By Greg Oguss
The best suggestion I know of for how to stay on top as an auteur in Hollywood comes from Martin Scorsese, whose advice is, “You make one for them and one for you.” In other words, for every Cape Fear-style commercial product you churn out, you’re allowed one idiosyncratic Last Temptation of Christ for the cineastes to chew over. Once in a while, the idiosyncratic offering becomes a hit, resulting in a zeitgeist film like Taxi Driver or Pulp Fiction, which is how a director typically reaches auteur status in the first place. The Coen Brothers reached auteur status by slowly building up a huge cult following with fan faves like O Brother Where Art Thou and The Big Lebowski. Following their Oscar triumph with No Country for Old Men, a film which took on weighty themes and hit with the mainstream, they had as much capital to burn as George Bush just prior to the Iraq Invasion. With Burn After Reading, they’ve spent that capital about as wisely as Dubya.
Ironically, Burn After Reading is a would-be comic exposé of the Bush-Cheney era with a healthy No Country hang-over. Its kinship with dramatic films like Syriana partially accounts for its slack pacing and dour mood. The story is the standard political thriller mix of coincidences, romantic entanglements and double-crosses, with a mislaid computer disk of government files setting in motion a blackmail plot that goes astray and results in violence which harms the innocent as well as the guilty, a standard Coens theme that’s become both repetitive and obvious in their films but has reaped Oscar rewards in Fargo and No Country for Old Men. The computer disk belongs to a downsized CIA analyst named Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) and it falls into the possession of a hapless pair of personal trainers named Linda Litsky (Frances McDormand) and Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt).
The goofy names that function as indicators of each character’s class position should clue you in to the weighty theme the Coens have on their mind. It’s an old-fashioned social problem film about how Everything That’s Wrong with America is affecting different classes and genders. This includes effete Princeton brats like Cox and his stuck-up pediatrician wife, played as a castrating bitch by Tilda Swinton, as well as the folksy commoners like Linda, Chad and their pals down at the gym. If the goofy names don’t clue you in, the over-the-top performances will, with the film frequently descending to a bunch of A-listers barking and mugging in an attempt to upstage each other. George Clooney leads with his chin and his hard-on as Harry Pfarrer, a neurotic U.S. Marshall who screws anything that moves. His performance recalls William Powell in the Thin Man comedies as well as the badly-received Katharine Hepburn impression Jennifer Jason Leigh did in The Hudsucker Proxy which sunk that film’s fortunes. The stand-out in the cast is Brad Pitt, whose dumb hottie act has been money in the bank since Thelma and Louise. Most of the funniest lines are his, such as when a Russian spy asks, “You are not ideological?” and, with no idea what this means, he stutters out, “I don’t…think so.”
The film’s humor revolves around how sucky life is in the digital age. Even that Russian spy is dealing with PC vs. Mac headaches. The mental anguish about modern life comes from all characters regardless of race, class or gender, save Pitt’s pleasingly upbeat moron, who gets the worst of the violence on account of what Linda terms his “can-do” attitude. Linda’s unsuccessful attempts at internet-dating, her fights with customer service people, and her explanation of “I know, I have to isolate, you know, firewall!” when things go wrong just aren’t very lol. On the other end of the economic spectrum, Osborne also deals with those annoying customer service operators, blowing up over the impossibility of remembering a zillion security passwords. After being downsized, Osborne’s life goes into a tailspin. He ends up tangled up with the “morons” and their “idiocy” as he constantly refers to Linda, Chad and their manager at the gym. The climax finds Osborne going on a violent spree against the “morons” reminiscent of Fargo’s Jerry Lundegaard, who also struck back at the “idiocy” of life to achieve the self-respect he was lacking in another blackmail plot that went awry. In Fargo, Jerry’s associate couldn’t find a wood-chipper efficient enough to dispose of the evidence of their crimes. In Burn After Reading’s final scene, the CIA boss who’s been receiving reports on the mess caused by his ex-analyst Osborne, asks, “Well, what have we learned?” He answers his own question glibly, “Not to do it again, I suppose,” admitting he doesn’t know what they did in the first place. Actually, a more intelligent and self-conscious villain would’ve made for a more delicious film, along the lines of Thank You for Smoking. But it’s also unnecessary to reveal what they did wrong because the point has been hammered home for audiences familiar with all those anti-Iraq films, which suggest that in the Bush-Cheney era, the CIA is the perfectly efficient wood-chipper. Much like in those films, in Burn After Reading, the CIA has been disposing of the bodies and cleaning up the mess created by the “clowns.”
There’s a somewhat sour taste in being asked to swallow a comedy about how terrible life is in the 21st century from a pair of multimillionaire auteurs while the co-director’s wife mugs her way through another kindhearted Jane Doe role on her way to a fat payday. The best auteur films, like Taxi Driver or Raging Bull, come from a director’s own experience but strike a chord with large numbers of audiences. Conceivably, most viewers can identify with Burn’s broad rant against against downsizing, money-hungry HMOs, the evils of the internet and the CIA’s disregard for human life. But the film’s potshots at these easy targets mostly sail wide of the mark.
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