Joel and Ethan Coen will re-team with No Country for Old Men producer Scott Rudin to adapt Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer-Prize winning”The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.” Of the book, Variety says that

“Chabon sets up a contemporary scenario where Jewish settlers are about to be displaced by U.S. government’s plans to turn the frozen locale of Sitka, Alaska, over to Alaskan natives. Against this backdrop is a noir-style murder mystery in which a rogue cop investigates the killing of a heroin-addicted chess prodigy who might be the messiah.”

Ah, an Alaskan-messianic-Jewish-noir-murder-chess-mystery. Sounds right up the Coens’ alley.

Actually, the descriptions of the Coens’ films often sound much less subversive than they turn out to be. How about one for O Brother, Where Art Thou?:

a “. . . picaresque comedy (inspired in part by Homer’s The Odyssey) set in the Deep South during the Depression.”

Or this one for The Man Who Wasn’t There:

“. . . stars Billy Bob Thornton as Ed Crane, a humble barber who suspects his hard-hearted and hard-drinking wife Doris (Frances McDormand) of having an affair with her boss (James Gandolfini).”

It seems to me that the Coens are the premiere value-added directors, taking tried and true premises and subverting them, adding “Coen touches” to them, making them their own. No Country for Old Men being the prime example

“Violence and mayhem ensue after a hunter stumbles upon some dead bodies, a stash of heroin and more than $2 million in cash near the Rio Grande.”

Sounds routine, doesn’t it? Could have been pedestrian in any other hands — say, those of a Tony Scott. But in the clutches of the Coens, it’s a pure-D masterpiece.

[Read my other peregrinations on No Country for Old Men here and here.]