Release Date: March 26, 2004
Starring: Tom Hanks, Irma P. Hall, Marlon Wayans, J.K. Simmons, Tzi Ma, Ryan Hurst
Directed by: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
Written by: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Distributed by: Buena Vista Pictures
MPAA Rating: R (language including sexual references)
Tom Hanks is so much more than an actor, you sometimes feel as though they should invent a new word for whatever it is that he is doing -- because surely, something so enjoyable, so relentlessly entertaining, so surpassingly involving cannot be mere acting.
No, Hanks is something more than an actor, and it may seem strange to say this with respect to The Ladykillers, a Joel and Ethan Coen-directed remake of the 1955 comedy of the same name, but a hilarious farce like this is exactly the sort of film that will make Hanks’s Olympian stature most obvious. Here is an actor who began his career in Hollywood doing comedy, smoothly transitioned into drama for a decade, and then, perhaps tiring of criticism that his roles were too political and listed toward Oscar-bait (you can almost hear him protesting, “I can’t help it if I’m good!”), turned to less sympathetic parts in less consequential movies -- once again with great success.
Goldthwait Higginson Dorr, Ph.D., his mouthful of a character in The Ladykillers, is perhaps the most memorable turn that Hanks, version three, has given us yet. He has so completely transformed himself into a caricature of Southern gentility and academia (a fearsome combination conducive to rhythmically hilarious, long-winded double-talk) that the actor, a Californian by birth and by occupation, feels remarkably at home in this darkly funny and not-quite-flattering picture about the criminal element at work in the thick-as-molasses backwaters of central Mississippi.
Professor Dorr is one of these criminals himself, a con man who has taken up residence in a boarding house run by the elderly Marva Munson (Irma P. Hall) because of its proximity to the Bandit Queen riverboat casino -- Dorr, along with a crew of four thieves for hire, plan to dig a tunnel from Mrs. Munson’s basement into the underground vault of the Bandit Queen, make off with the money inside, and then seal up the tunnel to eliminate any evidence of their heist. When all is finished, says Dorr, they’ll have more than $1 million in cash.
But the professor’s crew isn’t exactly the gang of professional heist-masters from Ocean’s Eleven; this is amateur hour. Soon after they start in on their tunnel, Gawain MacSam (Marlon Wayans), their inside man at the casino, loses his job for harassing the customers. Demolitions man Garth Pancake (J.K. Simmons) has irritable-bowel syndrome. The tunneling expert, known simply as the General (Tzi Ma), is a holdover from the Vietnam War. And the final man in the crew, the oafish Lump (Ryan Hurst), doesn’t seem to have much of a specialty at all -- except doing almost all of the brute, physical labor involved in digging a tunnel.
Yet despite their best efforts to ruin their own plan -- Garth Pancake loses a finger when he whacks a block of explosives with a hammer in a side-splittingly ironic demonstration of its relative harmlessness, and the General frequently ignores Mrs. Munson’s smoking ban, forcing him to eat his cigarette on several occasions -- these thieves seem to have hit the mother lode. The local law enforcement is a joke, and Mrs. Munson is rightfully regarded around town as a bit senile: she holds herself in high regard for sending a monthly, ten-dollar donation to Bob Jones University, tells the county sheriff he’ll be found wanton on Judgment Day if he doesn’t get the neighborhood teenagers to turn their loud music down, and holds conversations with her living-room portrait of her long-dead husband (who amusingly changes his expression depending on the scene).
But as much as the riverboat heist is the central plot device in The Ladykillers, this movie is more an exposition for the Coen brothers’ two favorite elements of filmmaking: dialogue and dark comedy, which, under their aegis, are often one and the same. The scenes between Mrs. Munson and Professor Dorr are among the funniest the Coens have ever committed to film, thanks in large part to the actors involved: Hanks, as mentioned, fully inhabits the leering, lascivious, loquacious G.H. Dorr, while the veteran character actor Irma P. Hall more than holds her own as Mrs. Munson in these verbal sparring matches. In some scenes, their exchanges seem to be a contest to see who can understate the dialogue more: “I can hardly contain my glee,” says Dorr without a trace of emotion. “Oh, you containin’ it okay,” she replies, just as dryly.
Nevertheless, Mississippi is a critical setting for this version of The Ladykillers; it could not possibly take place anywhere else. The Coen brothers love the South, in a roundabout way, which should be evident between this and O Brother, Where Art Thou? (which, for the sake of Coen enthusiasts who will want Ladykillers placed in some kind of big-picture perspective, was a better film). Like that earlier film, The Ladykillers has a fine sampling of Southern gospel music, and the film is set to the stately rhythms of a place altogether removed from anything resembling 21st-century reality.
This is another constant that will have the Coens’ fans enjoying the brothers’ latest work: like many of their earlier films, it has the construction of a fable -- notice how the story moves in the pattern of verses and stanzas, bracketed by the passage of a riverboat heading out to the trash dump, and a moral to boot, which is that money makes fools of us all. The professor and his crew come no closer to holding onto the money than the gamblers who has supplied it to the casino, and when Mrs. Munson tells the authorities that the cash is in her basement, they ignore her only long enough so that she can donate the lump sum to (wait for it) Bob Jones University.
Faced with Hollywood’s seemingly perpetual desire for redemption, happy endings, and loose ends neatly tied away, The Ladykillers is a refreshing dosage of the Coens’ dark, sardonic comedy, the kind of change of pace that audiences can use from time to time. These filmmakers and their movies will always be welcome with audiences, and when they get paired with a great actor like Hanks, it is so much the better.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)