COMMENTARY : The Coens--Improving on Good Things : ‘Miller’s Crossing,’ the brothers’ third film, shows their steady evolution as two of America’s most distinctive filmmakers

If she’s such an angel, why are you lookin’ for her at 4 in the morning?

--Gabriel Byrne to Albert Finney in “Miller’s Crossing”

How can we describe the Coen Brothers? Tongue-in-cheek devotees of American sociopathology? Film noirettes? The sons of Hammett and Chandler, branded by Cain? Or just two guys who like to make movies where the camera races around below knee level?

Pigeon-hole them where you will, they’re unique. In just three movies--the 1984 “Blood Simple,” the 1987 “Raising Arizona” and the current “Miller’s Crossing,” the Coens, Joel and Ethan, have decisively staked out their own weirdo, psychically charged territory. They’ve been praised to the skies--and also damned as cold-hearted copycats, derivative movie-brats, two more Reagan-era Raiders of the Lost Arts.

There’s something both impish and elusive about the Coens: Minnesota heirs of the flat, cold Midwestern interior which has inspired so many other slightly bent dreamers. They’re wonderful mimics and pastiche artists. They’ve managed to catch the timber and tone of writers like James M. Cain, in “Blood Simple,” and Dashiell Hammett, in “Miller’s Crossing,” with eerie accuracy. And in “Raising Arizona,” they grace their suburban and low-life Southwestern rustics with a flowery phraseology that seems to mix equal parts of Restoration Drama, Gothic romance, redneck badinage and windy TV commercials.

Like Preston Sturges, they throw strange rhythms and allusions into everyday speech: near-biblical phraseology (“Her womb was a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase” in “Raising Arizona”) and ornate colloquies (M. Emmet Walsh’s great oily wheezes of Texas cynicism in “Blood Simple”). “Miller’s Crossing,” their best script, finds them particularly inspired. The whole movie works out of several mixed rhythms, notably the gutter crackle of ‘30s Warners mob talk and the Irish lilt of two of the main characters: gang boss Leo O’Bannion (Albert Finney) and his alcoholic, sad-eyed lieutenant, Tommy Reagan (Gabriel Byrne).

This slightly elevated dialogue often seems to clash with their visual style. “Miller’s Crossing,” despite its jarring violence, is relatively somber and restrained, but their first two movies were hyper-kinetic, flamboyant, full of garish action and eye-popping angles. In “Blood Simple,” they use a lot of Hitchcockian voyeur shots; at one point they skim us down a loaded bar and hop over a glass. In “Raising Arizona,” they race their camera frenetically down highways, supermarket aisles, through doghouses and, at one point, across a front yard, up a ladder and into a window. They sometimes favor dog’s-eye or baby’s-eye views with tracking shots that assume the flying ground-level perspective of the creeping spirits in Sam Raimi’s “Evil Dead”--which Joel helped edit.

All of their movies are highly artificial, “movies” with quotation marks, and they’re about characters that might verge on stock movie archetypes--adulterers, detectives, cops, crooks--but for their alarming eloquence. The Coens helped write “Crimewave” for Raimi, and though it’s a labored and unfunny comedy, it lays out their usual strategy, a consciously comic or ironic perspective on dark, disturbing material: infidelity and murder in “Blood Simple,” childlessness and road psychopathology in “Raising Arizona,” and, in “Miller’s Crossing,” the Jacobean betrayals and murders of a Prohibition-era gangster community riven by “Titus Andronicus”-style blood feuds.

The Coens have a consistent motif, almost a trademark: wild, almost mirthlessly aggressive bursts of laughter or “joy”--Walsh’s “Blood Simple” cackling, the bozo howling of escaped cons John Goodman and William Forsyth in “Raising Arizona.” In “Miller’s Crossing,” the laughter has been largely replaced by a succession of cold, deadly, viciously meaningful smiles, behind which the speakers mercilessly calculate their interlocutor’s weak spots.

But indicting the Coens for artful heartlessness may be a bit premature--especially for a near-masterpiece like “Miller’s Crossing.” As writers, the Coens are comic artists who like to work out of serious themes and low company; if they’re sometimes damned for cold-blooded cynicism, it’s worth remembering that most of their models once were as well. “Miller’s Crossing” is a gangster movie which owes as much to literary inspirations as cinematic ones, and uses them with unusual wit, dramatic suppleness and emotional force.

