After the dual commercial failures of Barton Fink and The Hudsucker Proxy, the Coens decided to make a superhero film to ingratiate themselves to Hollywood a little bit, and to assure financing for their next picture, Fargo.  Perversely, the film is quite possibly the most low-key superhero movie ever made. Set in Hell’s Kitchen in 1980, it’s a period piece like most of the Coen’s work. This is one of the strangest films the Coens ever made. Far more of  a noir film than I think anyone had expected, Daredevil is barely a superhero film. Especially for its time, where the closest things to compare it to are the Burton Batman films and the Alec Baldwin Shadow. Next to those, it’s a chamber piece. Ironically, this might be what the Coens were thinking of before they summarily turned down Batman seven years earlier.

While heavily indebted to Frank Miller’s work on the character, the Coen’s smartly left out all the fantastic or science fiction elements – Elektra, Bullseye, Black Widow, the Hand, ninjas, super-villains, Nuke, the origin, even most of Daredevil’s super-senses. Many of which ended up shoehorned into the unwatchable Mark Steven Johnson remake. The Coen’s really don’t have much use for any of the Marvel Comics/ chop socky elements of the character. In the final result, it’s clear they just made a noir film. The plot of the film is loosely (very loosely) based on one or two elements that show up in Born Again and Man Without Fear, but the overheated tone of both those books have been removed. It might even be considered a sequel to Miller’s Crossing. It might also be the first superhero film that’s truly an ensemble piece. Daredevil isn’t necessarily the protagonist of this film. He’s sharing space with Ben Urich, Karen Page, Foggy Nelson, and Wilson Fisk.

It’s one of the Coen’s colder films, and it would seem to be something of an outlier in the Coen’s career – like the Hudsucker Proxy, The Ladykillers, and The Man Who Wasn’t There it doesn’t sit quite well with the rest of their filmography. Daredevil only appears in costume for about 40 minutes of the running time, but we never spend too much time with his Matt Murdock alter-ego either. Aside from a passing mention of him as a lawyer at the start of the film, his character is clearly defined as a non-talker, like many Coen protagonists. We know nothing about him that doesn’t pertain immediately to him being Daredevil. Even the inciting incident, Matt Murdock’s blinding by toxic waste never makes the film. Instead the Coens focus more on the death of Jack Murdock as the catalyst of Matt’s vigilantism. I think that the casting of Matthew Modine as Daredevil is the reason a lot of people never warmed up to this film the way that they warmed up to Burton’s inferior Batman. He was on his last bit of good will before torching his career with Cutthroat Island the next year. The Coens clearly cast Modine because of their long-lasting love of Stanley Kubrick. Modine never fits in with the Coen’s aesthetic, spending much of the film looking uncomfortable in his form-fitting outfit and inconvincingly playing blind the rest of the time. The quiet, unsure manner in which Daredevil acts show up again more successfuly in Josh Brolin’s movements in No Country For Old Men.Then again his ability to never be comfortable, except in the few short fight sequences (which are likely made with a stunt man), might be intentional. In the Coens’ Hells Kitchen, no one is ever comfortable in their situation. He does give a hell of a Kubrick stare in his opening sequence.

Like most of the Coen’s work, the film is a class struggle, but unlike a lot of them Matt Murdock isn’t attempting to move up in his own social status. Murdock isn’t financially oppressed by the rich, in fact he appears relatively well off. Which is a similarity to Miller’s Crossing, not the last. The very beginning of the film, a pre-credits flashback sequence tells us all we need to know about Murdock’s childhood. He’s blind, his father was a boxer who gets killed by the mob. Afterwards, we see a policeman explaining to Matt that his father is dead. Ironically, this is the only cop we see through the entire film. As with most of the Coen’s films, the police are either worthless or nonexistant. Following the credits, which just play quietly over shots of Hell’s Kitchen, we meet reporter Ben Urich (played by Steve Buscemi) and his photographer Glori (played by Frances McDormand in a very small role, again echoing Miller’s Crossing). The amount of time spent with Urich over the course of the film would make him the protagonist, if he didn’t suddenly disappear in the last half hour of the film. Buscemi’s Urich is constantly on the phone with his wife, or arguing with his editors. He’s a talker, but beyond that he’s a pleaser. We see him over the course of the film attempting to make everyone around him happy. When he finally has moral decisions to make once he’s put under pressure, what kills him is how much he lets everyone down by keeping his mouth shut, and then the danger he’s put them all in once he starts talking again. Foggy Nelson (Stephen Root) talks a lot as well, but he seems to be well-intentioned. Mostly he appears to be putting on a facade, another pleaser.

