At the Movies: Burn After Reading
If you're a fan of the Coen brothers' memorable characterisations, dark humour and violence, then you'd probably find last year's arresting Academy Award-topper, No Country For Old Men, near-impossible to beat.
In it, the Coens created one of the most unusual, startling killers in screen history, called in extraordinary performances AND made us work for satisfactory meaning at the end (I replayed it three times before drawing a comfortable conclusion). Their comically criminal, surreal filmograghy (Fargo, O Brother Where Art Thou, The Big Lebowski, etc) has earned them 10 Oscar nominations and four wins in 20 years, and secured audience loyalty but set up some demanding expectations: O Brothers, What Makest Thou Next?
And that expectation-the demand for something even better than best-is a stumbling block for viewers of their new comedy thriller, Burn After Reading.
Ossie Cox (John Malkovich), a CIA analyst with an anger and drinking problem, is fired, and decides to write his memoirs. They're terrible, but are full of classified names, assignations and data, and through no fault of Ossie's, fall into the wrong hands.
An array of vivid characters (Tilda Swinton as Ossie's formidable wife, George Clooney as her philandering lover, Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt as a pair of seriously naive gymnasium staff-come-blackmailers) manipulate each other and the fate of Ossie's memoirs for their own trivial ends, and some meet their own ends in the process. Meanwhile, the CIA, faced with a trail of confusion, comically tries to make sense of it all.
Brad Pitt is hilarious as a bimbo fitness trainer with a hydration fixation, and he and McDormand (Mrs Joel Coen) get some great laughs.
Burn After Reading is good. It's very good, with a fantastic cast being fantastically versatile and having a fantastically good time. The characters' interactions sparkle and run the show. It's bizarre and funny and disturbing. It's clever. And it has all the Coens' hallmark black comedy and a couple of rather splattery moments.
However, the complex plot had me trying hard to connect the dots. Those Coens want you to work for your money, but as the confusion clears it's apparent this spy thriller with no spies has nothing concrete to anchor it. You're so distracted by Swinton's icy precision and Clooney's animation that the incoherence and lack of unity just irks quietly in the background. Ultimately the story is a nut with no kernel-much ado about nothing-and a story reversion to Fargo in too many ways, and that's where Coen fans wanting forward momentum or deeper meaning may stumble over their expectations.
It's one of the very few films where the viewer might really benefit from reading a plot synopsis beforehand. Don't ask too much of it, then you'll get plenty. If you like slick, fast-paced films with a great script and brilliant caricatures that surprise and make you laugh, and if you can leave your expectations on the coathook in the porch, then Burn After Reading is a dark but very entertaining piece of silliness indeed.
Maria Polglase
BURN AFTER READING (R16) Next screening at the Village Theatre, Saturday 13 December at 8.00pm.
