Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together

From such cult hits as Raising Arizona (1987) and The Big Lebowski (1998) to major critical darlings Fargo (1996), No Country for Old Men (2007), and Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), Ethan and Joel Coen have cultivated a bleakly comical, instantly recognizable voice in modern American cinema. In The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together, film critic Adam Nayman carefully sifts through their complex cinematic universe in an effort to plot, as he puts it, “some Grand Unified Theory of Coen-ness.” The book combines critical text—biography, close film analysis, and enlightening interviews with key Coen collaborators—with a visual aesthetic that honors the Coens’ singular mix of darkness and levity. Featuring film stills, beautiful and evocative illustrations, punchy infographics, and hard insight, this book will be the definitive exploration of the Coen brothers’ oeuvre.

"...this book tries to plot "some Grand Unified Theory of Coen-ness" in a "definitive" exploration of the Coen brothers' oeuvre.", "Far from an entry-level guide to the Coens' career, this comprehensive dissection of their filmography aims to uncover a 'Grand Unified Theory Of Coen-ness'. Exploring the complexities of the duo's oeuvre with forensic attention to detail, critic Adam Nayman flags up repeating motifs and parallels, only occasionally overreaching into tenuousness.", "The large-format tome, lavishly decorated with stills (including on-set panoramas by Jeff Bridges), illustrations and infographics, may suggest coffee-table fare, but there is genuine substance here. Punctuating his chronologically ordered analyses of individual movies with interviews with key collaborators (though not the Coens themselves) and five chapters charting the commercial and critical vicissitudes of the brothers' career, Nayman swiftly shows he's done his homework: he's read the books that influenced the movies, researched and considered the countless references, and checked, for example, the number of cats used in shooting Inside Llewyn Davis (2012).", "Nayman’s essays are both entertaining and academic, analysing themes and motifs from each film, identifying recurring links between them, and tying them into cinema history - and once you start reading, it’s easy to get hooked. Even the most obsessive Coen fans will come out of this appreciating their favourite films in new ways as they see details they never knew were there.", “One of the pleasures of the big, handsome, mid-to-late career monographs that Abrams Books has made a specialty (they also released books on Wes Anderson, Oliver Stone, and Martin Scorsese) is that they allow us to appreciate the “minor” entries of those oeuvres. Take, for example, Adam Nayman’s The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together (out tomorrow), which, yes, gives full analysis and appreciation to Fargo, Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski, and No Country For Old Men. But Nayman also has plenty to say about supposedly secondary works like The Hudsucker Proxy, Burn After Reading, and, in this excerpt, the all-but-forgotten 2001 black-and-white film noir riff, The Man Who Wasn’t There.”

Adam Nayman is a film critic in Toronto for TheGlobe and Mail and The Grid and a contributing editor to Cinema Scope. He has written on film for the Village Voice, L.A. Weekly, Film Comment, Cineaste, Montage, POV, Reverse Shot, The Walrus, Saturday Night, Little White Lies, and The Dissolve. He teaches film studies at the University of Toronto and Ryerson University and is a programmer for the Toronto Jewish Film Society. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.