Coen brother, where art thou: When Joel & Ethan Coen go solo

“I had a partner. He threw himself off the George Washington Bridge.” - Llewyn Davis

Absence defines Joel and Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis. Following the suicide of Mike, the likable half of his folk duo, Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) ekes out a living couch surfing from one dingy Greenwich Village apartment to another, mourning his partner’s passing in public isolation on dim coffeehouse stages. Throughout the film, Llewyn’s alienation bumps against other, more successful partnerships that implicitly and explicitly remind him of what he’s lost and refuses to regain. Whether with a trio managed by a folk kingmaker or a dinnertime duet with a doting benefactor, replacing his partner Mike is anathema to Llewyn. As he sings, “Life ain’t worth living without the one you love.”

Following the release of their 18th film, The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs, the Coen brothers did something new: Made movies independently. In 2021, Joel released his austere and expressionistic The Tragedy Of Macbeth. Two years (and one Jerry Lee Lewis documentary) later, Ethan offered Drive-Away Dolls, a raunchy road comedy about Gen X lesbians trying to get laid. One drama, one comedy—even in separation, the brothers follow patterns established over their 40-year career.

When partners go solo, it has an illuminating effect on their work. This happens a lot in music, where the respective members of KISS can release four solo albums to reveal Ace Frehley as the bravest knight in Satan’s service. With the Coens, determining which idea comes from whom has long been a game for viewers, theorizing which joke came from Ethan and which from Joel. Would that it were so simple. “They kind of both do it all,” Hail, Caesar!’s Alden Ehrenreich said in 2016. “You have the sense after a take that they both have the same opinion of it, and they both know what each other is thinking, as people say, they’re like a two-headed brain.”

Superficially, Drive-Away Dolls and The Tragedy Of Macbeth couldn’t be more disparate. Macbeth recalls The Man Who Wasn’t There’s monochrome palate and conjures the funereal tone of Scruggs’ “The Mortal Remains” and the conspiratorial existentialism of A Serious Man. By contrast, Drive-Away Dolls is a rollicking sex odyssey, marrying the structure of O Brother, Where Art Thou? with the contagious stupidity of Burn After Reading. Dolls is among the broadest comedies Ethan Coen has ever directed, especially compared to his brother’s dour Scotland, and Macbeth is among the most visually experimental of Joel’s career.

The difference between a Coen brothers film and a film by a Coen brother is like the competing versions of “Fare Thee Well” that play at the beginning and end of Llewyn Davis. Elements of the Coens’ previous work are present, but others are missing. Macbeth exhibits the existential bloodletting and cursed ambition of Fargo and Blood Simple; Dolls the freewheeling, Looney Tunes energy of Raising Arizona. This freedom from each other allows them to satisfy themselves while ignoring the other’s ingredients.

Joel is getting a lot out of his system with Macbeth, stripping away the formal excess of the last four decades. “If I was working with Ethan, I wouldn’t have done Macbeth,” Joel said in 2018. “It would not be interesting to him.” Shot in black-and-white by Llewyn Davis cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, Macbeth’s spare, brutalist sets and brain-scrambling contortions from Kathryn Hunter are the inverse of Dolls’ canted angles and animated edits. Crucially, Macbeth retains something from all 18 Coen brothers movies that Dolls lacks: The crushing sense that God either hates or has abandoned us. Joel externalizes this feeling of cosmic cruelty in every frame of Macbeth, withholding the comedy that chased the brothers’ existential shots of whiskey.

As much as Macbeth resembles a Coen drama, Drive-Away Dolls reflects their comedies and, despite the happy ending, is the more classically Coen-feeling film. Co-written and edited by Ethan’s wife Tricia Cooke, Drive-Away Dolls is a Russ Meyer-styled road comedy, combining the ACME-branded violence of Raising Arizona—with star Margret Qualley channeling Holly Hunter’s drawl—with the farce of Burn After Reading. Motifs from across their filmography appear throughout, including close-ups of statues and the infirm, evoking everything from Fargo to Inside Llewyn Davis to The Big Lebowski.

But no one could be blamed for assuming either was directed by both brothers. If anything, the two solo movies prove, as in Hail, Caesar!, that movies aren’t solely made by directors, and the Coens have other collaborators who have also had a major impact on their work. For each project, both Ethan and Joel collaborated with their spouses, Tricia Cooke (co-writer, editor, and producer) and Francis MacDormand (star and producer). This would hardly be the first time they’ve worked with them. Among her many roles in the Coen filmography, McDormand won an Oscar for Fargo. Cooke, meanwhile, was one of the editors, along with Joel and Ethan, sharing the credit “Roderick Jaynes” on every Coen brothers movie from Miller’s Crossing through The Man Who Wasn’t There. Moreover, they both enlisted composer Carter Burwell, who’s worked on all but two of their films and has as much to do with the permeating “Coenness” as anything.

Working with others might have encouraged the brothers to broaden their horizons, with each Coen working outside the bounds of white hetero narratives. Macbeth marks the first time either director worked with a Black lead, Denzel Washington, with the closest exception being The Ladykillers’ Irma P. Hall. Likewise, Drive-Away Dolls puts Geraldine Viswanathan as its co-lead and is the first film by either Coen to focus on explicitly queer characters.

Llewyn Davis turns down every opportunity to find a new partner and break his Sisyphean existence. By finding new creative partnerships, whether a wife or the immortal bard, the Coens have sharpened their respective tools by being forced into new artistic positions. “I’ll go on the record and say that I dragged Ethan down into the lowbrow,” Cooke told Empire about Drive-Away Dolls. “It was definitely me saying, ‘How low can we go?’” Thankfully, the Coens aren’t as stubborn or as unlucky as Llewyn Davis and reportedly plan to share a brain on a horror film akin to Blood Simple. They’re not Llewyn or Mike. The Coen brothers and their collaborators are that third version of “Fare Thee Well,” played by a nascent Bob Dylan, from Inside Llewyn Davis’ conclusion, a culture-defining whole that really ties the room together.