Review of Blood Simple (1985) by David C — 15 Oct 2014

Some filmmakers revel in the idea of "the perfect crime." Joel and Ethan Coen, on the other hand, tell stories about half-baked crimes that go terribly, grimly, outrageously wrong. Already in "Blood Simple," the first film credit for the Coen brothers and for their frequent collaborator Frances McDormand, the elements of their grisly but sardonic formula were in place. An unassuming rural setting (the film was shot in and around Austin, but only in its least populous corners), pitiful and pitiable suckers caught up in a mess of their own inept devising, double crosses, and the joyously choreographed juxtaposition of popular music with violence. The latter has become something of a cliché, thanks to heavy rotation not only in Coen brothers movies but in Quentin Tarantino films, prestige TV dramas, and so on, but few examples are as effectively jarring as the sudden, celebratory intrusion of "Same Old Song" by The Four Tops into "Blood Simple.".

For the most part, though, "Blood Simple" emphasizes the sadness of its characters over humor. The tone is therefore closer to the Coens' Oscar-winning "No Country for Old Men" than to "Fargo," despite the presence of McDormand as a thickly-accented, gun-toting center both here and in the latter film. Given the Coens' flair for wordplay, of which there are glimmers here in an opening voice-over, it is notable that the most intense scenes in "Blood Simple" are virtually silent. Midway through, an increasingly grotesque sequence depicts a ham-fisted murder attempt and a messy cover-up. This long segment is full of brilliant visual misdirection; every time we're sure we know what's coming, and a new and more horrible possibility is introduced instead. The looks exchanged between John Getz's "Ray" and Dan Hedaya's "Marty" don't say much, because communication would ruin the farcical spiral of misunderstandings that drives the rest of the film. Their faces, therefore, reveal only raw feelings: the pain, fear, anger, sorrow, guilt, and jealousy that define their characters.

There is, then, more brooding here than in later Coen productions, which usually have more comic relief and do not drag out their carnage to quite the same extent. But although the Coens have tinkered with the balance of their engaging formula, they have seldom abandoned it, and in many ways "Blood Simple" feels like a far-sighted prevision of classics to come.