The Ladykillers Review
by Karina Montgomery (karina AT cinerina DOT com)May 11th, 2004
Ladykillers
Matinee
One of the most difficult reviews I have had to write in a long time, Ladykillers proves its aesthetic complexity by being impossible to discuss and yet impossible not to feel connected to. I could go on about Tom Hanks and Irma P. Hall and the simple pleasure of the storyline, the elaborate universes the Coens build and then are fruitful within, but that won't tell you why I liked it....
It is a testament to the Coen's visceral style of filmmaking (aided as always by the deft eyes of cinematographer Roger Deakins, the production design of Dennis Gassner, and Carter Burwell's music) that every new offering from them stymies a verbal qualification. I walk out of the movie knowing how I felt about it, but unable to justify exactly why. Movies come and go and the Coens' works wiggle tantalizingly at the edge of memory. To describe why you like a Coen Brothers movie is to describe why you like a smell or a taste, because you just do. This film is no exception.
As a friend recently observed about Tom Hanks, "Now he's just showing off," though really he's just returned to his quirky comedy roots after a glorious (and hopefully, not completed) turn in Seriousville. Who better to return him to form (and themselves as well, after the flaccid Intolerable Cruelty) than Joel and Ethan Coen. Hanks is a beautiful vintage cartoon of a southern dandy, planted amidst modern Mississipean miscreants of all shades.
His landlady and partner in this comedy is Marva Munson, played with amazing grace and pure southern style by Hall. Where Hanks is so rarified he's unreal (his flowery dialofue evokes memories of Ulysses Everett McGill from O Brother Where Art Thou), Hall is so real she's a glittering treasure. A man who can turn phrases so precisely that he discerns a difference between being surprised and being taken aback is a formidable man to have dazzling you with his prose. Sometimes he plays Hall like a lute, and sometimes she ends up being more savvy than he gave her credit for.
Dennis Gassner is a perfect designer for the Coens because they favor creating a slightly false, though entirely probable world just outside our own; you believe and hope such worlds could exist. His work on the Hudsucker Proxy, O Brother Where Art Thou, Big Fish, and the Truman Show is so good because it is so subtle. The same art director, Richard Johnson, was on these films as well as A.I., and if you have noticed the feel of these movies you know how the gentle visual elegance adds to the narrative.
As a remake of the 1955 film, the challenge is to be honorable to the original while making this work in itself original. Setting it in the American South rather than in Britain solves some of these problems, but creates new ones with the cross-cultural criminals involved. Hanks' little gang (Marlon Wayans, Tzi Ma, JK Simmons, and Ryan Hurst) have a scheme, which they must perforce keep from Hall and naturally, once begun, the farce starts to unspool thereafter. The dance begins, and this tidy, myth-like southern Gothic spins out to a dark but satisfying conclusion. Check it out.
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These reviews (c) 2004 Karina Montgomery. Please feel free to forward but credit the reviewer in the text. Thanks. You can check out previous reviews at:
http://www.cinerina.com and http://ofcs.rottentomatoes.com - the Online Film Critics Society http://www.hsbr.net/reviews/karina/listing.hsbr - Hollywood Stock Exchange Brokerage Resource
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