Joel and Ethan Coen (2008)

The Coen brothers’ self-satisfied misanthropy is strongly in evidence in an interesting example of how it’s possible to enjoy and dislike a film at the same time.   (At the start, I was amused in spite of my prejudice against the Coens; midway, I was laughing freely; in the end, I loathed what I’d seen – which, given the bias I started with, was almost reassuring.)  The Coens by now are as knowing about their smug superiority to their characters as they are about the rest of their material:  how else do you interpret the opening and closing shots as the camera zooms in from a God’s-eye view far above the earth to the bowels of a CIA building in Virginia, where the seed of the plot is sown – and, finally, zooms out again?  Burn After Reading is remarkably proficient and trim (96 minutes) and there is a pleasure, however grudgingly you feel it, in realising you’re in the hands of filmmakers who know exactly what they’re doing – even if you don’t like what they’re doing (and even though the brisk efficiency also sharpens your awareness of the discrepancy between the Coens’ substantial technical skills and their mean-spiritedness).

The tagline for Burn After Reading on the film’s poster is ‘Intelligence is relative’.  Late on in the film one character excoriates another as follows:  ‘I know what you represent.  You represent the idiocy of today.  … You’re one of the morons I’ve spent my whole life fighting against’.  This seems pretty close to the Coens’ credo (although the speaker of the lines is incandescent, whereas the writer-directors seem comfortably contemptuous).  Their characters are rarely admirable and probably unpleasant – but the cardinal sin in the Coens’ moral universe is foolishness.  (The absence of moral or intellectual exemplars means that the Coens avoid suggesting ways in which people might behave better or more cleverly.)   In the opening scene of Burn After Reading, Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich), a CIA analyst, is threatened with demotion and, in a fit of pique, quits the Agency entirely.   He starts to write a memoir, in desultory fashion; his ballbreaker doctor wife Katie (Tilda Swinton) starts divorce proceedings and copies her husband’s financial details onto the same disc as the beginnings of the memoir.  The disc comes into the possession of two employees at a local fitness centre;  Linda (Frances McDormand), who is desperate for funds to pay for various bits of cosmetic surgery, teams up with her colleague Chad (Brad Pitt) to blackmail Cox – with increasing incompetence.  Katie Cox is having an affair with Harry (George Clooney), a government treasury agent.  He’s married to Sandy (Elizabeth Marvel), a successful writer of children’s fiction; like Linda, he’s also into internet dating and the two start a relationship.

The farce plot that’s spun from this tangled web also involves the Russian embassy, private detectives and various levels of the CIA hierarchy.   This is a reductive description of the characters but it pretty well reflects their creators’ attitude towards them – a sort of censorious jocoseness.  (In more sympathetic hands, their obsessions and weaknesses could be eccentric and even likeable.)   The Coens seem to want to suggest that the consequences of the self-serving actions of the fools in Burn After Reading may be more far-reaching than the small-minded impulses behind those actions; yet the brothers want it both ways – since the events of the story depend heavily for comic effect on their implausibility.  (All this is reflected in Carter Burwell’s score – particularly in the early stages – which has a doomy sound and trouble-brewing momentum out of proportion to the mostly laughable events on screen.)

There are just two moments of significant violence in the film; they both have considerable and offensive impact.   When Chad, hiding in a wardrobe, is shot by Harry, who’s disturbed him there (or does Chad somehow shoot himself?), the bloody corpse is as startling to the audience as to Harry.   Near the end of the film (at the climax of his ‘morons’ tirade), Cox shoots then bludgeons to death Ted, the hapless manager of the fitness centre and this is filmed in a gruesomely realistic way.    These are both examples of the Coens’ cleverness in working the audience; they’re also examples of why their heartlessness leaves you feeling – once they’ve achieved their immediate impact – hollow and resentful.   Brad Pitt plays Chad crudely (he’s evidently – too evidently, and self-consciously – enjoying playing a clod); Chad doesn’t seem any more capable of mortality than a cartoon character so the death feels wrong.   As the fitness centre manager, Richard Jenkins – with a memorably doleful look and subtle line readings – is Pitt’s polar opposite:  Jenkins’s sensitive, funny performance makes Ted nearly believable – and the most likeable character in the film.   His fate is undeserved (and ironic – the fearful, tentative Ted is especially reluctant to get involved in what’s happening, and does so for the love of Linda) – so his death too is a shock effect.

