Burn After Reading

Comedy is a fickle thing. Just ask the Coen brothers. Possessing an incredible ability to craft crackling thrillers with a darkly comic attitude, the talented siblings seem lost when faced with the challenge of executing a purely comedic movie. Suddenly, the story is a wandering mess with various types of gags and profanity-fuelled outbursts enacted by flat and irritating characters. The whole point of the story is that there is no point and all of the jokes are delivered with such an obvious wink at the audience that the Coen's might as well employ a laugh track.

The brothers' approach to comedy has not matured or changed at all, as evidenced by their latest effort to spin inane silliness into quotable gold. Burn After Reading is a disjointed ensemble piece about idiot people stumbling into awkwardly dangerous situations. In other words, it's the same kind of comedy movie that the Coen Brothers have been making their entire careers. While they sharpened their creative skills with last year's devastating, haunting Oscar winner No Country for Old Men, they have now returned to their lazy, snickering ways with this unnecessary tale of morons partaking in moronic activities.

Reteaming with George Clooney (now in slimy mode) for the third time, the Coen brothers have also added a goofy Brad Pitt to the mix, as well as an angry John Malkovich, a hapless Frances McDormand, and an icy Tilda Swinton. The fact that each character can be easily summed up with the use of a single adjective should be a clear sign of how shallow this movie is. It doesn't help that each actor has been assigned a character that feels like a mere parody of the roles they've played before, serving only to lower their performances to the level of tired shtick.

The plot is thin and twisty, concerning itself with the misplaced memoirs of disgraced CIA agent Osborne Cox (Malkovich). Choosing to quit his job rather than face a demotion, Cox is on the verge of a breakdown. He begins his memoirs and saves the work in progress on a disc that ends up in the locker room of a local fitness gym. The disc falls into the hands of Chad and Linda (Pitt and McDormand), two idiot employees of the gym who believe they have stumbled upon top secret information. Because Linda needs money for a multitude of cosmetic surgeries she so desperately wants and because Chad is just a complete idiot, the pair decides to blackmail Cox, offering up the disc for a large sum of money. Of course, this is a Coen Brothers comedy, so everything goes horribly awry and several additional characters are introduced for no better reason than to increase the scope of the idiotic canvas.

When the Coen brothers apply themselves, they craft characters of astonishing depth and personality, such as in Fargo and The Man Who Wasn't There. In the case of Fargo, the characters are essentially a collection of dimwits in a very dangerous situation. On paper, the setup is not that far off from Burn After Reading or other misguided, unfunny efforts like O Brother, Where Art Thou? But the difference is that, despite the simple nature of the characters in Fargo and the dark comic spine that stretches across the entire narrative, the Coen Brothers treat the characters with respect. As a result, they remain focused on the story and avoid the temptation to take mean-spirited jabs at the characters. With the majority of their comedies, the approach is entirely different, because they not only give into the temptation, but go so far as to bathe in the possibilities. They attach a God-like omniscience to the narrative and ignore the story in favour of pushing the characters into increasingly impossible situations and then laughing at them when they fail to escape. There is such arrogance in how they attempt to achieve their goal that an emotional investment in the story becomes a futile effort at best. As audience members, why should we care about the characters when the people manipulating them hate them so much already?

The Coen brothers must be the most self-congratulatory filmmaking pair currently working. They seem to love rewarding themselves for their past achievements by sitting back, relaxing, and pathetically masterminding soulless nonsense like this. When you look at their filmography, you will see that for every Blood Simple, there is an O Brother, Where Are Thou?, for every Fargo, there is an Intolerable Cruelty, and now, for every No Country for Old Men, there is a Burn After Reading. It is like a sports star following every game-winning performance with a display of public urination. To be fair, the aforementioned movie pairs were not all released consecutively. The filmography of the Coens fails to follow such a preordained pattern. But the point remains that in the puzzling careers of these talented brothers, there is as much to lambaste as there is to celebrate.

The single small pleasure of Burn After Reading is found in listening to Carter Burwell's gently foreboding musical score. Burwell's music is often a perfect fit for the Coen's dark sensibilities and his score here at least attempts to heighten the movie's tone. Unfortunately, the score deserves a much better movie, one that can truly dance along with the deep and dangerous notes that punctuate this work.

Burn After Reading ends abruptly in a way that is supposed to seal the joke, but instead only illuminates how needlessly empty this whole lazy exercise is. If excising this trash from their system is the only way the Coens can create such grand art as No Country for Old Men, then perhaps they need to find a way to modify their creative process. They are as frustrating in their inconsistency as they are undeniably brilliant when at the top of their game. As someone who respects them and admires their unique abilities, I can only hope that there is some method to this madness.