Karen Page (Jennifer Jason Leigh) takes on the role of Murdock’s ex-girlfriend and a junkie, but it isn’t played for either romantic or vengeful tones. For the most part, she sits alone in her small apartment, occasionally Daredevil and Foggy Nelson stop by and talk to her. After her role in Hudsucker, the Coens wisely flip her into a non-talker. Daredevil is a man we never really get to know, his brief fight scenes are all quick and simple. DD beating up thugs, kicking the crap out guys in the bar, wading into groups – the film doesn’t have the time for violence you would expect a Daredevil film to. The only legitimate fight scene takes place at the end, where the Kingpin and DD go hand to hand.Even then, it’s not heavily intercut, it’s a pair of locked shots like the fight with Mike Starr in Miller’s Crossing, only lasting for ten minutes. Clearly, the Coens didn’t have any interest in the Bruce Lee aspects that Miller brought to the character. The Coens did have a coup in never having Mudock revealed as Daredevil throughout the film. He is never unmasked, and he is never shown putting on the costume. They are seperate, in a rare move for a superhero film.

The Kingpin is never referred to as such, he’s only Wilson to everyone he talks to. He is very fiercely played by John Goodman topping even his appearance in Barton Fink. Wilson is a quiet, dark presence in the first half – exploding into thunderous rage in the second half. Wilson also has a wife we never see. No attempt is ever made to tie the Kingpin into to Daredevil’s life in a Hollywood way – he’s simply an evil, opportunistic force in charge. He doesn’t have the moment where we see he’s a bad guy like most gangster films. He doesn’t have the finger-cutting predeliction of Durant in Darkman, he doesn’t bathe his enemies in their families blood or have an iconic Duke of New York saying, he doesn’t even ominously appear unseen until halfway through the film like Ving Rhames in Pulp Fiction. He simply gives innocuous orders to his men, under DD gives him so much trouble to elecit his wrath. The final fight sequence in brutal, realistic boxing. Closer to Raging Bull than Raimi’s Spiderman. There is no attempt to make these men paralells in the time honored hero/villain manner. They are simply adversaries, two men who are on a collision course because of what they do. Daredevil doesn’t even know who the Kingpin is until the middle of the film (with John Tuturro’s one-scene role as Turk, spilling his guts about who runs the neighborhood). Goodman might have seemed like a stange choice, considering all the work he has done without the Coens, but here he’s a force of nature.

It’s strange that this is a period piece, but most Coen films are. The setting in 1980 could be to show just how a city falling apart, but the Coens normally put a lot of thought and there’s no reason evident to me why it just wasn’t set in present day. Maybe the ramshackle post-Woodward and Berstein newspaper office scenes for Urich, I don’t know. The motifs that you see pop up in Coen films are here- like the hats in Miller’s Crossing or the shoes in Barton Fink. All of the five leads have a moment staring at photographs. Each of these moments illuminating something about their characters. Each of the characters is stuck, trapped in a series of movements and areas over the course of the film. Most of Urich’s scenes are at his work on the phone, most of Daredevil is either fighting or talking to someone else for information, most of Foggy’s scenes are in the Nelson and Murdock offices, all of The Kingpin and Karen’s scenes take place his office and her apartment respectively. For a character that has been so defined by movement in comics, the film is undeniably static and distanced. It might be their most Kubrickian film, owing a lot of it’s tone to The Killing and topping their own noir work in Millers Crossing and Blood Simple. There also seems to be a bit of Scorsese’s Mean Streets in there as well – using a lot of detail to make an incomplete picture of a neighborhood in the moment. Thematically, the Coens seem to have made a film about captialism, ironically by dropping all their societal mobility angle. Ben Urich is clearly the antecedent of Jerry Lundergaard in Fargo – the only difference is Urich is happy in his small life and Jerry is hungry for so much more. Everyone in Daredevil is resigned to their position, and is simply looking to live out their lives in place, and the only reason it doesn’t happen is because of the way the world pits these characters against each other. Oddly the Coens completelyremove the religious aspects of the character, possibly excising those needs with Barton Fink. It’s a strange film, the closest we’ll ever get to see Miller and Mazzuchelli’s Born Again as a movie. Actually it’s kind of a sibling to Born Again, it beng the calm together one and Born Again is the apocalyptic journey of the soul. Both stories show just how much can be said with the character, and how you can say things with Matt Murdock that you could never say with Batman. Batman is about vengeance. Daredevil is about redemption. And he never gets the chance to find it.

(Idea completely ripped off of both Jog and Andre Dellamorte. Sorry about that. )