Burn After Reading

Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand in Burn After Reading (dir. Ethan and Joel Coen, 2008).

When the Coen Brothers are in top form, as they are in their new CIA comedy Burn After Reading and last year's No Country for Old Men, it makes you wonder how they can ever do wrong. And in fact, even their relative misfires--dizzy pastiche like The Hudsucker Proxy, brittle noir like The Man Who Wasn't There, throwaway fluff like The Ladykillers--offer the viewer more intelligent visual and verbal stimulation than most other mainstream films. One of their most impressive achievements is not repeating themselves morally. More precisely, no two Coen Brothers films have the exact same moral weight, though each one has a measure that seems careful and exact.

By "moral" and "moral weight," I don't mean anything as crude as a "message." I'm thinking of more of a quantifiable ratio: a ratio of moral actions foregrounded or downplayed, emotions evoked or withheld, attitudes implied or occluded. The formula for this ratio is usually complex rather than simple, and when it is simpler, the movie is generally pitched as whimsical fantasy (Raising Arizona, Hudsucker, O Brother, Where Art Thou?). One constant or near-constant in the formula concerns the fates of the innocent, and the amount of investment in those fates the directors permit us. Depending on how it is handled, the deployment of this theme can make for tragic seriousness or comic sadism, or--most interestingly and most often--some degree of both. Even in No Country, which must be the brothers' most straight-faced dramatic production to date, the wiping of blood off a shoe confuses our trained responses, making us process horrified sadness and wry wit in the same instance.

Burn After Reading is never anything but farce, in the sense that its characters are satirical puppets. This is as true of the "sympathetic" ones as the ogres and buffoons. Or, the point is, everyone is an ogre and/or a buffoon, even the most blameless ones (including Claire Danes and Dermot Mulroney, if you can call them characters). How on earth can you care about these people? That's part of the Coens' genius in this film: you don't, but it all still works. You may find yourself hoping that certain characters fare better than others, but usually only provisionally, within the confined logic of a single scene or sequence. In No Country, the mortal consequences are felt deeply, though even there they are felt through a certain filter, an ironizing layer of textuality. In Reading, these consequences are occasion for sport, for loud belly laughter, even if it comes with a guilty hesitation. It's as funny as anything the Coens have ever done, but it's probably their most agressively nihilistic film. I'm sure many other viewers will make this same observation, but the reference point I kept returning to was Dr. Strangelove. This is most obvious in the parts that take place behind closed doors at Langley (especially the two brilliant short scenes with J.K. Simmons as a cynical superior officer), but the tone of schadenfreude throughout is of the same nervous timbre, down to the shaky sixties lettering and graphics on the movie poster. Accordingly, the global zoom-in/zoom-out visuals that frame the film seem like more than just a convenient cinematic cliche: with the accompaniment of Carter Burwell's urgent, drum-driven score, they extend the joke to something sublimely large and cruel.

No Country for Old Men

Josh Brolin in No Country for Old Men (dir. Ethan Coen & Joel Coen, 2007).

One of the things I like about No Country for Old Men is that, unlike with the majority of major studio releases, my first response is not to think about what its ideological unconscious is. I mean, I'm sure that it has one--that it, like all entertainment, signifies meaningfully as a symptom--but there is so much going on with narrative, character, framing, and so on that my mind is still not through with it just at that level. It sustains its appeal for the part of me that continues to be fascinated with classical filmic craft.

And yet, even acknowledging that the film affected me this strongly, I still have reservations. I'm surprised by how much I really just want a crime story to behave like a conventional machine. I'm surprised by how much I want narrative closure. The movie works beautifully up to the last few minutes in large part because of how it keeps making you readjust your expectations. Expectations, that is, with regard to plot. Then, however (as many reviewers have remarked approvingly), at the very last second, it makes you readjust your expectations with regard to what kind of story it is. And in a way, it's stunning how successfully the Coens pull this off. The problem is that I may finally prefer the story I thought it was at first.

The story it first seems to be is a well-oiled genre vehicle: a series of discoveries, murders, thefts, pursuits, close calls, confrontations, turnabouts, fakeouts. The story it turns out to be is a "probing psychological drama" or something. It's at the point that this story emerges that the full weight of the title manifests itself. And that's too bad, because I pretty much think Yeats is insufferably ponderous. From what I've read (which I'll admit isn't much) I've generally had the same impression of Cormac McCarthy, to whose novel I understand the film is exceedingly faithful. So I'm finally torn between being impressed that McCarthy had all this fine pulp action in his imagination, and disappointed that he finally succumbed to his more "literary" pretensions. I wish he had given up around the last chapter or so and let Elmore Leonard or Donald Westlake finish it.

Part of the reason it's so pleasing to be thrown for so many narrative curves is that it increases your anticipation of that final curve: the twist that will bring the entire fictive mechanism in for a landing. Some landing, any landing. When it is suddenly announced at the last moment that hey, we're not playing that game after all, we're playing this other game, all that built-up suspense feels like a haughty charade. It's as if you are being set up by the storytellers, made to look like a philistine for being invested in the genre you were led to believe you were enjoying.

The bulk of the movie is so good, however, that I can't help but recommend it enthusiastically.