Joel Coen and Ethan Coen: Burn After Reading

BURN AFTER READING
Written and directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
Starring George Clooney, Frances McDormand, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton and Brad Pitt

Osborne Cox: With all due respect, what the fuck is this? Whose ass did I forget to kiss?

The now infamous Coen brothers make a lot of movies and they know that people out there see a whole lot of movies too. A population distracted by constant film watching is a population led to see the world in a truly dramatic fashion. Finding a computer disc in the ladies locker room of a fitness club would ordinarily be just another occasion to throw something left behind in a lost and found box, likely never to be reclaimed. If you’ve seen one too many movies though, and you don’t have a whole lot going on in your own little life, you might see finding this disc as an opportunity to blackmail the owner of said disc for contents you believe to be top secret C.I.A. intelligence. There’s just one thing the movies don’t tell you about capers such as these though, and that is that none of it is real. In BURN AFTER READING, the Coens decide it’s time for a little fun and serve up a hearty dose of signature comedy that both highlights the influence of film and perpetuates it further at the same time.

BURN AFTER READING begins with a thunderous, percussion heavy score and an all too familiar opening shot of the planet we call home. Slowly but persistently, the worldview becomes more focused and as we descend, we zero in on the city of Washington. The titles appear on the screen, digitally processed as though you were reading them off a computer. Have the Coens made a super spy movie, I wondered, and with that, they had me exactly where they wanted me. Though you wouldn’t know it from the way they speak in public, the Coens are big jokers; they like to play with their audiences. They get you thinking one way and then take you in a whole other direction. It’s almost like they’re laughing at you sometimes but really, they just want you to have as much fun as they seem to be having. And fun is to be had in BURN AFTER READING. After perfecting the art of suspenseful drama with last year’s NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, the brothers have returned to more familiar waters for zaniness that is entirely offbeat while still sharp and biting.

The premise itself is certainly amusing, if not a little scattered, but it is the top-notch ensemble that solidifies this work as quintessentially Coen-esque. Regulars like George Clooney and Frances McDormand return as two particularly kooky people who find each other online while pretending to be different versions of themselves. Tilda Swinton and John Malkovich are a married couple on the way to divorce. Both are, to a fault, cold and crazed respectively, as well as formidable performers. Richard Jenkins turns in another self-effacing, understated performance (after this year’s THE VISITOR) that should nab him more work with high profile directors. And while all of these performances are top notch and so delightfully exaggerated, it is Brad Pitt that shines brightest for the simple reason that he is entirely ridiculous. Pitt plays Chad Feldheimer, a fitness trainer who has perhaps been running on endorphins for one too many laps, and the only character in this film who isn’t pretending to be anything he isn’t. This could have a lot to do with his character not being smart enough to pull off disguise but Pitt himself is more than capable. We never quite forget that we’re watching Pitt but that’s what makes his unbridled exuberance as he bounces around to the music in his headphones so darn funny.

Despite the title, nothing actually gets burnt after being read at any point in the film. The act itself though is so dramatic that to name your movie this essentially announces the intended tone. BURN AFTER READING definitely makes good on its promise and has a blast doing it. The Coen Brothers are sitting pretty atop their throne as two of Hollywood’s most celebrated filmmakers and their latest plays out almost effortlessly. Even switching over to a new cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki (rather than long time collaborator, Roger Deakins), happens without a beat missed. It’s as though they could do all of this in their sleep. Now, that would be one hell of a dream that would make one heck of a good movie. We just have to make sure we can spot the difference between that and the real thing.

GRADE: B

www.blacksheepreviews.com

BURN AFTER READING

A carnival of human folly

Review by Chris Knipp

In Burn After Reading the Coen brothers turn to a new genre, the spy story, and they shred it and, along with it, their cast of characters. Typically for the Coens, there's tight construction, quick pacing--and a somewhat unseemly delight taken in human stupidity--in the course of which a number of A-listers are coaxed into working hard to demean themselves.

This at least is what the critics are mostly saying. Now, in fact, the action's a bit puzzling, and the finale a tad unsatisfying. But what some reviews seem crucially to overlook is that there's much fun to be had here for viewers, not only in absurdities of dialogue and action--in the seemingly helter-skelter "clusterfuck" plot--but in the way the extreme story elements and satirical characters are destined to undercut whole chunks of movies you'll be seeing in the near future.

