The Coen Brothers are many things — the writing-directing duo who’ve earned Oscar acclaim with Fargo and No Country for Old Men; the directing-writing team who’ve created cult classics like Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski; the rare example of film makers who’ve leapt from Sundance to the mainstream; the even rarer example of film makers who work with big studios and big stars without losing one moment of the weird, off-kilter sensibility they’ve had since the budgets were small and the stars were their friends. Burn After Reading, the team’s follow-up to the stark, celebrated Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men, is a smaller movie, a stranger movie, a weirdly uncomfortable and bizarrely funny film that, for me, just got better the more it sank in. Burn After Reading goes from the corridors of power to the privacy of the bedroom, from the offices of political intelligence to the gyms of physical fitness. It’s a midlife crisis comedy that’s packing guns, a kinda-thriller where everybody’s just a little dumb.
CIA man John Malkovich is asked to leave the agency; he’s not happy about it, but he figures it’ll give him time to work on his memoirs, start a consulting agency; his wife, Tilda Swinton, already tired of his nonsense — she’s having an affair with George Clooney’s shaggy, shambling womanizing Federal Marshal — loses patience with his unemployed status fairly fast. Malkovich loses his rough draft at the gym, where self-improvement junkie Frances McDormand and buff, brainless trainer Brad Pitt find it and figure they can use it to make some easy cash. Greed, lust, delusional self-importance and frustrated relationships: Sounds like a comedy to me. …
And watching Burn After Reading, as bad judgment piles on misunderstandings, you get the sense that you could have done this film straight and had a version of it that would have worked as a tense, terse drama — but, with the Coens in charge, Burn After Reading gets turned into sharp, cruel comedy that gets big laughs out of bad behavior. J.K. Simmons plays the senior man following events when the small-scale squabbles between the characters become a matter of national security, and his confused, blunt befuddlement is funny, fierce and the perfect echo of our own uneasy what-the-hell-just-happened? laughter.
Everyone in the cast is pretty much perfect — from Pitt’s gum-snapping dim-bulb blackmailer to McDormand’s self-obsessed partner in crime, Swinton’s suburban snow queen and Clooney’s sex-crazed simpleton. And not to put too much weight on what’s essentially a silly, smart comedy, but part of me thinks that if you wanted to show future anthropologists a snapshot of life in 2007 — or, rather, the worst parts of life in 2007, the greedy, foolish, self-deluded part, where the people were dim and the people in charge were just as clueless — you could do a lot worse than showing them a copy of Burn After Reading. The DVD extras are fairly miniscule — the Coen’s don’t really like doing commentary tracks — and limited to a few short making-of documentaries where the Coens and cast praise each other and Pitt and Clooney are lovingly mocked.
Burn After Reading crashed and burned at the box office — people looking for another high-minded and superbly-made thriller-drama after the Oscar-winning success of No Country for Old Men were probably confused by it’s violent, vulgar, vibrant comedy. Then again, the Coens followed the Oscar-winning Fargo with The Big Lebowski, which also flopped in the theaters, and 10 years later, there are themed Big Lebowski parties and festivals nationwide. I doubt that Burn After Reading is going to become that kind of cult smash — it’s not quite as notably quotable as Lebowski — but if you missed it in the theaters, trust me when I say Burn After Reading is one of the funniest, freakiest and overlooked comedies of 2008, full of funny moments and just enough tough stuff to make you need the laughs it has.
Posted on January 6, 2009 at 1:21 pm
How exactly do you figure B.A.R. “crashed and burned” at the B.O.? It was the Coen Bros biggest opening weekend ever and did $60 million domestic (on a budget of $37MM). Factor in international and you’ve got a total gross of close to $150MM.
Posted on January 6, 2009 at 6:34 pm
B.O.: Well, considering that Burn’s Box office fell off by 42 % in its second weekend, 43% in the third and 36 % in the fourth … I think you can, in fact, call it a box-office flop; if Universal had to pay Clooney and Pitt’s regular salaries for this film, heads would have rolled.
Posted on January 6, 2009 at 8:51 pm
I laughed, was shocked, confused, and felt a mild sneaking amusement at the movie being about absolutely nothing. I keep giggling about “the russians?”…
Ok so you made it about something – mid-life crisis and some self-obsession.
It dragged a bit for me but that was perhaps the fault of watching the detested – The Women right before.
Thinking about self-obsession – Frances was more likable then a single character from the aforementioned movie. I have decided to stop speaking/writing the title, makes me uncomfortable.
Posted on January 7, 2009 at 11:17 am
@ Rocchi: Yes, but Universal didn’t. Fact of the matter is that the film got a 400% return on investment during its theatrical run alone (less P&A and marketing, natch). Love your stuff, just make sure you keep an eye on the numbers when you’re writing your posts and be careful not to mix opinion with fact.
Posted on March 3, 2009 at 4:13 pm
@Jaaz: You’re too right when you say the movie is about absolutely nothing, and that’s what makes it so brilliantly hilarious. The second time I saw it I dragged a friend along to see it, and afterwards, he says, “umm… kinda funny, but it didn’t have any plot”.
Of course I sit there and shake my head, and explained to him that saying that was like saying the characters in Napoleon Dynamite were lame.
This movie is going into my very small collection, no doubt about it!
Posted on March 11, 2009 at 12:06 am
I thought it should be called burn after watching.
If the clips I saw before going to the movies where what I expected to watch. With Brad Pitt looking so funny in the clips. Yet, this movie was not what I excpected. They may have made good money because of all the stars in it I thought how could you go wrong with all those people. Sadly the endless movie waiting to see what the point that dragged on to never land. I walked out and told everyone after the first weekend it should have been called burn after watching!!!