directors/screenwriters
Ethan Coen
Joel Coen
based on
a screenplay by
William
Rose
producers
Ethan Coen
Joel Coen
Tom Jacobson
Barry Josephson
Barry Sonnenfeld
cinematographer
Roger Deakins
music
Carter Burwell
editor
"Roderick Jaynes" (the Coens)
cast
Tom Hanks (Prof. Goldthwait Higginson Dorr)
Irma P. Hall (Marva Munson)
Marlon Wayans (Gawain MacSam)
J.K. Simmons (Garth Pancake)
Tzi Ma (The General)
Ryan Hurst (Lump Hudson)
Diane Delano (Mountain Girl)
George Wallace (Sheriff Wyner)
Stephen Root (Fernand Gudge)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 104m
u.s.
release: March 26,
2004
video
availability: TBA
official
website
other coen
bros. films
reviewed on this website:
- barton
fink
- the
big lebowski
- blood
simple
- fargo
- the
hudsucker proxy
- intolerable
cruelty
- the
man who wasn't there
- miller's
crossing
- o
brother, where art thou?
- raising
arizona
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"Professor Goldthwait
Higginson Dorr" is a wonderful name for a conniving smoothie,
and Tom Hanks plays the role like a man who relishes nothing
so much as unfurling that majestic name. In The Ladykillers,
Hanks is looser and funnier than he has been in quite some time;
he affects a triumphantly baroque Mississippi accent and speaks
with the utmost hilarious precision, as if his every sentence
were a dewy lover leaving the folds of his bedsheets. It's a
fully imagined comic performance to match that of Alec Guinness,
who played the analogous role in the original 1955 comedy from
the Ealing Studios. I can't remember the last movie character
so charmingly in love with the sound of his own voice.
This Ladykillers comes
courtesy of Joel and Ethan Coen, whom some may consider above
something so base as a remake. But the original story (like Assault
on Precinct 13, due to be remade soon, and itself a loose
remake of Rio Bravo) allows for any number of retellings;
the true star of both movies is the premise. In both, a band
of criminals hole up in the home of an elderly lady, under the
pretense of practicing chamber music. They plan to pull off a
big heist, but the old lady gets in their way. Except for the
mastermind (Guinness in '55, Hanks in '04) and a big, brainless
bruiser (Danny Green then, Ryan Hurst now), the criminals in
the remake don't correspond much to those in the original; there's
no callous Herbert Lom figure in the Coen film, or an equivalent
to Peter Sellers' Cockney layabout. The new group includes a
hip-hop janitor (Marlon Wayans), a demolition man (J.K. Simmons),
and a stoic combatant (Tzi Ma).
The old lady in the original
was a twittering dear thing with a habit of reporting imagined
oddities to the police. In the remake, Marva Munson (Irma P.
Hall) is a formidable black woman as comfortable handing out
slaps upside the head as serving cookies. The Coens' script is
a little foreshortened; those familiar with William Rose's 1955
scenario will miss the circular logic that allows the police
to disregard the old lady's story (in the remake, she reports
a neighbor's loud "hippity-hop" music). Still, Irma
P. Hall makes a strong foil for the inept thieves, especially
Marlon Wayans, who at the moment of truth -- as in the prior
film, he's drawn the short straw and has to eliminate Marva --
is undone by sentimental thoughts of his mama.
A character who picks the worst
possible time to have bowel problems may seem a bit too scatological
for the Coens' refined tastes. But then these are the same pranksters
who had thugs pee on Jeff Bridges' rug in The
Big Lebowski ("That rug really pulled the room together,
man"). A scene involving self-defense at a donut shop (with
the instant-classic line "Get your fingers out my
man's nose!") had me laughing well after it was over.
Ryan Hurst, as the aptly named Lump, gives us one of those hyperbolically
stupid Coen characters, introduced in a highly entertaining idiot's-point-of-view
scene on a football field. Even a cat doesn't escape the morbid
Coen touch, providing this darkening comedy with its final brilliant
sick joke. (A barge passing under a bridge, as in the original,
serves nicely as a means to dispose of inconvenient objects.)
Tom Hanks presides over it
all, looking and acting supremely happy to be there, like previous
stars who've blossomed under the Coens' jurisdiction (Nicolas
Cage, Jeff Bridges, George Clooney). The Ladykillers is
worth seeing just for the moments when the quick-thinking Professor
Dorr, never less than exquisitely solicitous, moves heaven and
earth to explain to his suspicious landlady why money is floating
around the root cellar, or lends his golden pipes to a recitation
of Poe, or attempts to calm a gun-waving Marlon Wayans by pointing
out that such behavior reflects badly on his colleagues and may
present itself as unseemly to their fellow patrons of the Waffle
Hut. I can well imagine the Coens guffawing as they wrote the
dialogue for Professor Goldthwait Higginson Dorr, and Hanks cackling
as he first read it, and myself laughing when I hear it on the
sure-to-be-overplayed DVD.
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