You've got a group of types. There's the ice queen wife (Tilda Swinton), her alcoholic husband (John Malkovitch), the cosmetic surgery-seeking plain girl (Frances McDormand), the ambivalent philanderer (George Clooney), the gym bunny (Brad Pitt), the good bloke (Richard Jenkins). Then you've got the various people they're tied to or get involved with, none of whom matter much except for a "CIA Superior" (J.K. Simmons). The machinations of the gym bunny and the plain girl (co-workers at a gym called Hardbodies) are reported to Simmons by an agent. They're trying to extort money from ex-spook Malkovich and sell his info to the Ruskies. Simmons gives orders to minimize damage and make some sense out of it all. It will be hard any time in the near future to observe any such characters and plot elements in another movie and not be reminded of how devastatingly they and their vices were twisted and mocked by the Coens.

The CD-rom Pitt and McDormand find at Hardbodies contains some intelligence-valueless memories of Malkovich's just-ended CIA career. He calls the conspirators a "league of morons," but he speaks too soon, because he's an idiot himself. Cruelty and anger do not make a man smart.

Reviewers accuse the Coens of meanness, but satire doesn't have to be nice. It is good to be able to laugh at ourselves, to see our own folly. The excellent and very famous actors who perform in this movie may understand that better than the critics do. They know the value of having a bit of fun--of laughing at themselves. They're not so much demeaned as set free of their solemn garb as tragedians who weep in a movie like Babel (as Brad Pitt did), or snarl and get tough like Clooney in Michael Clayton, and so on.

The action takes place in the environs of Washington, DC. The CIA, as moviegoers know all too well by now, is over the border in Langley. The opportunists, lobbyists, and exploiters, the poseurs and dreamers and has-beens, are everywhere--in the real DC, that is. This is a specialized and notional one, for the Coens are artists.

The Coens do not always succeed. There's a slight risk in their returning to mockery after the solemn horror of their literary adaptation of last year, Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. They had never worked off somebody else's story before and the purity of their accomplishment grew from their playing another's music, so to speak. In their own mode, ever since Blood Simple, the brothers have been cruel both to their characters and their audience--cruel in a way that gives excruciating pleasure in the suspenseful moments of Blood Simple. They can become too reductive and condescending, as in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, or too crass, as in The Ladykillers, or just boring, as in The Man Who Wasn't There, or merely conventional, as in Intolerable Cruelty. And as clever and able as they are, it is still true that when they have most succeeded, it is partly by accident, as in Barton Fink, which owes much to the dorky intensity of John Turturro, and the gargantuan genius of John Goodman; likewise The Big Lebowski became a thing far beyond their abilities because it stars the brilliant Jeff Bridges--and again the great Goodman.

But enough of the filmography--which in a way this movie has nothing to do with. Its virtue comes from its working a new game, the "clusterfuck" of schemers and cheaters so mixed up with each other everything ultimately implodes--with a plop.

The "clusterfuck" grows out of greed, vanity, and lust. The Coens' alleged "cruelty" comes from the stern morality of the satirist.

Clooney is sleeping with everyone he can, and that includes Tilda Swinton, Cox's (Malkovich's) wife, a mean pediatrician. McDormand, whose vanity leads to greed (it makes her want thousands for wholesale cosmetic surgery), is dating via the Internet, and thus she starts seeing Clooney too. Clooney goes to Swinton's and Malkovich's house when Malkovich is away, and then Pitt goes there in search of more state secrets. The critics think Pitt is the dumbest character of all. But he is the most selfless: he only wants to exploit the discovered data because it excites him to do so, without any real ulterior motive or plan. Malkovich is motivated, as in so many of the actor's roles, mostly by malevolence, and this time, the perversion of feeling that arises from alcohol. What a wealth of Deadly Sins are here!

The Russians are not in bed with anybody, but the CIA has an inside man at the Russian embassy. The lesson of John Le Carré: the Secret War is always behind the times.


Other than this, it is dangerous to reveal the plot; the trailers already revealed too much. The devil is in the details.

. . .is that the Coens are not flippant, they're moralists, and the delight in Folly is not mere crass fun but a stern picture of the world's disorder.