Coen brothers can’t get enough lovable dopes

Admitting to a ‘puerile sense of humor’
A disc containing CIA material Malkovich’s character is using to write his memoirs falls into the hands of Pitt and McDormand, who set out to blackmail him with all the panache of the Keystone Kops.

“The dynamic in this movie, for instance, between Fran and Brad, we can compare to like a Laurel and Hardy movie, where both characters are really idiots, but by common consent between the two of them, one of them has decided that the other one is smarter. There’s a little of that in ‘O Brother,”’ Joel Coen says. “So that how people perceive who the alpha leader is or the smarter one is, that can be very funny or interesting to reflect on.”

Ethan Coen compares that dumb-and-dumber factor to experiences they’ve had on commercials and advertising shoots.

“Sometimes it’s good, and you can do kind of fun stuff that’s interesting, and sometimes you’re in a situation where people are sitting around talking about a bunch of completely idiotic ideas,” Ethan Coen says. “And you couldn’t choose one from the other because they’re all totally idiotic, but somehow a consensus forms in the group that this one is the right one. It’s bizarre.”

Also bizarre is much of the action the Coens put their characters through. Clooney, whom Joel Coen says shares their “puerile sense of humor,” is set to work at a secret project in the basement: Building an intricate sex apparatus as a gift for his character’s wife.

Joel Coen said the sex machine had two inspirations: A contraption he once saw made by a movie grip and another displayed at the Museum of Sex in New York City. The Coens offered to take Clooney to the museum to show him the device.

“George said, ‘That’s all I need is to be seen coming out of the Museum of Sex with you guys,”’ Joel Coen said.

New genre: The ‘warmedy’
Lately, the Coens have wasted no time moving on to their next projects. They already had shot “Burn After Reading” when they collected their trophies at last February’s Oscars, and they began shooting another film Monday in their home state, Minnesota.

Starring a cast of comparative Hollywood unknowns led by stage actor Michael Stuhlbarg, “A Serious Man” centers on the domestic strife of a college professor in a Midwest Jewish community in 1967.

“It’s a ‘warmedy,’ it’s a ‘Table for Five’ kind of thing,” Ethan Coen says, slyly adding, “It’s our ‘warmedy.”’

Approaching stories in their own twisted way remains the Coens’ routine, even though they have edged from the fringes of cinema into the Hollywood players club.

Their Oscar triumph on “No Country for Old Men” hasn’t changed a thing, they say.

“No, no, no,” Ethan Coen says. “It’s a weird thing. It might have if it had been, like, on our second movie, but we’re just frankly, we’re just kind of set in our ways. ... We’re just old.”

“Age does play into it in the sense that if you stick around long enough, if you stick around and survive in any business long enough, you get a creeping and creepy feeling a little bit, after a while, that you’ve somehow entered the establishment of that world,” Joel Coen says. “Nobody likes to necessarily think of themselves in that way.

“The Oscars are sort of just another aspect of having stuck around long enough, and that’s sort of confirmation of the fact that you’re part of the establishment as opposed to part of the outside. There are good things and bad things about that, as you can imagine, and there would be in any business. But mostly, it’s a good thing in the sense that when your ambition is to be able to keep doing what you want to do the way you want to do it, that kind of attention and confirmation from the business is great. It can only be helpful.”

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