Burnt Offering?

Is this Osborne Cox? -- Picture courtesy of Working Title Films

by blogSpotter
Saturday I treated myself to the latest movie by Joel and Ethan Coen, Burn After Reading. The Coen brothers have been accused of treating their characters with contempt or treating them as cartoon characters. I have to say that many of their depictions are right on -- if the shoe fits, wear it. They frequently lampoon small town Americans, be it in Fargo or an Arizona trailer park. If it pains people to see such gullible culpability in a main character, guess what? The audience is probably finding discomfort in a hidden truth about themselves.

The Coen brothers have done a couple of movies which are serious allegories of Good and Evil -- Barton Fink and No Country for Old Men come to mind. They've lightened things up along the way with Raising Arizona, Fargo and The Big Lebowski to name a handful. Big Lebowski has even become a latter-day cult hit among college slackers some 10 years after its initial theater run.

In Burn After Reading, the brothers are back to their comic games -- showing the inept efforts of two Washington DC fitness trainers (played by Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt) attemping to blackmail a recently fired CIA analyst. They inadvertently obtain a copy of the analyst's unpublished memoire (left on a CD in a gym locker). The CIA man, played by John Malkovich, is a sad, disgruntled alcoholic with no secrets worthy of blackmail. He is however going thru a painful divorce with an emotionally frigid Brit wife (played by Tilda Swinton), and she in turn is having a torrid affair with a federal marshal played by George Clooney.

Much like a Seinfeld episode, these separate plot lines interlace in a manic (but not especially credible) way. The characters in this movie are all deeply flawed -- unintelligent or otherwise addled with lust, anger or arrogance. It was a disappointment to see two of my favorites (I won't say which) get blown away toward the end of the movie. Funny that you can grow a momentary attachment to such silly-acting people.

Richard Corliss of TIME Magazine panned this movie. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone gave a better, more circumspect opinion -- the movie is still funny and well worth viewing. It's not the best product from the Coen brothers, but that's because they've raised the bar so very high with all of their other marvelous movies. I would love to meet these two brothers in person -- their world view is so sharp and their take on it all is so witty. Burn After Reading is worth seeing, if only to see Brad Pitt acting against type, as a blond-highlighted surfer dude kind of guy.

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