The Coen brothers name cinema’s “ultimate important movie”, and why it’s a tragedy that they’re right
Realistically, a filmmaker shouldn’t set out to make an ‘important’ movie on purpose, because that would be pretentious. On the other hand, the movie that the Coen brothers called the most important of them all did fulfil that criteria, albeit in the worst way possible.
While it’s always been difficult to tell when Joel and Ethan are being serious or having a laugh at everyone’s expense, they weren’t wrong when they anointed a particular film as “the ultimate important movie,” even if it wasn’t said in a manner that reflected the heft of the subject.
They’ve made a few important pictures of their own, but you can’t really say that any of them have drastically or seismically altered the landscape of the entire industry, unless you count the wave of would-be auteurs who emerged in their wake and tried to capitalise on ‘Coenesque’ becoming an accepted term.
This being the idiosyncratic writers, directors, and editors, it was a passing comment that didn’t have much to do with anything, apart from some genre similarities. Many of their previous efforts carried some DNA, particularly Blood Simple and No Country for Old Men, but it wasn’t until 2010 that the Coens dived headlong into a conventional western.
Their adaptation of True Grit was followed eight years later by The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, giving them a double dose of the medium that’s about as quintessentially American as the moving image has to offer. Reflecting on its downturn, which saw it go from the most dominant genre in the nation’s multiplexes to little more than an afterthought, one notable example popped into Joel’s mind that could explain why.
“Oh, yeah, Heaven’s Gate,” he suddenly recalled, before Ethan described it as “the ultimate important movie.” Is there an element of tongue being placed in cheek? Most likely, since this is the Coens, but when you look back on what’s happened in the four and a half decades since, it’s technically not incorrect.
As much as their regular cohort, Jeff Bridges, would love for it to be recognised as the unsung masterpiece he’s adamant that it is, a point of view that more and more people are slowly coming around to, Michael Cimino’s folly is still best remembered as the movie that hammered the final, and most painful, nail into the coffin of the ‘New Hollywood’ era.
After the western went miles behind schedule, massively over-budget, and died a slow death at the box office, the major studios suddenly decided that maybe it wasn’t the best idea to keep handing unfettered creative control to filmmakers to let them make whatever they wanted, however they saw fit. Since then, it’s not a coincidence that mainstream fare has become increasingly safe, risk-averse, and repetitive.
“Westerns used to be free to be not important,” Ethan added, which is also true, but the fallout from Heaven’s Gate ran deeper. It’s one of the most important productions ever mounted, but ushering out the age of widespread big-budget auteurism in favour of slick, shiny, and formulaic tent-pole releases is about the worst way to achieve it.
