CS Daily Archive > Weekend Read > 03/26/04

The Ladykillers Cook Up Southern Trouble

Reviewed by Yon Motskin

Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
Based on William Rose's script for the 1955 film

Writer-director brother team Joel and Ethan Coen remake the classic caper comedy with their own idiosyncratic and tried recipe -- bubbling with Southern flavor, bumbling crooks, and a mouthful of bible-belt dialogue-speak from star Tom Hanks.

In the Deep South, Goldthwait Higginson Dorr, Ph.D wants to rob a casino. He assembles a crack team of four "experts" to help him dig a tunnel into an office that holds $1.6 million in cash from the Bandit Queen riverboat. They rent an adjacent basement room from an elderly church lady to pull of their seemingly simple heist, but soon run into a whole vat of trouble, including mutiny, dynamite, and their meddling landlady. But knocking her off proves to be the most difficult.

While The Ladykillers is a remake of the 1955 film written by William Rose (which was nominated for a Best Original Screenplay Academy Award), the story has all the concoctions of a quirky Coen brothers film (who themselves won an Best Original Screenplay Academy Award in 1996 for Fargo). Except for the main spine of the story, they've retained very little from the original Rose script. The most noticeable difference is the location, which has been reset from London to the Bible Belt South. Here, the writers are able take full advantage of good old-fashioned morals, the steep Southern history, gospel music, and a dialogue rich with lyrical and arcane phrasings -- all of which factor in as obstacles for Dorr and his band of bickering bandits.

First, how Tom Hanks manages to wrap his tongue around the long-running, heavy-accented dialogue is maybe the most interesting mystery of the film. It's clear the Coen brothers had a field day writing his "theories" and "ruminations," which Dorr uses in nearly every scene to get the gang out of sticky situations. The "one penny" speech Dorr gives to the landlady attempting to pardon their criminal ways is particularly long-winded, and may make viewers run for the dictionary.

The second factor is the most subtle in this slapstick farce, but harkens back to the Coens' earlier detail-oriented gems like Blood Simple and Barton Fink. The literature of Edgar Allen Poe is a minor but running motif, including poetry recitations by Dorr, but the "raven" payoff in the final death comes as both surprising and satisfying. In any other film, it might be considered a cheat and almost arbitrary; but in the quirky world the Coens inhabit, it's fitting, final, and most importantly, funny.

While The Ladykillers is weighted down by an extraordinary amount of (unnecessary-but-zany) dialogue, it still manages to retain a somewhat light touch like previous Coen efforts -- largely in part to the "hippity-hop" and gospel music, and knee-slapping, Southern-fried portrayal by Tom Hanks.

The Ladykillers
Touchstone Pictures
Rated R; 104 min.
Opening Friday, March 26, 2004

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Writer-director Yon Motskin is a recent graduate of the New York University film program. He is currently in preproduction on his first feature, Cutman, a dark boxing drama based on his award-winning short which premiered at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival and will screen at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival

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