Oct 08 2008
Burn After Reading
After two poorly received films, Intolerable Cruelty & Ladykillers, the Coen Brothers came back with 2007’s winner of the Best Motion Picture at the Academy Awards, No Country for Old Men. Many heralded this as the return to form everyone was waiting for, a clever thriller, well written, casted, and performed. It toyed with genre conventions (a hallmark for the duo, no doubt) and was cinematically interesting (due in no small part to the cinematography of Roger Deakins).
The initial buzz for their recent Burn After Reading was all positive. It totes an impressive cast including Tilda Swinton, George Clooney, John Malkovich, Brad Pitt, and Frances McDormand. It also returns to their more latent genre play, which was less present in No Country for Old Men. Yet Burn After Reading reveals a Coen Brothers who should not “return to form.” The genre play is beginning to feel forced and less insightful than it has in their classics like Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, or O’ Brother Where Art Thou?.
While Deakins would deny it, his cinematography has become an integral part of the look of a Coen Brothers film. Not since Barton Fink have the Coen Brothers worked without him behind the camera. Burn lacks the deep focus and outward glances of Deakin’s camera. While Emmanuel Lubezki is a brilliant cinematographer (Children of Men still stands as one of the greatest achievements in cinematography of recent years) he feels like the wrong man for the film. The tight frames and less than coy backward glances at the spy thriller genre are less engaging than Deakins more static images. Though, this is by no means the film’s greatest problem.
The film doesn’t function in part because of a script that goes nowhere, and proposes to be meta at the end as way out of the hole it has dug (which doesn’t work), and the performances are less than adequate for the huge cast it flaunts. While it would be easy to say there are possibly “too many cooks in the kitchen,” the real issue with the performances is that no one is authentic. All of the actors play themselves, or characters they are frequently cast as. The skin deep portrayals belie the power of a cast of today’s best actors and actresses. Albeit, this is an unfair criticism, to say that they could do better and not judge it at face value. If this were a film from a cast of unknowns, and helmed by a debut director, it may be judged differently, but I’m going to pull this move one more time before I’m done here.
Overall, the film is funny, it’s not a flop, George Clooney fighting the homemade dildo-machine is hysterical. But there is so little insight into the genre and into the process, as there usually is in Coen Brothers film; we’ve come to expect more from them. The film is a surface level comedy that lacks the ability to pull itself into the social commentary and genre parody it seems capable of. It instead falls closer to a film like Epic Movie or any of the films from that series, that don’t go beyond pure genre parody. Sure, this has a plot, but it doesn’t come together, and there attempt in the final frames to make sense of the film by allowing that it really doesn’t make sense doesn’t make any sense.