It’s been praised, justly, for its visual coups: the burnished, shadowy-brown hues of Barry Sonnenfeld’s cinematography, the wizardly production design by Dennis Gassner. And for its dramatic ones--by Byrne, Finney and the whole superb cast. But, right now, its dialogue is what makes it special. The plot and milieu come largely from Hammett’s novels, especially “The Glass Key” and “Red Harvest,” but the racy lingo, stiletto-sharp, pungent and on-the-nose, also recalls Sturges or Ben Hecht. Scorsese’s “GoodFellas” is deeper, denser and more virtuosic--but “Miller’s Crossing” is the 1990 crime movie with the richest, most startling characterizations, the most juicily quotable lines.

Incongruous eloquence was the hallmark of many ‘30s and ‘40s crime movies, especially “The Maltese Falcon,” where rumblingly orotund Sydney Greenstreet beamed at Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade and told him, “I’ll tell you quite frankly, I’m a man who likes to talk to a man who likes to talk.” The “Miller’s Crossing” characters obviously like to talk and cross-talk.

Unlike most slightly flabby or over-profane modern pseudo- noir scripts, this one is easy and melodic, spiked with dozens of low-life bon mots that draw blood, in or out of context--delivered by a cast of murderers, gamblers, alcoholics, whores, chiselers and corrupt politicians that seem possessed with bizarre eloquence. The Coens understand the secret of the best ‘30s hard-boiled dialogue: it’s a language of stylized shop talk, lightly veiled aggression, dangerous euphemisms. Here, philosophical comedy seems to mix with Black Mask magazine pungency and street grit.

The rhythms reverberate afterward--not just the obvious zingers--the cynical observation that a city boss has “more hair tonic than brains” or the shivery come-on, “The two of us, we’re about bad enough to deserve each other,” but the way the wisecracks extend into wit combats or explode into horrifying non-comic cadenzas. The movie’s high point: John Turturro, gut-wrenchingly intense as weaselly little bookie Bernie Bernbaum, lurching awkwardly to the ground in a poetically gray forest before the man about to kill him, shrieking over and over, unforgettably: “I’m praying to you. Listen to your heart!”

The tower of all this babbling, an unnamed “eastern” metropolis--re-created in New Orleans, with a political structure that recalls Prohibition-era Chicago--is loaded with diverse immigrant strains: the main characters include Italians, Jews and a “Dane.” But the Irish lilt predominates: melodic, harsh-edged and melancholy. It’s poetry on the edge of an abyss.

Maybe the best way to enjoy “Miller’s Crossing” is simply to listen to it: not just to the ingenious turns of phrase, and the relish with which the cast delivers them; not just to the blend of mournfully pretty Celtic ballads and Jazz Age pop songs on the sound track, but to the whole, lyrically melded cacophony of talk, song and background noise. The cold crackle of ice cubes in a tumbler, the ship horns and hoof-clops, the cracking of tree-limbs in a windy forest where a grim quartet have come for an execution, Frank Patterson’s soaring “Danny Boy” while Leo’s Thompson machine gun routs two potential killers. The way the song “Running Wild” starts up at the climax of a lover’s quarrel, or the way “Good Night, Sweetheart” suddenly stops when Leo delivers the kiss-off to Tommy.

The Coens and sound editor Skip Lievsay meld everything into a world where dreamy re-creations become stark and immediate: where the sound is cranked up to a near-paranoid level, where the characters, in the midst of chaos, try staunchly but comically to preserve their cruel cool. In the great “Danny Boy” scene, the ecstatic refrain reflects Leo’s sentimentality, but it also echoes his exaltation at the assertion of his old mastery, dealing fiery death to new challengers. The movie, for that wonderful, hair-raising few minutes, steps back from exposing Leo to admire him--and then probably chuckles at itself for doing so.

But what of the vision behind this virtuosity? “Miller’s Crossing” is an entertainment, but, like Graham Greene’s “entertainments,” it’s not empty of moral themes, psychology or social observation. It’s a dark comedy set in hell, a fairy tale of utter moral chaos, of near absolute evil, in which the prime instigators of that evil--the gangsters who run the city and keep mayor and police chief scuttling like flunkies between them--spend their own time absurdly ruminating over ethical and moral consequences and strategies.

