|
|
Burn After Reading
What did we learn?
2008
Review: September 30, 2008
Director: Joel and Ethan Cohen
Starring: George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, John Malkovich
May help loosen your mind up to an appropriate degree.
THE SETUP:
Bunch of wacky shit happens, centering around a loss of possibly-important state secrets.
DISCUSSION:
Okay, so let’s get out of the way that you are not going to walk out of this movie going “Holy Shit! That was fucking amazing!” as you often do when emerging from Cohen Brothers movies. There are a lot of expectations for this movie, based on the filmmakers coming off the incredible No Country for Old Men, everyone’s late appreciation for The Big Lebowski [it got terrible reviews when it was out, btw], and the fact that it looks like it will be a scathing satire of our current high-surveillance/heavy-idiocy national situation. So it’s easy to have a lot of expectations for this, and easy to be let down by it, but I think if you can just try to get what you can from what’s there, it may be more rewarding than it initially seems.
The movie opens looking down from space, and zooms in until we are in some government office, where John Malkovich as Osbourne [Oz] Cox is being fired because of his drinking problem. He comes home to his wife, Tilda Swinton as hilarious uber-frozen-bitch Katie, who won’t let him get the news out because she’s screeching about how he didn’t pick up the cheeses, then later blames him for not telling her. She is fucking George Clooney as Harry, who is married to a nice children’s book writer. Katie plans to divorce Oz, and her lawyer advises her to download Oz’s complete financial information before she files. She and Harry plan to get married once he also divorces his wife, which he feels bad about.
Then, at the Hardbodies gym, Frances McDormand as Linda and Brad Pitt as Chad happen upon a disc of Oz’s information that they take to be sensitive state secrets. The reason Chad thinks it’s so important is that it’s a bunch of numbers he doesn’t understand. Before this, we have seen Linda at the plastic surgeon, as he outlines four procedures that will make her a “new woman” and hence equal a long-lasting relationship. When Chad hits upon the idea to blackmail Oz to get his information back, she sees this as a way to finance her operations.
The trailers pull that particular thread out as the dominant story of the film, but it really only serves as an excuse to set the story in motion. This is what sets the film up for disappointment, as if you’re waiting for that story to develop, your eyes are not looking where the action is. The action is with the characters, and the portrait of our current national psyche that they collectively paint.
SPOILERS > > >
Let’s take Linda. She in convinced that no one could possibly love her as she is, but will as soon as she gets plastic surgery. What this means is that she completely negates the value of her personality or intellect, and sees her value to another human being only as a physical property. She is on various dating/hooking-up websites, where she in turn judges others solely on their looks. She meets these people in a park, and the movie contains several scenes of her slowly walking by people sitting on benches, her eagerly evaluating each of them, and each of them perhaps waiting to meet someone as well, hoping that this one will be different, will mean something, will be the one. She has a date with a guy who she’s not totally thrilled with, and sleeps with him. In the middle of the night she sneaks into the living room of her tacky, cookie-cutter apartment and looks through his wallet. There she finds—hilariously sad—a 7-11 Gift Card and a note from his wife. Meanwhile, her manager at the gym is trying to convince her that she’s fine as she is, and in fact he’s in love with her. She doesn’t even listen.
The other main figure is Harry. He is sleeping around with several women [after which he compulsively needs to go jogging], including Linda. He is also the only one in the film who shows any concern for the feelings of other people. He shows Linda the present for his wife that he’s been secretly working on in his basement. It is a chair in which someone can rock, and trigger a dildo to come up between their legs. It is funny, but also unbearably sad, as he is making it to offer to his wife, but it is something that will replace HIM. It is as though he wants to hang on to his wife, and is willing to make himself a sideline participant in their love life, so long as he can be involved in some way. When circumstances get really bad, he calls his wife and begs her to come home. He says her present is ready and he’d love to give it to her. She says she can’t, and she doesn’t offer for him to come stay with her. Soon he is served with divorce papers. This woman he thought was completely devoted to him and would be crushed by his leaving her, is in fact leaving him. Harry seems physically crushed by the news, and goes home to smash her present in a heartbroken rage.
Meanwhile, everyone else is acting out of self-interest, with nary a thought to anyone else. Linda and Chad never think about what their extortion plan might do to Oz, and we never find out what Chad might want to do with any potential windfall—it’s all about Linda and her operation. Katie seizes all of Oz’s assets and locks him out of his own house. Katie’s niceness to Harry is over the moment they are officially together, and in a hilarious moment, she hammers the table with her fingers as she says “I! Don’t! Hammer!” Everyone is trying to get something for themselves, as though whatever it is will make all the difference. There is a line toward the end that brings this movie into line as a contemporary extension of No Country for Old Men, as one character expresses the utter futility of all effort, as the world and its inhabitants are so awful—but of course so much was going on I neglected to write the exact line down. < < < SPOILERS END
The plot is wrapped up in a way that resolves nothing. At one point Oz faces someone invading his home and says “You represent the idiocy of today. You are part of the league of morons,” which sums up his bitter accounting of humanity. Soon after the intelligence officials reviewing the case ask in bewilderment “So what did we learn?” There is no apparent answer, and the camera zooms back out to space, looking down on the entire country, as though to say we’ve been examining just a tiny fragment of the vast league of morons.
This isn’t something you walk out of saying “That was great!” in part because one is primed, based on trailers and expectations, to be looking over here, while the real action of the movie is over there. The espionage plot if just a grand MacGuffin that sets in motion this ensemble portrait of a disconnected, desperate, busy but heartbroken society. I guess the film this most reminded me of was Ghost World, in that it uses its "story" to draw a portrait of a desperate, disconnected society. Rather than being just an expectation-resetting piffle after the seriousness of No Country for Old Men, this is a loose, comic, modern extension.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
I think so, but truth be told it’ll hold up fine on video.
