Blood Simple (1984)

I had seen a dozen Coen brothers movies. My overall impression was that they are very skilled at the craft, whether going goofy or gritty, but always include something strange and unsatisfying, seemingly to annoy viewers on purpose. I got curious about their first feature-length effort, an indie, which was the only entry on AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills I hadn't seen yet.

Texan bar owner Julian Marty (Dan Hedaya) hires PI Loren Visser (M. Emmet Walsh) to see whether Marty's wife, Abby (Frances McDormand in her screen debut), is cheating on him. She is -- with one of his employees, Ray (John Getz). When his own confrontations prove fruitless, Marty asks Visser to kill Abby and Ray. He learns the hard way not to try to make a hit man out of someone who wasn't in that line of work to begin with. But that's just Act 1. Characters get confused from there, and as their panic mounts, so do the dangerous mistakes....

Perhaps the surest sign that the directors were novices is the small cast. Apart from the four above, the only character to rate a mention is the other bartender, Meurice (Samm-Art Williams), who is largely detached from the travails of the rest and serves only as a liaison from time to time. This doesn't mean the Coens did a bad job. Christopher Nolan's Following had a similarly tight focus on a far smaller budget, and that was admirable.

BS moves pretty slowly, for realism and/or sheer tension. Characters also get a lot of the 96 minutes to themselves more or less, and they're not in the habit of talking out loud to nobody, so prepare for extended periods without dialog. I had a little difficulty determining motives at times. Of course, it's common for Coen characters to lack smarts, virtue, or both, as is clearly the case here. (Bloody simpletons?)

Oddly enough, once the pieces fit together for me, I found nothing particularly strange or unsatisfying about it. That said, I'm not sure what critics found "shockingly funny" about it. Sure, characters keep thinking and doing the wrong things, but the setup isn't terribly contrived, and the subject and atmosphere are consistently serious.

I do appreciate the artistry. There are good camera shots. The music alternates interestingly among the dark original score, prolonged silence, and dissonant background fare. Nothing feels truly gratuitous or undercooked. The action gets fairly thrilling eventually, provided you're not so disgusted with the characters that you don't really care whether they survive. I suspect that that was part of Pauline Kael's problem with it.

You might see BS as a predecessor to Fargo. I prefer to see it as its own thing, and I rank it about average overall for Joel and Ethan.