Burn After Reading (Coen, 2008): Everyman Screen on Green, 10.30pm
This film (also screening on April 5th) is part of the 35mm Coen Brothers season at Screen on the Green. Full details here.
Time Out review:
With their hangdog mugs now nestled against the bosom of mainstream
Hollywood, indie-crossover darlings the Coen brothers have concocted
another of their Hawkesian screwball quickies in which an ensemble of
beautiful A-listers merrily play the fool. Already a hit in the US,
‘Burn After Reading’ is a snappy, confident, lightly satirical and
stridently mischievous entertainment that arrives on the back of their
sand-blasted lament for times past, ‘No Country for Old Men’. But
while the tenor may have changed, the madcap template is very much in
place. The rub: a disc containing the memoirs of recently dismissed,
mid-level CIA operative Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich at his
high-falutin, foul-mouthed best) floats into the hands of two gormless
gym employees-turned-recreational grifters, plastic surgery-obsessed
singleton Linda (Frances McDormand) and soft liberal airhead Chad (Brad Pitt,
right). After an inevitably calamitous attempt at bribery (‘We’ve got
your secret shit!’), the pair find themselves cack-handedly doorstepping
the Russian embassy in search of a swifter pay-off. Fold into that a
parallel story where George Clooney’s rubber-faced philanderer, Harry, tries to juggle semi-serious flings with Linda and Osbourne’s flamed-haired ex, Katie (Tilda Swinton).
Considering
the Coens’ past form with intricately plotted farces (‘Raising
Arizona’, ‘Fargo’, ‘The Big Lebowski’), this does feel effortless to the
point that you might imagine they could have scribbled it on the back
of a napkin between breakfast and brunch. Yet, beneath its deadpan
façade, nimble direction and robust photography (care of Emmanuel
Lubezki) lies a cheerily nihilistic (misanthropic even?) work which
paints its characters as preening, self-obsessed, idiot savants who wear
stupid clothes, habitually lie, misuse the internet for dating and
wouldn’t know a conscience from a Coke bottle. Even at their lowest ebb
(2004’s ‘The Ladykillers’) the brothers’ palpable affection for old
movies injected some humanity into the overly sardonic proceedings; but
here, even the movies are bad, as seen in their snarkily anodyne
film-within-a-film, ‘Coming Up Daisy’. The audience are, in the
end, placed in the boots of JK Simmons’s flummoxed CIA chief who, having
been nervously informed of the preceding antics, finds it tough to
fathom how these people could have been so damn stupid. It’s possibly
the Coens’ least romantic film, which makes the cynical tone a tough
pill to swallow, but chances are that you’ll be too busy hooting and
chuckling idiotically to notice.
David Jenkins
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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