written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen
USA; 2008
Just to be clear, this film is gut-busting funny, but there's something missing.
It's an antithesis to No Country, perhaps? Instead of intelligent characters perpetually out-smarting each other in a death dance of existential meaninglessness, a bunch of ninnies play a retarded intramural spy game that hardly sticks to any kind of arc whatsoever, nor does it hold any allegorical resonance. It's definitely closer to O Brother, where the stupidity of the characters is so unbelievably far-reaching that the only real option is to keep laughing. Lebowski was a masterpiece for many reasons, but chief among them was that every character's choices made perfect sense in that weirdly skewed and morally corrosive L.A., while somehow Burn After Reading's playfully domesticated Washington D.C. tropes pale in comparison to the real-life malignancy that overshadows that completely disgusting and evil city. Don't the Coens ever read the news?
There is complete freedom extended to this Hollywood A-Team, yet there is hardly a grain of respect extended to the characters themselves. McDormand's and Pitt's Linda and Chad are basically thrown to the sharks. It's funny as hell, but I think it's near impossible for any sentient humans to make such poor decisions. Malkovich drowns in a shallow pool of scripty hard luck, pulling some laughs through a parody of himself and a ubiquitous and glorious "What the fuck!?" For Swinton's Katie, there is written only one degree of cold, to which she responds with an apparent spill-over from Narnia's Ice Queen performance. This time her weapons are less mythic. Money and property are a far scarier arsenal than swords and steel, and an army of lawyers is pretty much the same thing as an army of ghouls and goblins, isn't it? Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but the smartest moments come as subtle critiques of corporate suburbia more than anything else.
Also, what's with the sex chair? To me, Linda, Harry, Harry's wife, Katie, and everyone else seem to be exhibiting healthy, and quite normal, adult sexual behavior until this strange coital eccentricity appears and has an actual significance in the story beyond its non-sequitur humor. It's probably due to the ambiguity that surrounds Harry. What is this guy all about? The Coens lobbed this complete freedom role to Clooney and he seems to have merely reprised his O Brother character, but instead of covering his selfish motivations with distracting language, he doesn't seem to have any discernible motivations whatsoever besides a serious commitment to upper-middle-class living. It's not until he shows a truly vulnerable side that any of his character information is at all interesting.
In prior Coen films, it's the character actors that really provide the magic, and not the stars. It's a Shakespeare trick, where a single line spoken by a castle guard or a peasant will often have as much resonance as all of the protagonist's subsequent stanzas. This star vehicle (because that's what it is, let's not entertain any illusions about it) allows its multiple stars nearly complete freedom to fuck around, but however funny it is, freedom ain't free. There is far too little discipline here, and once again, the most interesting performances come from the likes of J.R. Horne's divorce lawyer, Richard Jenkins' gym owner, and J.K. Simmons' CIA director. Hollywood's star system is systematized for a reason, Joel and Ethan. You can break the 180-degree line all you want but you can't F with the personality cult.
