The only “sexy” movie the Coen brothers ever made: “It’s more of a glam thing”
As two of modern cinema’s most famed and acclaimed filmmakers, the Coen brothers are used to having superlatives thrown their way. However, “sexy” isn’t a word that’s often, if ever, used to describe their work, and while they technically didn’t say it themselves, they didn’t disagree either.
Whenever anyone contemplates one of the siblings’ many classic movies, titillation, exoticism, or eroticism isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. Joel and Ethan write, produce, direct, and edit what they know: stories about oddball characters, typically set in middle America, that flirt with absurdity.
If they’re creating something from the ground up, then audiences have been conditioned to expect a certain set of Coenisms. However, when they’re working in the studio system or scribbling a screenplay for somebody else to direct, then they’ve been known to venture outside of their wheelhouse occasionally.
They performed uncredited rewrites on regular collaborator Billy Bob Thornton’s Bad Santa, helped crack the script for Angelina Jolie’s biopic, Unbroken, and penned Steven Spielberg’s Cold War drama Bridge of Spies. It’s not impossible to imagine them helming the former, but the latter two? Not a chance.
Inevitably, despite the presence of their favourite idiot, George Clooney, in the lead role, the Coens were accused of selling out for the first time in their career when they agreed to direct 2002’s glitzy rom-com, Intolerable Cruelty. It was the first time they’d been writers for hire, and they only ended up stepping behind the camera when their schedules opened up.
Ron Howard was the first name attached to direct, but when he was replaced by Jonathan Demme, who also dropped out, the Coens took over because their planned adaptation of To the White Sea fell apart. Howard’s Imagine Entertainment remained on board, with his producing partner Brian Grazer hyping up the brothers’ involvement.
“Joel and Ethan are the coolest, purest filmmakers in modern movies,” he said. “Here you have a romantic comedy with these mainstream movie stars. And then you add the Coens’ irreverence, and it’s their irreverence injected into this romance that makes the whole journey very sexy and very unpredictable.”
A lot of those words don’t jive with the Coens’ back catalogue, something Ethan was fully aware of. “It’s more of a glam thing than certainly we’ve ever done before,” he agreed. “Like a lot of screwball comedies, it’s about rich people, so not just in terms of photography but in terms of set dressing, wardrobe, every aspect, it’s all very high-end.”
Joel admitted that “we didn’t write this originally as something we were going to do ourselves, that wasn’t the case here,” and it showed. The material felt ill at ease with the Coens’ established sensibilities, and it can’t have been a coincidence that Intolerable Cruelty was immediately recognised as their weakest picture, at least until another studio gig usurped it; their remake of The Ladykillers.
To the surprise of nobody, apart from maybe Grazer, the Coens directing a movie they hadn’t planned on directing didn’t turn out to be one of their best.
