film: Burn After Reading
On today’s menu, we’ve got a film about fitness instructors, Internet Dating and the CIA. Well what else did you expect from the Coen brothers? It’s Burn After Reading.
So what’s the plot I hear you say.. Well John Malkovich’s CIA operative Ozzie Cox is sacked due to a monumental drink problem. But that’s not the half of it. Hell-bent on revenge, Cox decides to write his warts’n’all memoirs, but stupidly leaves them at his gym. The manuscript then falls into the soft but sweaty hands of needy gym instructors Linda and Chad, played by Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt. Throw George Clooney’s sex pest Harry Pfarrer into the mix and let the mayhem commence.
Writer/director/producer/sibling superteam Joel and Ethan Coen have a twenty year career that has divided audiences with the precision of a knife. Raising Arizona, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, Barton Fink and O-Brother Where Art Thou. You either get them or you don’t. My mother, Jacquline Ann Gayner, does not get them. But then again she doesn’t get the world wide internet, The Simpsons or the pleasure of pork scratchings, so what does she know?
Personally, and god what an indulgent, self-mastubatory phrase personally is, I have been a longtime fan of the brothers Coen. Even if their career had only consisted of The Big Lebowski, then they would still receive my undying love and admiration. Their anarchic sense of humour, their love of dialogue and their hallmark tracking shots have unquestionably elevated them to the pantheon of comedy greats.
When I saw this movie trailed, it was billed as a laugh out loud comedy. What it certainly isn’t, is a laugh-out loud comedy. Sure. there may be some amusing moments, but they tend to fit into the wryly entertaining or I’m laughing inside category rather than I’m-going-to-follow-through-and-ruin-my-Egyptian-cotton briefs hilarious.
Interestingly, most of the silent chuckles come from Masters Pitt and Clooney, two men better known for making women go silly in the bed than making men go silly in the head. Pitt’s portrayal of a coiffured plank-for-brains fitness freak is verging on the genius whilst George, he of Clooney, is rivetingly vile as an internet lotharion. And just you WAIT to see what he’s built in his cellar. All I can say without spoiling things for you is OUCH.
Nevertheless, as an out-an-out comedy, Burn After Reading let me down. Malkovich never gets beyond grouchy, Tilda Swinton’s repressed wife never gets beyond annoying and Coen stalwart Frances MdDormand never gets beyond pithy dryness. I can honestly say I didn’t admit audible laugh gas once. So that’s the no element of does it deliver, but if you take it from me that this is a quirky drama rather than arts comedis…then you’re in for a much much better time.
Well not that much fun admittedly but Burn After Reading certainly remains watchable and perfect fodder for a Sunday night film. Loathe as I am to use such a bland adjective, the flick is deliciously quirky and, afterall, we all need a bit of quirk in our lives. Much as you’d expect from a Coen brother’s film, the plot unravels as unpredictably as a schizophrenic on a therapist’s couch. The acting is first rate and the characters are more eccentric than this script’s metaphors put into a blender and jazzed up with triple sec and tropical fruit juice. In terms of downside, I’m afraid that the dialogue ain’t as good as previous Coen fair, which is a shame because it doesn’t really lift this movie higher than a high 3 star rating. Goodbye.
For the best of the rest:
The Guardian:
With Burn After Reading the Coen brothers finds room for George Clooney, Brad Pitt and John Malkovich - along with Tilda Swinton who, improbable as it may seem after all those years slogging it out for low-budget avant-gardists like Derek Jarman, Sally Potter and John Maybury, is now supping at the high table of Hollywood aristocracy. And the Coens themselves are new enough to the big leagues for them to still feel they are blinking owlishly in the spotlight.
The Times Online:
Joel and Ethan Coen call upon a heavyweight cast of regular collaborators (George Clooney, Frances McDormand, Richard Jenkins) and newcomers to the Coen repertory group (Brad Pitt, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton) for their follow-up to the Oscar-winning No Country For Old Men. And then the brothers gleefully despatch half of their stars in a hail of bullets and blunt weapons.
Rolling Stone:
All the Academy Awards that Joel and Ethan Coen won for No Country for Old Men produced an unintended effect: It made the outlaw brothers respectable. That’s got to be driving them nuts. (Have any Oscar winners ever looked more miserable on camera?) Luckily, the idiot-boy side of the Coens barrels out whenever prestige threatens to choke their rebel spirit. Blood Simple begat Raising Arizona, Barton Fink begat The Hudsucker Proxy, and Fargo begat (hello, stoner heaven) The Big Lebowski. For me, the only time the slide into silly didn’t work was when The Man Who Wasn’t There begat the twin low points in the Coen canon, Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers.
