Burn After Reading
by Titus Gee
Official movie still and poster art
I almost missed Burn After Reading, Joel and Ethan Coen’s latest three-act parody of the great human drama. Then it almost missed me.
Burn opened on an inconvenient night in RedFence Land, which explains why this blog does not include a video by the 2 o’clock Critics and why it didn’t appear a little closer to opening night. I went to see it on a whim a week later.
Billed under the tag line “Intelligence is Relative,” Burn plays heir to the Coens’ early hometown masterpieces like Fargo and Raising Arizona. Like the others, it highlights common, dull-eyed, endlessly pedestrian characters caught up in matters far beyond their depth. In this case the unfortunate saps live in or near Washington D.C., adding another pin to the brothers’ American tour. Apparently even the capital city harbors its share of dowdy tweed jackets and granny panties.
The brothers Coen have a rare knack for capturing the banalities of life. Rather than gloss over their characters’ flaws – whether in flesh or character – they take a snickering pleasure in uncovering them (and therefore us) in all their wobbly, pale, and freckle-spattered humanity. Here they see almost too sharply and seem to believe not enough in the potential for warmth and goodness in the world. Their story is a tangle of selfishness, betrayal, infidelity, and paranoia.
To drive the story forward, they give us Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand), a manager at the subtly named Hardbodies Gym. Aging, single, and physically fit in the sagging way of post-middle-aged workout fanatics, Litzke becomes obsessed with cosmetic surgery in the hopes of snagging a more exciting class of man on her internet dating services. When the gym janitor finds a DVD on the locker room floor bearing the memoir of aging, alcoholic CIA analyst Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), Litzke and her goofy fitness-addict sidekick, Chad (Brad Pitt), decide to collect a reward for returning it – whether Cox offers one or not – and thus pay for the surgeries.
The Coens’ filmcraft cannot be disputed. The boys know how to create a seamless world that captures and retains the audience from Fade In to the credits. Cinematography, wardrobe, directing, editing – it all fairly drips with talent.
In Burn the writer-directors use some of their favorite world-class actors and draw from them all but flawless performances. McDormand inhabits the slack-jawed but single-minded Litzke without a hint of self-awareness or a wink for the folks at home. And Pitt has a well-established knack for playing manic or dim-witted characters with charismatic abandon. His physical goofiness offers sporadic humor to an otherwise rather disheartening first two acts. Malkovich’s signature pause-and-rush over-enunciations find a perfect home in the nerdy, washed-up character of Cox, and he plays the role with a kind of seething, self-absorbed rage (always his best psychology type casting?).
George Clooney plays Harry Pfarrer, the 70s-sleaze-ball holdover that is sleeping with Cox’s wife (played by a Tilda Swinton reprising her roll as the White Witch but without the weird costumes). Of course, believing that Clooney’s oafish charmer could win the heart of Mrs. Cox is as difficult as imagining that Swinton’s cold adulteress could really make her living as a pediatrician, but the two overpower such foibles with the strength of their character creations.
And yet, the strength of performances in Burn ultimately hamstrings the story. The characters, often described as darkly comedic, come across too fragile and naked to be laughed at without a certain haughty cruelty, but also too sad and horrible to invite sympathy. The only one who acts kindly or nobly – a two-dimensional side character – gets an axe to the head for his trouble. Meanwhile, the main players leave the audience perpetually caught between horror and amusement, without much catharsis on either front.
The Pfarrer character’s obsession with sex toys and coitus aids mars the middle section of the film. The apparatuses get a perplexing amount of attention, including odd and repeated detours from the main story into Pfarrer’s basement. And the choice to display a large, pink rubber phallus in the middle of an otherwise sexually demure film serves no apparent purpose in the larger story. If they meant it to be purely humorous, they achieved only an uncomfortable echo of the fart-joke motif in Lady Killers. The scenes really only served to highlight (without any apparent intention by the filmmakers) the mainstreaming of pornographic elements into the broader culture.
The third act swerves suddenly into the darkness with hardly a hint of comedy to ease the shift. Pathos and fragility turn rapidly to violence and destruction, leaving us feeling sucker punched and reeling.
And yet all is not lost.
As though predicting the audience’s consternation, the Coens send in veteran actor J.K. Simmons. His character appears briefly, late in the film, and doesn’t even have a name (the credits dub him “CIA Superior”) but, as one shrewd moviegoer put it, “he sits at his desk for three scenes and steals the show.” Simmons embodies the wink of self-awareness that the rest of the movie (with the exception of Pitt) generally lacks. His character does little more than receive status reports from another agent about the bumbling antics of the other characters. But he serves as the movie’s official observer and audience representative. He slips into the theater seat beside us, throws a comforting arm around our shoulders and calmly says just what we’ve been thinking. His final scene congeals all the awkward tension of the previous 95 minutes into a single moment of uncontrollable mirth. Like Charlie the Unicorn, Burn isn’t funny, and then suddenly, inexplicably, it is.
That’s gotta be worth something, right?
Sure, the Coens have done much better work than this, but they also have done decidedly worse. And, hey, they just gave us No Country for Old Men. Maybe we all needed a bit of a break.
