“Truly groundbreaking”: the comedy movie the Coen brothers called “all kinds of jaw-dropping”
You never truly know when the Coen brothers are being serious or pulling your leg, which makes it hard to decipher whether or not they truly believed a lowbrow comedy movie was genuinely one of the most groundbreaking things they’d ever seen or not.
After all, Josh Brolin suggested that Joel and Ethan have been guilty of playing up to their eccentric reputations in public, but this is also the same Joel and Ethan who revealed that their nightmare over becoming industry sell-outs manifested itself through a dream of the Incredible Hulk, so who knows?
The Coens also claimed that they wished they’d directed Anchorman, which is nothing if not an oddly niche what-if, even though you can’t imagine it would turn out the same way with the brains behind Blood Simple, Fargo, and The Big Lebowski at the helm, but it would definitely be a sight to see either way.
Despite being responsible for many hilarious scenes spread out across a number of seminal films, the Academy Award winners have never made an out-and-out comedy, at least in the conventional sense. The Ladykillers was intentionally farcical, but it wasn’t very good, although it might be the closest they’ve gotten to aiming deliberately and specifically for yuks.
The brutal reception to the remake of the Ealing classic, which it deserved because it remains the worst entry in their shared filmography by far, may have sworn them off another concerted attempt, but it transpired that Anchorman wasn’t the only Judd Apatow-backed comedy that struck a nerve with the duo.
“I Love You, Man was kind of funny,” Ethan told GQ, and he wasn’t wrong. It’s easily in the upper tier of the collective ‘Frat Pack’ efforts, with Jason Segel and Paul Rudd making for a winning double-act in a story that features all of the gross-out and foul-mouthed stuff audiences had come to expect, but with a surprisingly deep and introspective throughline about loneliness and male friendship.
“That shows you what old fogies we are,” Joel jumped in. “We saw I Love You, Man, and there was some really funny stuff in there, but it was all kinds of jaw-dropping to us,” and Ethan concurred: “Yeah, shocking.” It didn’t exactly upend conventions or blaze a new trail, but it struck a nerve regardless.
“I’m sitting there wondering why people aren’t talking about how bold this movie is,” Joel continued. “I found it truly groundbreaking and really out of the mainstream, but only because I’m an old fart.” Old farts or not, the emotional undercurrent of two guys pushing 40 becoming best friends in a film with the requisite amount of dick jokes knocked the Coens for a loop, for whatever reason.
Maybe they’re huge Rush fans as well, with the band getting a subplot of their own that bonds Rudd’s Peter Klaven and Segel’s Sydney Fife together in the first place, but wherever the truth lies, nobody would have guessed that the Coens found I Love You, Man, of all things, to be a groundbreaking work of cinema.
