Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
9/20/08
There
are times when I'm glad I'm not paid to do this. There are two goals
to good film criticism, the first being to dissect why a given film does
or does not work against the criteria we tell ourselves are objective.
The other is to step back after seeing and reacting to that film and to
try and understand our own thoughts and feelings about it. I find
myself pulled in two different directions regarding Burn After Reading,
the tonally challenged new dramedy from the Coen Brothers. Measured
against those objective standards, the movie just doesn't work. Even
at just a shade over 90 minutes, it feels very long, the performances are
coming from all sorts of different directions, and both the Coens and their
actors fail miserably at making any of their network of interconnected
characters empathetic in any way. But as the story rolled to its'
conclusion and the final scenes played out, I couldn't help but feel like
I'd just seen something really profound. Like a lesser Forrest
Gump, a movie that never fails to affect me emotionally even as I struggle
in vain to understand just what it's trying to say, Burn After Reading
feels like a mournful eulogy for a nation that's abandoned all sense of
ethics and morality in its' mad pursuit of happiness that will never come
precisely because the seekers have become so soulless. It's just
hard for me to explain HOW it is this, but through the rubble of one failed
scene after another, I felt it in my gut, and I was glad I saw this deeply
flawed movie. Your results may vary.
Osborne
Cox (John Malkovich) is demoted from his CIA job because of his “drinking
problem”. Enraged, he quits rather than accept a lesser position,
and vows to start a consulting company and write his memoirs. It's
more than his embittered wife Katie (Tilda Swinton) can stand, and she
consults a divorce lawyer (J.R. Horne) who advises her to steal as many
of her husband's financial records as possible before serving him with
papers. Somehow, a disk containing those files and the memoirs ends
up on the floor of a gym, and the manager (Richard Jenkins) and two employees
get a look at it. Dimwitted Chad (Brad Pitt) believes the owner will
be happy to give them a reward for the find, but when they track down Cox
and he reacts badly, plastic surgery-obsessed Linda (Frances McDormand)
looks for another way to make money off the disk. While the Russian
embassy mulls her offer of classified information, Linda goes on another
in a long line of Internet dates with Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney), who
happens to be sleeping with Katie and looking for a way out of his marriage
to children's book author Sandy (Elizabeth Marvel). With all this
treason, blackmail, and infidelity, it's surely only a matter of time before
someone gets shot...
While
I was a vocal critic of last year's Best Picture winner No
Country for Old Men, I've traditionally been a big fan of the Coen
Brothers' comedies, with their crazy, outsized performances and cheerfully
silly populism. Burn After Reading is a departure in many
ways, not the least of which that it seems intended more to be droll than
funny. Oddly, while most of the cast doesn't seem to realize they're
in a comedy, Clooney alternates between sadness and silliness and Pitt
and McDormand are as broad as anybody in O Brother, Where Art Thou
or The Hudsucker Proxy. The former has a lot more luck than
the later: Chad is the movie's most enjoyable creation, a stone cold
imbecile with no fear of stepping in way, WAY over his head in a blackmail
scheme he's just too dumb to realize the danger and immorality of.
The usually excellent McDormand has no luck with Linda, though. She's
a desperate woman, fearing that perceived physical imperfection has doomed
her to a life of one night stands with online losers, but there's no “in”
to the character. We never feel her pain, and she's just never funny
enough to compensate. Clooney, as always, is excellent. He's
capable of being gloriously twitchy, waxing philosophical in support of
his own selfishness and totally melting down into a paranoid heap.
Swinton is convincingly icy, and has one really funny scene near the end
that reveals how funny her bitchiness has been intended to be the whole
time, but again there's just no “in”. Malkovich has a lot of luck
letting us inside the impotent, drunken frustration Osborne feels at the
world around him, but the movie has a lot of faith in the idea of his constant,
relentless profanity being hilarious when it's not even once. A lot
of the movie's funniest stuff is around its' edges. Sandy makes a
book tour visit to a memorably awful Good Morning Seattle talk show,
while CIA operatives played by David Rasche and TK Simmons have a pair
of great conversations trying to understand the serendipitous crime spree
unfolding before them. Simmons nails the movie's final line, which
made me feel more than ever like I'd just witnessed something that was,
in its' own hard to define way, kinda great.
The
Coens get accused a lot of “hating”, “talking down to” or “making fun of”
their characters, and I've traditionally defended them against those charges.
But in the case of Burn After Reading, they're spot on. Some
of these people are funny, some of the things that happen to them are kinda
poignant. But Joel and Ethan can't reduce themselves to feel for
these poor, selfish, deluded fools and their desperate quest to bedhop
themselves into happiness. As a whole, the movie's feel is too standoffishly
odd to take full advantage of its' own screenplay. As a guy who's
used to laughing hysterically at the weird goings-on in the Coen World,
I couldn't help but think that Burn After Reading is just too Coen
to be funny.
But
still, there's something here in this Altmanesque web of characters obsessed
with the superficial: plastic surgery, exercise, and that weird machine
Henry is building in his basement (when he unveils it, you'll either be
hysterically amused, totally aghast, or both. Either way, the movie's
R rating is earned). Locked in desperate forward motion, neither
Henry nor Linda could tell you why they're unhappy, just what they're certain
will turn things around. Clooney has a powerful scene late in the
game where he gets exactly what he's spent the whole movie saying he wanted
and is devastated by it. Osborne is enraged but not surprised to
find a bunch of fools trying to shake him down for his memoirs. He
has, he tells us, spent his whole life at war with morons. So much
sadness, so much desperation, and the CIA's satellites quietly take it
all in, hoping to learn what it all means, so we can just not do it again.
There's a conspicuous lack of empathy to the exercise: in a movie
that begins and ends with the world viewed from space, we're really watching
these people like ants under a microscope. But I watched with fascination,
and sadness.
Did
I mention I'm terribly conflicted about this movie? Burn After
Reading stirred up a lot of emotions in me, and I can't even guarantee
that it was intended to do so. But a movie is just a series of pictures
run really fast: the magic happens in our brains. And while
those pictures on the screen were deeply flawed, there was some pretty
interesting stuff happening in my brain. Those Oscar-winning Coen
Brothers sure are geniuses. Maybe. |
