Tom: Dream I had once. I was walkin’ in the woods, I don’t know why. Wind came up and blew me hat off.

Verna: And you chased it, right? You ran and ran, finally caught up to it and you picked it up. But it wasn’t a hat anymore and it changed into something else, something wonderful.

Tom: No, it stayed a hat and no, I didn’t chase it. Nothing more foolish than a man chasin’ his hat.

In Miller’s Crossing, a hat is just a hat. And Tom (Gabriel Byrne) is convinced it’s pure stupidity to think it could mean anything more. In the two decades since, the films of the Coen Brothers have been accused of being similarly pointless, heartless, only composed of empty pastiche and clever dialogue.

This feeling somehow bubbled to the surface as the Coens embarked on what I like to call their ‘Trilogy of Meaninglessness’. (It might sound better with an exclamation point.) First there was the Cormac McCarthy adaptation No Country for Old Men. It’s so bleak the hero is killed off-screen, barely as an afterthought, and its villain’s only morality comes with the flip of a coin.

Then the Coens made the spy farce Burn After Reading: a flurry of pointless schemes and sudden violence, adding up to nothing much at all. A running joke throughout the film comes in reports on its characters delivered to J.K. Simmons’ bewildered CIA agent. Finally, all he can think to say is: “Report back to me when it makes sense.”

In 2009, the Coens released A Serious Man. Its tragic hero, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), tries to understand why terrible things happen as his life falls apart around him. He’s told that it’s wrong to even ask the question; God owes him no explanations. “Why does he make us feel the questions,” Larry pleads, “if he’s not going to give us any answers?” Larry’s son, Danny, thinks he’s receiving answers from a famously wise rabbi, but they turn out to be the lyrics to Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Somebody To Love’.

It’s all there is; it’s better than nothing.

Today sees the release of the latest film by the Coens, True Grit. While it’s full of the same deadpan comedy and love of language that characterises their work, it’s undeniably a more traditional kind of movie. I swear I could almost feel the Coens’ relief as they wrapped themselves up in the conventions of the classical western. It’s provides a world where there’s right, and there’s wrong, and justice can be found at the end of a gun.

Early in True Grit, 14-year-old Mattie Ross (astonishingly portrayed by Hailee Steinfeld) is picking out a horse. Mattie asks the stable boy what kind of treats the horse likes. He replies, bemused, that she’s a horse. She likes apples.

There’s nothing more foolish than a man chasing his hat; okay, fine. But you can’t deny that horses like apples. There’s comfort – and maybe meaning – in that.

A SERIOUS MAN

Directed by: Joel & Ethan Coen

Starring: Michael Stuhlbarg, Aaron Wolff, Richard Kind

Remember seeing the last Coen Brothers film, Burn After Reading, and wondering: what the hell was the point? Or their film before that, No Country For Old Men, with its bamboozling, creepy non-ending? Now the Coens have taken that same sense of pointlessness and transformed it into their best screenplay since The Big Lebowski.

A Serious Man is impossible to do justice to in a plot summary. (Okay, fine. “Larry Gopnik, head of a Jewish family in 1960s suburbia, who loses his faith as his life inexplicably falls apart.” You happy now?) Larry, played by mostly-unknown Michael Stuhlbarg, is utterly sympathetic as a man trying to do what’s right while slowly succumbing to hysteria.

It’s funny, awful, and heartfelt. Like an absurd episode of the Wonder Years, maybe, if Kevin’s grown-up narration was actually the Voice of God and had gone mysteriously silent. It’s been true for two decades now: when a Coen Brothers’ film is firing on all cylinders, there’s nothing else like it.

Other reviews by me this month:  Dead Set and Crank 2: High Voltage on DVD, and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus in cinemas.

Issue #34 is on sale now.