Blood Simple. (1984)

Genre: Crime Drama
Director: Joel Coen
Writers: Joel and Ethan Coen

At this point in time, there are plenty of people familiar with the work of the Coen brothers. Recently, they've gained widespread popularity with No Country for Old Men (2007) and Burn After Reading (2008), and were best known in the 1990's for Fargo (1996) and, one of my personal favorites, The Big Lebowski (1998). The Coens have done some damned entertaining work in their time, having started as associates of several major names in the business, including the Raimi brothers (Sam, Ted and Ivan), Bruce Campbell, Holly Hunter, and Francis McDormand. Their first work, Blood Simple., apparently started as a teaser trailer featuring Bruce Campbell in the role that would eventually be performed by Dan Hedaya.

The plot of Blood Simple. is pretty strait forward, although the Coens' specific method of storytelling initially left me (and probably much of their audience) wondering what was going on for a period of time. As with most of their movies, most of us will have to watch them more than once just to figure out what's going on; it's not uncommon to watch the first half hour of a Coen brothers flick wondering when the plot is going to start. I remember feeling a little bewildered when I first saw No Country for Old Men, waiting a good twenty minutes before realizing that there was a story unfolding right in front of me. I guess the Coens are just that good at subtlety.

This movie begins with an affair between bartender Ray (John Getz) and the wife of the bar owner, Abby (Francis McDormand). Well, sort of. The movie actually begins with some Texas landscape shots and a voice-over (similar to the beginning of No Country for Old Men), followed up by Ray and Abby driving down the highway in the rain. The aforementioned bar owner, Julian Marty (Dan Hedaya), suspects something is going on, so he hires private investigator Loren Visser (M. Emmet Walsh) to follow them and take pictures--Visser is actually trailing Ray and Abby in the opening scene while they drive down that dark highway. After discovering his wife's infidelity, Marty is angered to the point of embezzling money from his own business to pay Loren Visser to murder the young adulterous couple. Visser, however, has plans of his own, and instead decides to rip off Marty and try to get away scott-free. As is the way in a Coen brothers movie, nothing goes as planned.

For those unfamiliar with the other works of the Coen brothers, it should be known that their movies make heavy use of dramatic irony. Their characters suffer from tragic flaws that prompt them to do the kinds of idiotic things that make some movie watchers stand and scream at the screen. Items are shown not because their presence is significant, but because their absence is significant. The Coen brothers also tend leave entire plot threads unresolved, which is probably why the message boards at imdb.com are filled with threads reading "I don't get it" or "What's the point of this movie?", along with other varied inanities. Blood Simple. actually wraps everything up fairly well compared to some of the Coens' flicks, but like I said: it really needs to be watched more than once, if only to have a full understanding of the basic mechanics of the plot.

I listed the genre of Blood Simple. as "crime drama" because that is what is listed on imdb.com. The more pretentious film-goers would call this film noir or neo-noir. Film noir, if you are not familiar with the term, refers to a number of the crime dramas from the 1940's into the 1960's, in which the term "noir" (dark or black) is in reference to everything from the characters, the tone, and the lighting (think Humphrey Bogart). Really, it doesn't make a damn bit of difference when it comes down to whether or not a person can enjoy this movie. One need not be an arrogant film snot to understand that interesting choices were made in lighting, photography, plot development, and character motivation, just as one need not be a wine connoisseur to enjoy a good drunken buzz.