Joel and Ethan Coen don’t do simple characters. Films like Fargo and the thriller No Country for Old Men are populated with oddballs, con artists, wastrels, and heels, many of whom are the protagonists of their respective films. Even their most unambiguously virtuous characters tend to have some flaw or idiosyncrasy that makes them interesting to watch. The villains in the Coen brothers’ movies are rarely cut-and-dried, either.
The antagonists are just as complicated as their heroes and equally compelling. From unpredictable killers to petty criminals and corporate schemers, the Coen brothers have created a unique rogues’ gallery filled with corrupt, callous, and murderous characters. Bernie Bernbaum and Jerry Lundegaard perhaps deserve an honorable mention on a list of the 10 best Coen brothers’ villains for the sheer chaos they cause, but neither seems self-aware enough to truly be counted as antagonists, no matter how harmful and devious their actions.
10
Sidney Mussburger
The Hudsucker Proxy
The Hudsucker Proxy’s Sidney Mussburger isn’t your usual villain; he doesn’t kill anyone or even break the law — he’s more like an Old Hollywood industrialist villain, like Mr. Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life or the Duke brothers from Trading Places.He’s callous, greedy, and unconcerned with the fates of those he sees as beneath him, rather than a conventionally evil character. Mussburger’s main goal is to seize control of the Hudsucker Corporation by any means necessary, and he’s perfectly happy to manipulate the guileless Norville Barnes to accomplish this, no matter the consequences for Norwood.
Mussburger is a gleefully corrupt, calculating operator, whose elaborate scheme to engineer a collapse in the company’s share price is undermined by the very thing he assumes he can control: the stupidity of the person he sets up to take the fall. The Hudsucker Proxy features a heightened, Hawksian performance style, and Newman plays Mussburger with just the right amount of old-school flim-flam and corporate edge, making him a thoroughly entertaining baddie. He’s not the most frightening or dangerous villain, but he represents a different, more respectable-looking kind of venality.
9
Tom Chaney
True Grit
In the original True Grit, the man who killed Mattie Ross’ father and provides the impetus for Mattie to hire Rooster Cogburn is a bit of a comical character. Jeff Corey really mines the character’s absurd side, but the Coen brothers’ version, played by Josh Brolin, is a much more somber, sinister character. There’s something particularly unpleasant about Brolin’s Chaney. He’s a coward, a bully, and a murderer, but there’s very little charm or humor to him. What makes Chaney such an effective villain is that he’s almost entirely devoid of the romanticism we might associate with a Western outlaw.
Chaney is in stark contrast with Rooster Cogburn’s nemesis, Ned Pepper, who’s a much more traditional Western villain: ruthless but with some semblance of honor. He keeps his word to leave Mattie unharmed, and even shows contempt for Chaney himself. Chaney isn’t an outlaw with a heart of gold; he’s a thoroughly nasty, grubby, self-serving opportunist who committed a despicable crime and is desperately trying to avoid the consequences. Brolin does a great job of removing any trace of charm from the part and makes Chaney genuinely repellent. He’s also a useful reminder that you don’t need to be particularly complicated or nuanced to be an effective villain. Sometimes, a horrible person is just a horrible person.
8
Johnny Caspar
Miller’s Crossing
Miller’s Crossing is the Coens’ labyrinthine gangster saga, and its main villain is Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito), the boss of the Italian contingent of the gangster underworld, and the opposition to Leo O’Bannon (Albert Finney) and his Irish outfit. For most of Miller’s Crossing, he is a reasonably straightforward boss (“A square G, a straight shooter”), albeit with an incredibly short fuse. This is all laid out in the iconic opening scene, which begins with Caspar’s magnanimous speech about the virtues of “ethics” and ends with him furious at Leo for giving him “the high hat!”
Oddly, Johnny is reasonable and even sympathetic. He trusts Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne) when he sells his lies, even apologizing for his harsh treatment at the hands of The Dane (J. E. Freeman). Tom plays his men off against each other and mixes lies and truth to turn him against his most loyal lieutenant. Seeing Johnny struggle with this conflict, along with the fact that he’s the only character with a family, you begin to think he might be the most humane character in Miller’s Crossing. However, this goes out the window in the film’s third act, when we see just how dangerous Johnny can be, wasting no time in “putting one in the brain” of anyone he suspects of disloyalty. His capacity for violence is every bit as great as his capacity for pontificating about morality.
7
Carl Showalter
Fargo
Miller’s Crossing marked the first of many collaborations between Steve Buscemi and the Coen Brothers. The directors brought him back for Fargo as Carl Showalter, a similarly verbose villain whose mouth gets him into trouble throughout the film. Jerry Lundegaard hires Carl alongside accomplice Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare) to kidnap his wife in an attempt to scam the ransom money from his father-in-law. Carl is the mouth and supposedly the brains of the operation, but his fast-talking quickly proves to be a cover for how woefully inept he is.
