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The Ladykillers
(2004)
Dir: Ethan and Joel Coen
Tom Hanks is a truly guileful being. In movies and interviews, he can be either nauseatingly ingratiating or thoughtful and penetrating. For all the tidy righteousness of his roles in deluge like Forrest Gump, Apollo 13, Saving Private Ryan and Castaway, he is capable of considerate and thoughtful feats, as evidenced in Punchline, Big, Joe Versus the Volcano and Philadelphia. His sappy HBO executive-producer stints, From the Earth to the Moon and Band of Brothers serve his forthright image as his generation’s Jimmy Stewart with a tedious fervor, treading earnest in the conjured sea of chaste Americana. He mostly exists as a reminder that affability always nabs the gold, but on occasion, Hanks flutters out of the goodly shadows with an iconoclastic performance, as in The Ladykillers.
Hanks stars as Professor G.H. Dorr, an eloquent and numbingly loquacious southern crook, operating under the guise of a “Renaissance musician,” and effusing a bumbling Colonel Sanders’ magnetism. His comic foil is Irma P. Hall, as a cantankerous but extremely lovable old black woman whose life orbits around a hatred of “hippity-hop music,” a love of the Bob Jones Bible Institute, and the heartfelt meditations she directs toward an oil painting of her dead husband that looms over her fireplace. Hanks rents a room in her antebellum home, coaxing her into letting his gang of musicians rehearse in her basement, where their real plan involves tunneling into a riverboat casino’s subterranean vault. Most of Hanks’ band is a shortlist of comedic stereotypes. There’s a zero-nonsense Asian, the dumb lumbering jock and a foul-mouthed black slacker. Demolitions expert Garth Pancake, played by J.K. Simmons, is the only member of the troupe who is pure Coen weirdness, but because there is no shortage of the brothers’ engaging dialogue, they all rise above the boring expectations set by their typecasts.
This is a remake of a 1955 film of the same name and starring Alec Guinness. Joel Coen has tweaked William Rose’s original screenplay, setting the action in an anonymously deep cranny of the South instead of London, and stuffing it full of modern nuances (hippity-hop) and spooky symbolism (mostly a festering, island garbage heap and the barge that makes hourly runs out to it). Although the highly mottled introductory segments insinuate that a frenzied sprawl of a movie will follow, things congeals nicely, and soon enough it’s a roaring fireball of morality and mirth. Mixing decaying elements of Car Wash-esque blacksploitation films--a gregarious southern Baptist church, slobbery booty-worship and the aforementioned steely-eyed Asian--with more tepid Caucasian slapstick (lovable chaos and pratt falls) and modern fecal farce, the Coens once again prove that their vision and discipline can put effervescent magic into just about anything, even Tom Hanks.
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