and in Visser
he had the role of his career. This is a movie about only slimy characters –
and he’s the slimiest of them all. Dan Hedaya is also excellent as Marty – who
like Visser – thinks he is smarter than he really is. John Getz has the type of
role that Fred MacMurray played in Double Indemnity or Tom Ewell in Detour – he
never seems to realize just what a sucker he is. Frances McDormand, in one of
her earliest roles, is also quite good – although she is hampered a bit by the
fact that her character never really figures out what is going on – she’s
confused, as well as an emotional wreck, at the end of the movie – and given
what happened to everyone else, she may never figure out what happened.
There
are two virtuoso – nearly wordless – sequences in Blood Simple. Without giving
too much away, I’ll say the first one involves one character trying to dispose
of a dead body, which doesn’t want to co-operate, and the other is the climax –
that has two characters involved in a bloody battle, even though they cannot
see other – they are opposite sides of a wall.
Blood
Simple lacks the ambition of much of the Coens work. It really is precisely
what it seems like – a modern day noir, with only a few characters and
locations (the film was an indie, made on a very limited budget). But the film
is fiendishly clever and stylistic – and did what the Coens hoped it would –
put them on the map. It is often ranked among the greatest debut films of all
time – and it deserves to be there. The Coens have topped Blood Simple a number
of times in their career – but for pure bloody pleasure, Blood Simple works
just about perfectly.
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