Coen Brothers Films Ranked
10. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is an anthology Western that explores the many ways you can approach America’s favourite genre; a film that takes liberal influence from authors and filmmakers of days past over six self-contained stories.
We follow a singing gunslinger (Tim Blake Nelson), a bank robber awaiting hanging (James Franco), a disabled traveling actor and his cruel manager (Harry Melling and Liam Neeson), an obsessive gold prospector (Tom Waits), a widow on a wagon train (Zoe Kazan), and several inhabitants of a nighttime stagecoach (including Brendan Gleeson), across the course of this film’s 2 hours and 12 minutes.
Anthology stories by their very nature can be hit-and-miss, but The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is certainly more of the former, with every actor giving it their all. The highlights are definitely Tim Blake Nelson’s titular character’s ingenious and hilarious way of violently dispatching an armed opponent with a saloon table in the first story, closely followed by the penultimate segment which sees many a faltering passionate declaration between Zoe Kazan’s young widow and Bill Heck’s wagon train heartthrob.
Many of these stories preserve the romance of the Western genre, but the Coens also cap off most of them in a pretty unforgiving and borderline cruel manner, fully acknowledging the harshness and violence of living in this time period.
9. The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)
After their founder and president suddenly commits suicide, Hudsucker Industries, at the behest of the crafty Sidney J Mussburger (Paul Newman), appoints a puppet at the head of their company to drive down share prices and ensure they retain control of their stock. But the naïve Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins) comes up with an unexpectedly brilliant product idea just as undercover journalist Amy Archer (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is assigned to get the scoop on the inner workings of the company.
The tone of The Hudsucker Proxy, which looks back to the fast-talking comedies of the 1930s from the likes of Frank Capra and Howard Hawks, put a lot of people off when it was released in the mid-1990s, but the old-fashioned Hollywood ambition behind it is clear. Being different from most of its contemporaries has of course resulted in quite a cult following.
Sam Raimi’s collaboration with the Coens on the screenplay after acting as second unit director on a couple of their earlier projects adds a certain over-the-top goofiness to many of the character interactions, but Robbins, Leigh and Newman pitch their performances appropriately to this slightly heightened world, and the more fantastical elements that come in towards the end lend a magical-realist fable aspect to this unique examination of capitalism and staying true to yourself.
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8. Miller’s Crossing (1990)
A mob enforcer’s (Gabriel Byrne) loyalties are tested as he searches for a snitch and attempts to stay one step ahead of both sides of a brutal gang war at the height of US prohibition.
Miller’s Crossing is a fascinating film and understandably caused the Coen Brothers a real headache to write. It’s a little different from the other major gangster offerings of 1990 (Goodfellas and The Godfather Part III) – while it’s got a standard story setup for this genre, few of its characters behave in exactly the way these kinds of archetypes usually do, and the tricky script gives us plenty of unexpected plot turns and a stubbornly ambiguous final scene.
Let’s not even start on the sheer amount of complex visual symbolism the Coens packed in here and the fact that there’s definitely one reading of this challenging film that calls into question how much of what we’ve been watching actually happened. Put that puzzle in your fedora, then watch it get carried away by a gust of wind.
7. Burn After Reading (2008)
Recently sacked C.I.A. analyst Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) writes his scathing memoir which falls into the hands of two inexperienced blackmailers working at a gym in Washington D.C. (Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt). A chaotic chain of events ensues as Linda and Chad attempt to sell their ill-gotten information, and paranoid Treasury Department worker Harry (George Clooney), through his relationships with Linda and Oz’s wife Katie (Tilda Swinton), inadvertently escalates events.
Despite the contemporary setting and the prominence of some massive movie stars, Burn After Reading is essentially on old-fashioned farce (with added sex toy chair) that allows the Coens to have fun doing what they do best: writing a bunch of idiots in a situation spiralling rapidly out of their control.
This is easily one of their most accessible films. It presents a lean screenplay, clear stakes and memorably quirky performances. It also gleefully makes fun of more serious espionage thrillers with J.K. Simmons’ bewildered CIA Head being told about everything we have just witnessed by his deputy and responding with “Report back to me when it makes sense.”