In the first scene, obviously inspired by the opening of “The Godfather,” the Coens pit Irish mob boss Leo against the local Italian mob leader: glowering plug ugly Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito) who wants to “whack” Turturro’s Bernie, a local bookie spilling information on fixed races or fights. Curiously, in the midst of Johnny’s presentation, he launches into a discussion of ethics . . . or, in his words, “et’ics.” Most writers would have tossed this incongruity off as a stray joke, but the Coens extend it, let it blossom. For Johnny, his nemesis’ behavior is inexcusable. (“If you can’t trust a fix, what can you trust?”) The very structure and sanctity of crime itself has been sullied; murder is the only honorable response. “Et’ics” are an obsession of Johnny Caspar’s, and also of the movie.

Everyone involved, even the most cold-blooded killer, dourly macho Eddie “Dane,” (J. D. Freeman) quarrels incessantly over morality, strategy and even decorum. If, at the beginning, Johnny seems an explosive psychopath, insanely sensitive to social slights, soon his obsessions with the moral boundaries of power become apparent--in between wild temper tantrums when he orders killings or bashes in someone’s head. It’s a terrific comic premise, and also, undoubtedly, a sly comment on the non-criminal world outside, where equally abstract rationalizations and skewed observations often accompany the most cruel and self-serving behavior.

The Coens--who, in “Blood Simple” generated a chain of murderous double-crosses out of one infidelity and, in “Raising Arizona,” constructed the plot around the intrusion of home life into the outlaw-road world--here make sex the secret spur to all their machinations. Underneath the dark, stolid, heavily pillared world of “Miller’s Crossing,” there’s a quagmire of tangled sexual relationships: two main triangles, one heterosexual (Leo, Tommy and Leo’s “twist” Verna, who is also Bernie’s sister), one homosexual (Bernie, the Dane and Steve Buscemi’s Mink). At the center, the only uninvolved party in the roundelays, is family man Johnny Caspar: constantly extolling familial virtues and demonstrating fatuous pride in the achievements of his idiotic son.

Identification is a mysterious process--and, in “Miller’s Crossing,” we’re asked to follow most of this through the eye and ear of a character, Tommy, whose motives are opaque to everyone else in the film--even perhaps, himself. (“I dunno. Do you always know why you do things, Leo?” he mutters.) As Tommy, Gabriel Byrne, looking charmingly like some dissipated younger cousin of Spencer Tracy, is incurably in the grip of three non-sexual compulsions: alcoholism, gambling and wisecracking. He’s both omnipotent and helpless: adviser to two ganglords, yet unable to keep his creditor-bookies off his tail.

But though, at times, Tommy seems to have embarked on a mysterious Yojimbo-like campaign of universal destruction, in one key shot, while he straightens his hat, we may see the answer in his eyes; see, if only faintly, the love for Leo, which he’s masked or disavowed throughout. That hat is important: Tommy dreams about it, talks about it, consistently loses it-- whether in dreams, beatings or murder attempts. It’s the key image of a movie where people are often identified by their headgear or hairstyle--including a murder victim named “Rug,” whose toupee is stolen. Perhaps the hat symbolizes the social facade that lightly covers the gangsters: so fragile, a smack can knock it off, or the wind blow it away.

In a way, when Bernie pleads for his life from Tommy, howling that they’re the same--lovers and schemers, not killers--he’s telling a partial truth. But, in buying Bernie’s plea, Tommy commits a perversion in his own special world: showing mercy to a man he knows has to be killed. The forest at Miller’s crossing, shot in sepulchral hues that recall the woodland execution scene in Bertolucci’s and Storaro’s “The Conformist,” is the site of a twisted moral reckoning, a dream, a crisis, two near-deaths and one real one. It’s the squirt of blood and tears at the center of a machinery of murder. That, perhaps, is the darkest, most despairing theme in “Miller’s Crossing.”

In this killer’s world, love and pity are perversions. Love destroys you, saps you, makes you pull bonehead plays. Murder is good business--as long as it’s handled et’ically.