Can the Coen Brothers Please Make Contemporary Movies Again?

With The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, currently streaming for all on Netflix, the Coen Brothers have once again dipped back in the western well. Like the noir and crime genres, it’s a vibe the brothers are both familiar with and well-versed in. Their two previous efforts in the western genre have been nothing short of wild successes: 2007’s No Country for Old Men and 2010’s True Grit are not only the Coens’ two top-grossing hits, but they combined for 18 Academy Award nominations, with No Country winning them their lone Best Picture prize. So, yeah, it works out well for them.

The Coens have a fondness for period-set films in general. In their almost 25-year career, the brothers have made more movies set in another period than they have contemporary movies. They have, over the years, set their films in the 1960s (A Serious Man and Inside Llewyn Davis), the 1950s (The Hudsucker Proxy and Hail, Caesar!), the 1940s (Barton Fink and The Man Who Wasn’t There), the 1930s (O Brother, Where Art Tho?), the 1920s (Miller’s Crossing), and the Old West (True Grit and the latest The Ballad of Buster Scruggs). Even 1998’s The Big Lebowski is set in the recent past to better situate it in relation to the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Interspersed among all those period films, of course, are works like Raising Arizona and Fargo and the aforementioned No Country for Old Men, all contemporary-set and no less Coens-y for the lack of old-timey costumes or sets. The past decade, however, has seen the balance tip heavily to period films. Since 2008’s Burn After Reading, it’s been five straight period films, plus three screenplays — for Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken, Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, and George Clooney’s Suburbicon — also set in the past. Not to sound too panicky, and not to sniff at great movies like Inside Llewyn Davis, A Serious Man, and Hail,Caesar!, but what gives here?

It’s not like this string of period films haven’t commented on The World We Live In. Their brand was always a little bit fatalistic, but that stretch of A Serious Man, True Grit, and Llewyn Davis went real heavy on the fatalism, frustrations, and often the doomed lives of good (or at least talented) men. Still, there’s no small sense of retreat into the comfortable confines of the past going on in this stretch. Burn After Reading is not the most universally praised of Coens movies, but more than anything else released since, it looked the the absurdities of the George W. Bush era of American history straight in the eye and screamed a hearty “WHAT THE FUCK?!” Which felt in the smallest but still meaningful way cathartic.

To appreciate how it feels to have the Coens work in a contemporary setting and really resonate, look no farther than their two best films: Fargo and No Country for Old Men. Both are timeless in their own way, and certainly No Country owes a debt to author Cormac McCarthy’s prose, but no two Coens movies feel more meaningful and less distanced from the audiences they’re speaking to. Marge Gunderson’s “and it’s a beautiful day” speech from the end of Fargo reflects the heartbreak of a good woman who got a glimpse at most venal and rotten corners of humanity, of a human race whose morals have slid so far but which may not yet be beyond shame. When she asks Peter Stormare’s deadpan killer “Dontcha know that?” you feel just a glimmer of hope that maybe she might get through. You’re telling me nothing like that could apply to 2018?

The messages in No Country for Old Men are of course darker, though Tommy Lee Jones’s character expresses a similar befuddlement at the nature behind all that wickedness. You can see why they wouldn’t want to be, but I selfishly want the Coens back on this beat. I don’t need them to solve the world’s problems, that’s not what they’re there for, and answers have never been their strong suit anyway. But I want them to be in the world with us, staring back at it with us instead of noodling over the demise of the old West or the simple folk singer or … you know, the old West some more. The gunslingers and prospectors and old showman don’t need them like we do.

Stream The Ballad of Buster Scruggs on Netflix