CS Weekly Archive > Weekend Read > 9/12/08

The Fires of Funny

By peter clines

Proving that a few little golden statues haven't swelled their heads, Joel and Ethan Coen forgo the standard post-Oscar Holocaust movie and instead return to their roots with an absurdist comedy about espionage, athletics, and internet dating.

Burn After Reading

Joel and Ethan Coen (also directed)

Oswald Cox (John Malkovitch) is a high-strung CIA analyst who quits the agency when his security clearance gets downgraded and decides to spend all his time drinking and writing a "memwa." It's the last straw for his wife, Katie (Tilda Swinton), who makes a CD copy of all his files and finances for her divorce lawyer to go over. Katie's also been getting in some extra mattress time with Harry (George Clooney), a philandering Treasury agent who's bedding numerous women he meets through online dating services. Among these women is Linda (Frances McDormand), an employee at an upscale gym who's obsessed with her expensive plan to rebuild her body through plastic surgery, even though her smitten boss (Richard Jenkins) loves her as she is. All these storylines come together—and begin to spiral rapidly downward—when Linda's not-so-bright co-worker Chad (Brad Pitt) finds a computer CD filled with historical and financial records that seem to be tied to the CIA, and the two gym workers decide someone must be willing to pay for all this obviously high-up information. And then…well, that's when things start to get a bit silly…

A lot's changed for the Coen Brothers (No Country for Old Men) since they were crammed into a tiny editing room with a young Sam Raimi, cutting together a movie about dead folks at a deserted cabin. At heart, though, they're still two guys who like to make people laugh and think a bit, and this shows in the script for Burn After Reading. Like most of their films, the story isn't about clever plot twists or MacGuffins, it's about painfully realistic characters that audience members can relate to. In fact, the Coens admit to writing many of their roles for specific actors, and trusting that their all-star cast can bring characters to life with subtle gestures, pauses, and intonations just as well as the most exhaustive script. The man who's lost his self-defining job. The woman scared she's getting old and unattractive. The married man who still wants to play the field. The bozo from work who never got past seventeen and goes along with your scheme because he's just not smart enough to know he shouldn't. It's the ultimate mid-life crisis film, as the entirely over-40 cast of characters deals with changes at work, at home, and in bed by making very poor decisions that will impact the rest of their lives.

Linked to all those poor decisions are enough coincidences and screwball nonsense to make you laugh, but never enough that it pushes the film into slapstick. When it comes down to it, the Coen Brothers are to comedy what Stephen King is to horror. Because their stories focus on making the characters as believable as possible, we don't question it when events around those people start leaning more and more towards the absurd. Half the fun of this film is watching the snowball effect as Oswald, Linda, and Harry make assumption after assumption, and then continue to make decisions based on their complete lack of understanding about what's really going on. There probably hasn't been a film made that so effectively shows random events making a person more paranoid by the minute. In fact, J.K. Simmons almost steals the film as the CIA director/straight man who tries to make sense of the completely ridiculous situations that are being dropped on his desk.

The film isn't flawless, and it does take a while for the story to get going. Like many of the Coens' films, it depends more on a slow build rather than on hitting the standard Hollywood page counts for inciting incidents and plot points. There's also an odd but still funny climax that happens almost entirely off-camera. The loveable numbskull characters (such a pleasant shift from the embarrassing idiot who's become an American comedy standard) carry you through those scenes, however, and when the object of the script is to make people laugh, it's hard to argue with a film that does just that.

People looking for a comedy version of The Manchurian Candidate or All the President's Men might be disappointed, as politics is the smallest element in this web of sex and self-deception, but Burn After Reading still may be one of the most honestly funny films this year. The Coen Brothers once again show that comedy isn't just a lowest-common-denominator art, but one that can even people over 35 can enjoy.

Burn After Reading
Focus Features
Rated R; 97 min.

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Peter Clines has had a lifelong love affair with the movies. He grew up in New England, where he studied English literature and education, and now lives and writes somewhere in Southern California. If anyone knows exactly where, he would appreciate a few hints.



Burn After Reading courtesy Focus Features

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