Carl dismisses everyone else as “a bunch of f***ing imbeciles,” when the reason the cops are onto him and his partner is his own negligence. First, he fails to swap the number plates of the stolen car, blows his attempt at bribery, and then fails to get the cop’s body off the road in time to avoid a passing car, leading to two more executions. He even develops a particular vendetta against parking attendants, which is about as petty a grievance as you can imagine.
It’s an impressive catalog of failure, and that’s before he gets shot in the face, axed in the neck, and fed into a wood chipper. Miller’s Crossing may have utilized Buscemi’s ability to rattle off fast-paced dialogue, but in Fargo, that fast-talking serves him even worse than before. Carl is a fantastic comic creation, but underneath all the bluster, there’s a genuinely dangerous criminal.
6
Leonard Smalls
Raising Arizona
Raising Arizona is one of the Coens’ most exaggerated realities, at times feeling distinctly like a live-action cartoon. The film follows petty criminal H.I. McDunnough (Nicolas Cage) and his wife Edwina (Holly Hunter), who kidnap one of the quintuplets born to furniture tycoon Nathan Arizona (Trey Wilson) when they discover they can’t have a child of their own. The villain is equally larger-than-life; Leonard Smalls is “the lone biker of the apocalypse,” who seemingly comes into existence at the start of the film and makes his way toward our hero for a fateful encounter. H.I., with his unusual eloquence, voices this concern in his voiceover:
“I didn’t know where he came from or why. I didn’t know if he was dream of vision. But I feared that I myself had unleashed him. For he was the fury that would be, as soon as Florence Arizona found her little Nathan gone.”
For a character hired to retrieve a stolen baby, you might expect him to be something of a rough-and-ready lawman, even if he’s a little on the unscrupulous side. But that’s not the case: In his first meeting with Nathan Arizona Sr., he balks at the $25,000 reward, says the going rate for a baby on the black market is $50,000, and remarks, “If you don’t pay, the market will.” It’s a truly sinister moment in an otherwise light, fun film, and one that separates Smalls from the various other misfits and criminals who populate the story. It’s also telling that he’s the only character who encounters Nathan Jr. and isn’t immediately smitten by the baby. The final confrontation between Smalls and H.I. is a beautifully choreographed piece of live-action cartoon violence, as he beats the ever-loving spit out of our hapless hero. Cobb’s extraordinary physical presence makes him an almost mythological figure, and he’s arguably the closest the Coens have come to creating a literal monster.
5
Loren Visser
Blood Simple
M. Emmet Walsh was arguably the only recognizable star in the Coens’ debut feature Blood Simple, and he brings so much charisma and humor to his duplicitous villain that it’s hard to hate him. Jealous bar owner Marty hires Walsh’s Visser as a private detective so that Marty can investigate his wife Abby and her lover Ray. Visser initially seems like a rather sleazy, slightly buffoonish operator; his disarming laugh, endless supply of jokes, and general air of shabby incompetence make him seem like a sleazy amateur, but his plans are considerably more sinister. He doctors photographs to prove to Marty that he has killed Abby and Ray, then kills Marty himself once he’s been paid. He subsequently finds himself desperately trying to tie up loose ends.
Walsh is magnificent throughout. Visser is a slippery, opportunistic character who seems to take a certain pleasure in the surrounding chaos. There are a handful of scenes that show that Visser is at least more self-aware than the other characters in Blood Simple, including the moment when he says “Brother, you are disgusting” when Marty suggests a way of disposing of the bodies, and his final, guttural laugh to himself, as he realizes the joke was on him the whole time.
4
Eddie The Dane
Miller’s Crossing
The Dane isn’t the main villain of Miller’s Crossing, but he best fits the traditional villain mold. He’s intelligent, tough, and has a clear grudge against our hero. He’s also the only one who comes close to exposing Tom’s treacherous nature. Many fans theorized The Dane is the protagonist of the story, at least when viewed from an alternative perspective.
He’s straight and direct from the very start, and while Tom works tirelessly to pull the wool over everybody’s eyes, The Dane works just as hard to expose him. He tails Tom’s girlfriend Verna, kills Leo’s bodyguards, and beats the truth out of a boxer. His confrontation with Tom is one of Miller’s Crossing’s great scenes, as he taunts Tom before laying out his suspicions in a scarily accurate monologue:
“You join up with Johnny Caspar, you bump Bernie Bernbaum. Up is down. Black is white. Well, I think you’re half smart. I think you were straight with your frail, I think you were queer with Johnny Caspar… and I think you’d sooner join a ladies’ league than gun a guy down. Then I hear from these two geniuses they never even saw this rub-out take place… Everyone is so goddamn smart. Well, we’ll go out to Miller’s Crossing… and we’ll see who’s smart.”
