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(Continued)

The movie is a stunning exercise in surrealism (keynoted by another sometime scribbler for the screen, Nathanael West), and advisedly airless as a bell jar. Most of it takes place in Fink's room in the sepulchral Hotel Earle (slogan: "a day or a lifetime"), which the Coens cover in an encyclopedic range of camera angles. But essentially, as a bit of voice-over trickery at the beginning suggests, it could all be contained within Fink's mind.

Neither "Miller's" nor "Fink" got any love from Oscar (though the latter swept so many awards at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival that Cannes subsequently adopted a new rule limiting any single movie to two citations). That would come only with the brothers' sixth film, "Fargo" (1996). Could the Academy have felt licensed at last to endorse a Coen movie because, unlike any of its predecessors, it came officially validated with a real-life story basis?

That story is the chronicle of a preposterously ill-conceived but nonlethal crime that serves as the trip wire for multiple murders, variously born of accident, knee-jerk malevolence, and native stupidity. Yet gruesome as the violence is, the most in-your-face aspect of the movie is the full-frontal Minnesotan-ness of its cast of characters. Just about everybody speaks in a narcotized "y'know" kinda Scandihoovian singsong and accommodates both affection and atrocity with the same moonfaced equanimity. The Coen boys were born and raised in these precincts (rarely explored in cinema heretofore), and it's a serious challenge to judge from moment to moment whether their regional portraiture is an act of love or juvenile vengeance.

Love, finally, carries the day, because "Fargo" attains a cumulative grandeur rivaled only by "Miller's Crossing" before it (and now "No Country for Old Men"). This is sounded from the outset, by the haunting image of a car's lights and then a car piercing the wraparound whiteout of a North Country winter and dragging its way toward the camera to the thrumming of Carter Burwell's score. The Coens and cinematographer Roger Deakins took pains throughout the film to catch the look and ambience of a place without so much as a horizon to anchor the perspective and give definition to emptiness. People may be forgiven a little loopiness for surviving there.

The man driving that car and setting the movie in motion is Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy), a beleaguered Minneapolis car salesman come to Fargo, N.D., to enlist two goons' aid in kidnapping his wife so that he can reap the ransom payment and use it as investment capital, donchaknow. Throughout the film, Jer just can't catch a break, as another great shot succinctly defines. He's left the office of his rich father-in-law, who not only disrespects him at every turn but has just undercut -- unknowingly, yet! -- the whole rationale for his criminal venture. The camera looks down from on high -- from a god's-eye perspective or just the father-in-law's office -- and sees an abstract pattern, black-and-white in this color movie, consisting of a snow-covered parking lot, a lone car, a lamppost, and eventually a foreshortened figure in a bulging parka: Lundegaard making his glum way he-no-longer-knows-where. The image at once summons up the Wile E. Coyote cartoonishness of the Coens' aggressively zany "Raising Arizona" (1987); asserts the Beckett-like absurdism underlying (and occasionally right on the surface of) the events in "Fargo"; and continues the film's mission of nailing down the documentary, meteorological reality of life in this bleak place.

Running parallel to the ferocious black humor and murderous grotesquerie is the good guys' side of the story, which mostly means Brainerd policewoman Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand, who would cop an undreamt-of Best Actress Oscar). The fact that McDormand is Mrs. Joel Coen is only one factor tipping the scale in favor of love winning out over satiric caricature in "Fargo." Marge, good of heart and sharper on police procedure than her male colleagues, is happily married to, pregnant by, and supportive of loving husband Norm (John Carroll Lynch). She's the film's repository of not only family values but values, period -- something we may not have realized it had until her bedrock goodness confronts the monstrous hired goon (Peter Stormare) near film's end. (In this, she foreshadows another lawman, the frontier philosophe Ed Tom Bell, eloquently played by Tommy Lee Jones in "No Country for Old Men.")

The brothers Coen won an Oscar of their own for the "Fargo" screenplay, but have never chosen to tell another real-life story. Among latter-day efforts, "The Big Lebowski" (1998) is a charming jeu d'esprit, part private-eye parody, part Southern California acid trip, and all shaggy-dog comedy, with Jeff Bridges giving a masterly performance as The Dude, philosopher-king of middle-aged slackers; its bowling-alley buffoonery lingers fondly in the mind, along with a daft aura of majesty and loss. (It also has become the brothers' most adored film, a true cult classic that not only recurs on midnight marquees but has given birth to the phenomenon of the Lebowski Fest, at which fans throughout the country dress as their favorite characters, quote lines, bowl and sip White Russians. Truly, The Dude abides.)

"O Brother, Where Art Thou?" (2000), taking its title and mock-serious premise from the social-consciousness allegory glimpsed at the beginning of Preston Sturges' "Sullivan's Travels," is a rural comedy about three escapees from a Depression-era chain gang (George Clooney, John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson) trying to reach home and/or a buried treasure worth precisely one-point-two million dollars. A reverie of American life in the 1930s as derived entirely from movie, music and radio lore (and, oh yes, "The Odyssey" by Homer), the film plays like a Three Stooges short for long stretches yet yields up enchanted moments, such as a forest suddenly filling with figures in white, bound for a riverside baptism and singing a folk hymn. Turturro's moves when caught up in hillbilly-music frenzy are the stuff of spastic poetry, and Clooney -- subsequently established as a member-in-good-standing of Coen stock company -- uncannily recalls the Clark Gable of the film's era in his breezier assignments.

No one else but the Coens would have conceived of such films, or the black-and-white tone poem that is "The Man Who Wasn't There" (2002). That nicotine-steeped immersion in the Jim Thompson/James M. Cain universe is filled with characters bearing names out of "Double Indemnity" and "The Asphalt Jungle," and features Billy Bob Thornton as, perhaps, a nobler variant on Jerry Lundegaard of "Fargo," trying to do the right thing by punishing very wrong people and, we need hardly note, failing and failing and failing.

"The Man Who Wasn't There" came close to being another Coen masterpiece. "No Country for Old Men" certainly is. Only their second adaptation ever (after 2004's "The Ladykillers," a fingernails-on-the-blackboard remake of the classic Alec Guinness comedy), "No Country" is the extremely faithful film version of a recent book by our best contemporary novelist, Cormac McCarthy. Fans of the book should feel they're seeing on-screen what they saw in the mind's eye while reading it, yet the movie is also wall-to-wall Coenworld.

The Academy had their big chance a few days ago to get it right, to acknowledge two American cinematic visionaries at their peak. Damn if they didn't get it right.

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Richard T. Jameson has been editor of Movietone News (1971-81) and Film Comment (1990-2000) magazines, as well as Seattle's Queen Anne News (2003-present). He has been a member of the National Society of Film Critics since 1980.