Movies: They Ain't Heavy...

Even people who love the Coen brothers prefer the idea of the Coen brothers. Or just like being people who like the Coen brothers. Their movies can sometimes be disjointed, silly, hit-and-miss cartoons, but even those give you a glimpse of the brothers' Platonic ideal: hyperintellectual, dizzyingly creative, unpretentious truth. Appreciating a Coen brothers movie is partially about seeing not what is on the screen but what you want to see there.

Why do they get away with this? First of all, look at them. These aren't guys who belong in Hollywood or anywhere else that directly intercepts the sun's rays. They're like huggable anti-Baldwins. Not only do they look like bookstore clerks, but they giggle and mock themselves. Even coldhearted studio bosses are so charmed, they let the pair make their small-budget,

low-profit movies every year--and give them control over the final edit. In addition, there's the fact that Coen brothers films are often brilliant.

But the real trick to their belovedness is that Joel and Ethan Coen go highbrow on lowbrow: opera parody mixes with stoner humor in The Big Lebowski, a cow explodes in the middle of a Depression-era adaptation of The Odyssey in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and quips about Renaissance music are juxtaposed with irritable-bowel syndrome in their latest, The Ladykillers, which opens this Friday. "We're not embarrassed to put in the cheapest gags if they make us laugh," says Joel, 49. "On the other hand, if something goes over somebody's head, we don't care if not everybody gets it." Nothing makes people--especially the type of young men who watch their films over and over and form a fan base--happier than very smart jokes about very adolescent topics.

The likability factor of the Coen brothers is so strong that even when an idea seems bad (like retreading the old British movie The Ladykillers) and is not even theirs (the Coens were hired to write the script and then took on the whole project when Barry Sonnenfeld dropped out as director), Tom Hanks signs up at below his usual salary. "I wanted to work with the guys," says Hanks. "If someone said, 'Disney is remaking The Ladykillers,' you'd probably just run away. But the Coen brothers live in this alternative world where they don't have to adhere to the same rules that most other people do when it comes to filmmaking."

The Coen brothers didn't go to Hanks for his box-office juice. They tried that last year with Intolerable Cruelty, a commercial failure even with George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones in a romantic comedy. "I don't know that we want to do something again where that was the obligation," says Joel. They cast Hanks because he could pull off the potentially over-the-top role of a classics-obsessed Southern criminal. "Tom can do that sort of stuff without it being shtick," says Ethan, 46, sitting with his brother at a Los Angeles diner.