It’s a fantastic piece of dialogue, and J. E. Freeman delivers it with extraordinary venom. What makes the protagonist theory fall apart is Freeman, who makes The Dane such a malevolent, sadistic presence. Heroes don’t say things like “I am going to send you to a deep, dark place, and I am going to have FUN doing it!” He’s not simply a gangster trying to expose a traitor; he’s a man who genuinely enjoys inflicting pain. He’s a terrific villain, and one of the most underrated performances in the Coens’ filmography.
3
Gaear Grimsrud
Fargo
The closest thing the Coens have to a bona fide, unambiguous villain is Peter Stormare’s dead-eyed Gaear Grimsrud, who is terrifyingly single-minded in his approach to crime. Fargo is very close to a comedy in places, and one way it achieves this is by subverting the idea of the strong, silent type. Gaear is certainly reticent, but where you might expect a character like this to speak in pearls of wisdom, his dialogue is so banal. “Where is pancakes house?” is about as profound as he gets.
Gaear’s silence is also a mask for some truly chilling psychopathy. He’s utterly indifferent to the suffering of others, whether it’s the people he murders, the police officers he encounters, or his own criminal accomplice. He doesn’t seem particularly interested in money, either, and there’s something deeply unsettling about how little pleasure or emotion he displays in his work. It’s never entirely clear whether he always intended to kill Carl, but when the two finally fall out, Gaear wastes very little time settling the matter. He chases Carl down with an axe and feeds his body into a wood chipper in a horrifying and darkly comic scene. Stormare’s performance is extraordinary throughout, because he manages to make Gaear frightening without ever really raising his voice, and his complete apathy for his horrific actions makes him one of the most disturbing villains the directors have created.
2
Charlie Meadows / Karl Mundt
Barton Fink
For most of Barton Fink, John Goodman’s jovial neighbor at the Hotel Earle, Charlie Meadows, seems like a genuinely good friend to John Turturro’s intellectual, self-important playwright. He’s welcoming, good-natured, and always happy to lend a hand, while Barton condescends to him about his work, his supposed lack of sophistication, and the so-called “life of the mind.” Though Charlie always has stories to tell, Barton never stops to listen to his neighbor for a moment. It’s only at the very end, when it’s revealed that Charlie has a secret of his own, that Barton is stunned into silence.
Then, viewers learn Charlie is actually an escaped serial killer known as Karl “Madman” Mundt, and when he returns to the hotel, the atmosphere changes completely. Barton notes that it’s getting hotter, and Barton Fink has already made several allusions to Hell. As Charlie returns, accompanied by flames licking the walls and a hotel seemingly descending into an inferno, he begins to feel less like a neighbor and more like the Devil himself.
Goodman is, as usual, absolutely magnificent. His transformation from affable insurance salesman to terrifying, almost apocalyptic monster is one of the best performances in the Coen brothers’ filmography. It’s particularly unsettling that Charlie’s friendliness is not entirely fake: he genuinely likes Barton, but that doesn’t make him any less dangerous. His final confrontation with the cops, running down the corridor as flames lick the walls, is one of the most extraordinary scenes in their entire filmography, and his subsequent conversation with Barton is chilling for how quiet and friendly he is during it.
1
Anton Chigurh
No Country For Old Men
Anton Chigurh is the dead-eyed, unsmiling psychopath from No Country for Old Men, and he’s technically a Cormac McCarthy creation. But the look of Javier Bardem’s villain, from the extraordinary haircut to the almost alien detachment, is entirely the Coens’ doing. Their No Country for Old Men adaptation, as well as Bardem’s Oscar-winning performance, brings something quite remarkable to the character. To put it simply, when someone asks fellow hitman Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson) just how dangerous Chigurh is, he replies:
“Compared to what? The Bubonic plague?”
Bardem plays Chigurh with a kind of preternatural stillness that makes him a terrifying, almost supernatural presence. He has a rigid set of rules, and his insistence on following them gives him the appearance of having some kind of moral code. But this is really just a way of rationalizing his own psychopathy. His scenes with his victims, just before he kills them, are among the most chilling and tense moments in No Country for Old Men. He sees himself as an instrument of fate, and his coin tosses allow him to convince himself that the decision to kill someone isn’t really his to make. It’s this combination of ritualistic behavior and indiscriminate violence that makes him so frightening.
The coin toss scene with the shopkeeper is perhaps the perfect illustration of Chigurh’s nature. A mundane encounter in an ordinary shop becomes an existential nightmare, with the life of a stranger resting on the outcome of a coin flip. Bardem is extraordinary, making Chigurh simultaneously polite, courteous, and utterly terrifying. There are plenty of great villains in the Coens’ work, but none match Chigurh’s sheer intensity and menace. Like Smalls, he’s an almost elemental force, but one grounded in reality: a figure of death who seems to have wandered in from some other plane of existence. He’s the obvious number one, and deservedly so.
- Release Date
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November 21, 2007
- Runtime
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122 minutes
- Director
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Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
