Word: coens
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...real trick to their belovedness is that Joel and Ethan Coen go highbrow on lowbrow: opera parody mixes with stoner humor in The Big Lebowski, a cow explodes in the middle of a Depression-era adaptation of The Odyssey in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and quips about Renaissance music are juxtaposed with irritable-bowel syndrome in their latest, The Ladykillers, which opens this Friday. "We're not embarrassed to put in the cheapest gags if they make us laugh," says Joel, 49. "On the other hand, if something goes over somebody's head, we don't care...
...likability factor of the Coen brothers is so strong that even when an idea seems bad (like retreading the old British movie The Ladykillers) and is not even theirs (the Coens were hired to write the script and then took on the whole project when Barry Sonnenfeld dropped out as director), Tom Hanks signs up at below his usual salary. "I wanted to work with the guys," says Hanks. "If someone said, 'Disney is remaking The Ladykillers,' you'd probably just run away. But the Coen brothers live in this alternative world where they don't have to adhere...
...Coen brothers didn't go to Hanks for his box-office juice. They tried that last year with Intolerable Cruelty, a commercial failure even with George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones in a romantic comedy. "I don't know that we want to do something again where that was the obligation," says Joel. They cast Hanks because he could pull off the potentially over-the-top role of a classics-obsessed Southern criminal. "Tom can do that sort of stuff without it being shtick," says Ethan, 46, sitting with his brother at a Los Angeles diner...
Band of Bozos? The Fellowship of the Dingbats? Dawn of the Brain Dead? Something along those lines might be a more telling title for The Ladykillers, wherein the Coen brothers merrily subvert that standard caper trope in which a bunch of guys tunnel their way toward a large cache of cash and, naturally, an even larger concluding irony...
...meanwhile, are free to settle down with the Coens in their best environment, which is provincial America. Their most delicious films (Fargo, O Brother, Where Art Thou?) are populated by curiously likable boneheads, obsessively committed to miscreant conspiracies far too complex for them to really master. Opposing them are thwarting figures like Marva (or Marge, Fargo's immortally sensible, pregnant, smart police chief) who appear at first glance to be simple souls but are, in fact, the salt of our earth--folks who have so internalized their morality that it comes out as just plain common sense, funnily understated. They...