I'm getting harder to entertain, especially in the genre of spy movies. But the Coen Brothers' latest film is still entertaining.
There's something really deeply missing in this film. The premise is great. Have a story about a farcical number of love triangles, as with the French classic 'La Ronde' (and there was an episode of Seinfeld following that too.) and mix it with a spy thriller. So you get one fired spy dude whose memoirs kick off a comedy of errors so convoluted that the CIA itself cannot figure what's going on. What a brilliant idea.
It's too bad that this film is so chock full of stars that it doesn't quite work, each of them mugging it up on the screen not being funny. Brad Pitt has maybe one funny line in the entire movie. I can't remember what it was. George Clooney plays a great character but I kept finding myself staring at his beard to see if it was real. Why the closeups in a comedy if the guy's not being funny? I wanted this movie to be a lot more hilarious than it was - it seems that the Brothers have lost their comic timing altogether. In every way that No Country was slowly paced, I can see the Coens wanting something light and rompy, but this one just falls apart.
What's missing from this film is the intelligence of the fools. What made Blood Simple and Raising Arizona so gawdafully funny, as well as Fargo when it was, had everything to do with the utter absurdity of people who were actually smarter than you might think, getting themselves into impossibly complex and desperate situations. This time, everybody in the film, well the ones we spend the most time on is played as an idiot, Pitt especially - taking up entirely too much share of the screen.
Frances McDormand and John Malkovitch save this from being a real stinker. McDormand, in a measured yet manic performance manages in a couple excellent scenes to convey a sense of female midlife desperation in an extraordinary way. Malkovitch explodes with apoplectic rage, frustration and condescention. Those two alone generate all the dramatic tension in the film.
The biggest problem with this film is that there were too many stars, and they all lived too long in the film. More dead bodies and more unknown actors would have made the deadpan required of Coen's script work better. But if you had to use big names, then Brad Pitt should have been Owen Wilson and George Clooney should have been Ben Stiller. On the other hand, maybe Burn After Reading proves once and for all that only Guy Ritchie can do Guy Ritchie, with the exception of Woody Allen's 'Small Time Crooks'.
Recent Comments