Both the deaths work only momentarily:  even if you’re relieved to see the end of Pitt’s performance, dispatching him in this way throws Burn After Reading off balance in the same way that the death of Jennifer Tilly’s caricature of the gangster’s moll in Bullets Over Broadway did for that film.   From that point on, you suspect that the Coens may revert to type any moment – so when the Jenkins character is killed off, appalled regret is quickly replaced by anger at the film-makers.  What unites the two characters of Chad and Ted is that both are losers:  the Coens seem to think that such people can’t expect anything better than to be disposed of.   (The denouement means that Linda has to be paid off by the CIA to keep her quiet; this is one case where a fool in a Coen film ends up with what she set out to get.  It’s perhaps significant that we don’t see her enjoy her pyrrhic victory.)

The Coens may not like people much but they love cinema, and actors seem to fall half-way between the two.   In other words, the performers may be expected to incarnate despicable people – but the Coens are shrewd enough not to interfere with – and they probably themselves enjoy – a cast that’s putting on a good show.   This laissez-faire approach may not always be the right decision:  Javier Bardem’s charisma in No Country For Old Men seemed to me to make the shadow-of-death he was playing too physically dominant a presence;  here the Coens certainly allow Frances McDormand, like Pitt, to give a strident, self-indulgent performance.    (I’ve never before seen McDormand make faces and act in this busy, overemphatic style.)     But the directors are right not to control George Clooney; his comic style here tends to the hyperactive but it’s counterbalanced by his relaxation.  Clooney’s innate affability and courtesy, and his terrific audience rapport, mute the unpleasant aspects of Harry; instead of experiencing this man as a serial philanderer, you accept him as someone looking for the right girl and too genially cowardly to extricate himself from unsatisfying relationships, however many of them he may be having at the same time.

Tilda Swinton will need to be careful not to get herself typecast – in American films at least – as a haughty, cold bitch but she plays the role here with perfect acid control and crack timing.  (It’s amusingly unbelievable that Katie Cox is a paediatrician and a good joke that we see her with a patient only once – an implacably uncooperative little boy, in her last scene.)  Swinton’s Katie is a credible partner for Clooney’s Harry, in spite of her freezing hauteur and his easy-going amiability; you can believe that the two of them enjoy the sex and that’s enough reason for their being together.  John Malkovich doesn’t have the same kind of connection with the audience as some of the other actors (it’s mispronunciation of the word ‘rapport’ by the kidnappers that sends Cox into a rage during the abortive blackmailing phone call from Chad and Linda).  The fact that Malkovich sometimes seems to be drawing on his own rather than the character’s reserves of anger can make him uncomfortable to watch.  But he does some very clever things:  out of a job and cross-examined by Swinton as to what he’s going to do next, he says he’ll write:

‘Write what?

A book.

What sort of a book?

You know – a memoir.’

Malkovich intones ‘a memoir’ with exquisite lack of conviction.   It’s not just these three big names and Richard Jenkins who make Burn After Reading an entertaining and quickly moving hour and a half.   As in No Country, the Coens cast and direct the actors in the smaller parts carefully and skilfully.   There are excellent cameos from J K Simmons, as the CIA boss, Jeffrey DeMunn, as Linda’s cosmetic surgeon, and J R Horne, as Katie’s lawyer – and a fine moment when Cox goes to Princeton for a reunion dinner.  You look out for John Malkovich as the camera starts to pan across the guests.  They’re such a visually fascinating collection of shapes and faces that, by the time you get to Malkovich, you register him almost incidentally – at the same time, he looks remarkable enough to belong in the company.

22 October 2008