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THE LADYKILLERS (2004)
Dir. Joel and Ethan Coen
Review by MICHAEL ROWIN
a Film Comment online exclusive
Underneath their absurdist humor, are the Coen Brothers really god-fearing, moral conservatives? Being the cinematic archeologists they are, it's not surprising that they've finally got around to remaking a comedy classic, but they go about it in an odd way, taking Alexander Mackendrick's 1955 The Ladykillers and infusing its heist-gone-wrong story with a religious theme. The opening sequence unequivocally spells out the film's concerns: a raven perches on a demonic gargoyle while a riverboat casino and a barge carrying garbage glide ominously across the river below, the action scored to the gospel hymn "Come, Let Us Go Back to the Lord." The juxtaposition of vice and virtue drives the point home: this is going to be a tale of good vs. evil, Coen Brothers-style.
The current Ladykillers stars Tom Hanks as Professor Goldthwait Higginson Dorr, an eloquent if insufferable conman and thief who arrives at the door of Marva Munson (Irma P. Hall) seeking a room for rent. While pretending to rehearse with a string quintet in her basement, Dorr and a rag-tag ensemble plan a robbery that involves tunneling into the aforementioned casino's vault. Joel and Ethan Coen (for the first time sharing directing credit) do a solid job elaborating on the source material. Hanks's Dorr is close to unbearable with his Southern gentleman erudition and creepy giggle - one actually starts tuning out his long-winded, Coen-esque speeches after a while - but, whimsically combining obnoxiousness and romantic decadence, he makes for a more flamboyant character than Alec Guinness's snide criminal mastermind in Mackendrick's original. The rest of the gang seem to come from the Coen file folder labeled "freaks": Gawain (Marlon Wayans), a foul-mouthed, short-fused "inside man" who works at the casino as a janitor; Garth Pancake (J.K. Simmons), a know-it-all demolitions man with bowel problems; The General (Tzi Ma), a terse, efficient Vietnamese mercenary with a Hitler moustache; and Lump (Ryan Hurst), a dim-witted football player who serves as the team's "muscle."
It's Hall, however, who emerges as the film's dominant presence, and her character exemplifies the changes the Coens have wrought on the original version. Whereas the earlier film's Mrs. Wilberforce, as played by Katie Johnson, was a bumbling innocent who absent-mindedly caused trouble whenever she sought to help out, Marva is a large, no-nonsense, church-going black woman who at one point even slaps Gawain around. Mrs. Wilberforce wasn't so much good as oblivious; Marva connotes righteousness and purity, and seems shielded from harm by divine power.
It's nice to see the Coens having some fun with the material's cinematic possibilities, particularly after the uninspired realization of Intolerable Cruelty. A portrait of the late Mr. Munson doubles as commentary and sight gag with its shifting facial expressions (the portrait of Mr. Wilberforce in the original, by contrast, was a mere afterthought); the introduction of Lump recalls the fresh visuals of early Coen Brothers: four downs of a football game, all charging linemen and flailing limbs, are shown from Lump's subjective point of view-the camera inside his helmet - before the goliath himself is revealed on screen.
But these morsels only momentarily draw attention away from the weak foundation on which the film is built. Marva eventually finds out about the robbery and Dorr and his gang must silence her, resulting in the same ethical and cinematic confusion that capsized Cruelty. The question remains: can the Coens revel in the mayhem that so attracts them while remaining true to the feel-good Hollywood endings that they also partly parody? Here they seem unable to find the correct balance, and fall back on a rudimentary moral lesson mentioned earlier: Dorr's Edgar Allan Poe-quoting huckster and his greedy, cowardly crew get their comeuppance, while Marva basks in the glow of an earthly reward that's earned through common sense and humble servitude to the Lord. Meanwhile, the bizarrely-fashioned Southern setting - with one foot in the present by way of Gawain's rap music (or "hippety hop," as Marva calls it) and the other in a time warp past with Hanks's Colonel Sanders imitation - recalls the Depression-era South of O Brother, Where Art Thou? In both cases the Coens employ clichés of Americana to coddle their audience while never letting go of their condescension towards their characters.
Something else seems off kilter in The Ladykillers. Despite its light-triumphs-over-darkness story, the film is strangely uncognizant of its racial politics. Marva repeatedly sings the praises of Bob Jones University, and at the film's conclusion donates the gang's loot to the school. The controversial Bob Jones U., it might be noted, has had a notorious history of prohibiting interracial dating, a policy that prompted scrutiny of George W. Bush's cozy relationship with the school during the 2000 presidential election. Nothing, however, clues the audience in to this fact or the irony of Marva's decision. The Coens are too smart to be unaware of this extra-filmic information, which clouds The Ladykillers' sunny fantasy-world, but you would never know it - their work is so ingrained with post-modern stylization that any reassessment of the film's moral framework wouldn't even register. When the end credits roll and the gospel choir that appears throughout the film brings the house down with a rousing rendition of "Let the Light from the Lighthouse Shine Down On Me," all moral, symbolic, and narrative loose ends are tied up, any questions about Marva's disconcerting ignorance of real-life issues drowned out by unreflective optimism.
Where are the Coens headed with this minor addition to their ouevre? Putting aside The Man Who Wasn't There, their recent films circumvent rather than satirize social complexities, and employ caricature as reassuring gag rather than disarming critique. The gleeful anarchy that reigned in Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, and The Big Lebowski has been replaced by dutiful compromise - a disappointing transformation exemplified by the difference between the charismatic, psychotic criminals of past Coen films and the cute, superficially-wacky crooks on display here. In fact, The Ladykillers is a lot like Dorr's band of mischief-makers - running away from its own shadow, it hides in harmless eccentricities and forgettable slapstick. - MICHAEL ROWIN
© 2004 by The Film Society of Lincoln Center
