In the films of Joel and Ethan Coen, the world is clear as mud. It is streaked and shmeared.
The cinematic universe these Minnesota-born brothers-turned-filmmakers have created over the past four decades, together and separately, is absurd, fatalistic, misanthropic and humanistic, populated by unserious, articulate, good-hearted, self-loathing folks who think they’re smarter than they are, and violent evil dybbuks and rudderless institutions, and it’s all folly. None of it matters because we’re all heading for the same fate, which no amount of money can save us from. In other words, they are deeply coded texts, handwritten on scrolls, dressed in shimmering finery, held in spotlit arks, telling their story in a dead language without the vowels inked to guide the reader. Sound fun? Make sense? It is, and it does, as long as you’re in on the joke.
There’s never been a lot of money here, but somehow it’s worked. With a few exceptions, the brothers’ creative seed has found consistent purchase. They have been unqualified successes, and have found gratification in their every impulse, even while finding kinship in the losers they interpret the world through time and again. They’ve navigated a broken Hollywood system with autonomy, becoming widely recognized and decorated as masters from the beginning, when they emerged fully formed (with some box office bombs and critical pushback peppered in). Their story is one of the rarest exceptions in movie history—an example of completely idiosyncratic, intellectual filmmakers rising to the top of their craft and finding acceptance and love for their often strange and subversive movies, helping to reshape the cinematic landscape in the process. I don’t get it either, but I accept the mystery.
For film nerds, they’re simply unfair, the best at every technical element of making movies. In cinematography, sound design, editing, soundtrack, screenwriting, they tower above their peers. They are masters of tone, of spatial language, of communicating story via image pregnant with meaning, of the action set piece. They cast the greatest actors and get some of their absolute best performances out of them. There is a chicken-and-egg component to many of these relationships. They don’t exactly invent Jon Polito, or Sir Roger Deakins, or Hailee Steinfeld, or T Bone Burnett, or Frances MacDormand, or John Goodman, or Skip Lievsay, or Holly Hunter, or John Tuturro, or Carter Burwell, or Oscar Isaac, but we never look at those people's work the same way as we do in their work with the Coens, or love them quite as much as when they work with other people. Maybe it’s taste that allows them to locate the perfect people for these moments in time and career. Maybe it’s a symbiosis, where they find something in their collaborator or maybe their collaborator is unlocked by the brothers. It’s another unsolvable puzzle in a cold, chaotic, Godless universe.
The following is a ranking of the 21 collected films made so far by my favorite directors who ever lived (solo works included), the recent byproduct of yet another run through their incredible, near-perfect filmography. It won’t be the last. For me, and many sick neurotic people like me, it’s a body of work that contains worlds I find eminently habitable, worlds that change in meaning and shape and significance as I age along with them. They traipse through the 20th and 21st American centuries, the whole history of cinema, and selectively pluck influences and subjects to build postmodern facsimiles of, but these characters really exist alone in their own cartoon pocket universe. Which is why this last viewing experience was one of the best, by brilliant design, as if this was how these films were designed to be watched: In rapid succession, while manically taking notes, over a few weeks.
You pick up interconnected rhymes and echoes, a cinematic universe of cyclical shit you couldn’t have possibly tracked through the 80s, 90s, 2000s and 2010s in real time. A twirling top hat becomes a rolling hula hoop then a spinning hubcap. Herbert I. McDonnough becomes Ulysses Everett McGill. Barton Fink becomes Llewyn Davis. Loren Visser becomes Leonard Smalls, Anton Chigurh, Bob Dylan, a tornado heralding the end of the world. It is one great Mentaculus, a meticulously constructed, circuitous road to nowhere.
There is an unusually subjective, random quality to ranking Coen Brothers films because the quality is so high and the films often incongruent apples or oranges. This time I adhered more closely to the pleasure principle, and tended to gravitate towards the films I loved watching the most in the moment rather than respect for their ship-in-a-bottle construction. But we’re ordering perfection, quite appropriately a fool’s errand. The order very well may be entirely different on the next rewatch. For young readers and the uninitiated, what I would say is this list represents a chalk ranking of the Coen’s works from the vantage point of the middlebrow dumbass fan. It’s a good starting point for you to develop your own list with an obsessive deep dive. —Abe Beame
Read our ranking of the Coen Brothers’ best films, including Ethan Coen’s just-released Honey Don’t, right here.
