| The Coen brothers do it again New CIA comedy Burn After Reading is bold, preposterous - and hilarious. Watch for Brad Pitt loosening up more than he has in ages.
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| BURN AFTER READING
Opens Friday
Perhaps conspired as an amusing palate cleanser for the awards sweeper that was the arch, thought-provoking adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men - as much as The Big Lebowski was a candy-coated treat for those that thought Fargo was a bit stiff - Burn After Reading sees the Coen brothers playing in a minor key.
Don't get me wrong - the Minnesota-born brothers are still operating on all cylinders and at the top of their gamse both as writers and directors, but the sprawling, contorted and preposterous dimensions to which they take their CIA comedy and its stars - George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand - is characteristically bold and old-fashioned, miraculously all at the same time. Like the Coens' other comedies, Raising Arizona, The Hudsucker Proxy, and The Big Lebowski, one foot remains in traditional '40s screwball, while the other is firmly planted in their now-established brand of peculiar, modern tweaks of the same.
It's minor key, then, in that we've seen this unlikely handling of material from the Coens before, but it remains just as startling - and as satisfying.
John Malkovich is Osborne Cox, a recently fired CIA analyst left to drift in his own presupposed profundity. Cox is writing a memoir that no one will ever want to read, especially his cold-hearted wife, played with icy coolness by Tilda Swinton. She's having an affair with Clooney's Harry Pfarrer, a man obsessed with the particulars of hardwood floors, and whose good looks mask his ineptitude at just about everything. McDormand and Pitt are fellow employees at fitness palace Hardbodies, the former going beyond usual vanity, intent on undergoing four procedures to lift, tuck, and slice into the excess weight around her close-to-40-year-old body. When the staff discovers a disc encoded with what they believe to be secretive CIA material (in actuality, Cox's memoirs), Pitt and McDormand attempt to blackmail Cox into submission. Where the plot goes from here is anything but predictable, but the conflicts and infidelities sure do pile up.
Both Clooney and Pitt shamelessly mug, with Pitt not being this carefree in his loosening of body language since 1991's Johnny Suede, jiving to the dance music piping in from his iPod. His innocence is easily corruptible, but it's never identified exactly what he wants in return, and in the end, it's hilarious enough to witness his lack of vocabulary when dealing with his well-spoken foe Malkovich.
Character faces jut out in almost every scene, but most commendable is Richard Jenkins as Hardbodies' fearful manager Ted Treffon. His unrequited feelings for McDormand are never explicitly front-and-centre, but his pained facial expressions are enough - portraying his torment excruciatingly well.
Coens-regular J.K. Simmons turns up in two scenes as a CIA higher-up rationalizing everything that's been going on under his nose. His pithy last comments act almost as a mock retort for No Country's divisive ending, and its audience reaction.
— Aaron Graham |
Uptown
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