Burn After Reading, the new Coen Brothers movie, plays like the comedy mirror to their own No Country for Old Men, with a dash of The Big Lebowski thrown in for good measure. A group of dimwitted personal trainers (Frances McDormand, Brad Pitt, and Richard Jenkins) discover a disk in their gym with what looks to be secret CIA files on it. The disk belongs to Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), who doesn't even know that it is missing (or that the disk of information even exists), so when the personal trainers contact him in order to collect a reward of some sort, things turn sour and all hell breaks loose. What follows is mayhem, death, a few laughs, and a morally ambiguous ending. Pretty much what you'd expect from the Coens.If you've been keeping track, you probably remember that I was not the biggest fan of their Oscar winning picture from last year. I came to appreciate it as time wore on, but it is not the classic many might have you believe. Which is a shame because I really love these guys and their offbeat filmography. On paper, Burn After Reading looks like a return to familiar territory for the brothers. Viewing the film, however, it became slowly apparent that this was not going to be the knockout that so many of their earlier films were. Indeed, by film's end I was a bit disappointed. Not overwhelmingly so, thankfully, but enough to make me a bit sad. Will the Coens ever achieve the same lofty heights they hit with Fargo, Lebowski, Barton Fink, and others?
The film starts off surprisingly slowly, introducing us to all the players. This is problem number one: there are too many characters at the outset, and too few are immediately interesting. Cox and his wife Katie (Tilda Swinton) take up a good majority of the opening scenes, yet they have very little spark to their characters. They are two bitter, angry people that you would not expect a comedy to be centered around. Thankfully just when you think you can't take any more of these two George Clooney shows up to brighten things up a bit. His Harry is a twitchy, odd duck. Cheating on his wife with Katie, he also cruises the internet looking for other woman to fool around with. He is a fun character, but for a long time we don't understand why he is even in the film. After a good twenty or thirty minutes we are finally introduced to the Hardbodies employees, and this is when the film finally takes off.
McDonrmand is a ball of energy as Linda, a woman who just wants a couple simple procedures done to make her appearance better. Discovering the secret disk may be exactly the ticket she needs in order to pay for those procedures. The true revelation is Pitt, an actor who rarely disappoints but is especially great here in what is easily his funniest role. Pitt plays Chad, a man who takes dimwittedness to rarely seen levels. His attempts to negotiate with Cox over the return of the disk fail repeatedly, yet he can never understand why. Chad feels almost like he is from a different movie, especially when he is interacting with the dry Malkovich, and as he cuts a swath through the story he leaves behind nothing but charm and laughs. Sad that he has relatively small screen time compared to the rest of the cast - a few more scenes with him would have gone a long way, especially early on.
The film has a strong climax, and the abundance of characters makes sense by the end, but that opening half is far too slow and dull. Also, I suspect many might be annoyed by the glib, offhanded way the film is concluded, making the loose ends of No Country seem like nothing. When this film does hit the right notes, it can be very funny. Yet it is not nearly funny enough, nor as interesting and insightful as most of the Coen Brother's previous films. It all adds up to a lot of nothing. I know the Coens had some purpose to this darkly misanthropic comedy, yet I can not figure out what it is. My silver lining is that a some of their films have failed to impress me upon early viewings, only to expand with passing time - even No Country. I suspect a second viewing here will illuminate some of the subtler points and make me appreciate what felt like an otherwise malformed film. But until that second viewing, all I am left with is a film that came close to being good but just missed that mark.
