The basic fact (a Texan bar-owner is betrayed by the private detective he hires to murder his faithless wife and her lover) is transformed by an imaginatively tortuous script into a clever, almost farcical study of humans forever misinterpreting each other's actions
While the audience understands what is happening, the characters, their perceptions distorted by suspicion, fear and jealousy, strike in the dark and destroy friends, enemies and themselves Murder, too, is a dirty, protracted business one character is even buried alive just as, in the Coens' irredeemably seedy Texas, the corrupt private eye (marvelously played by M. Emmett Walsh) sweats continuously
While the audience understands what is happening, the characters, their perceptions distorted by suspicion, fear and jealousy, strike in the dark and destroy friends, enemies and themselves Murder, too, is a dirty, protracted business one character is even buried alive just as, in the Coens' irredeemably seedy Texas, the corrupt private eye (marvelously played by M. Emmett Walsh) sweats continuously