Burn after screening

The Coens’ latest is a disappointing
follow-up to No Country for Old Men

by MARK SLUTSKY

I think we were all hoping that when Joel and Ethan Coen pulled No Country for Old Men out of their sleeves, it would mark a return to form for the unquestionably brilliant, but erratic filmmaking siblings. No Country was so perfect, it demonstrated such control of their craft, that it seemed like maybe they would put their period of really bad comedies (Intolerable Cruelty, The Ladykillers) behind them.

No such luck. Burn After Reading, their latest, is exactly the kind of star-studded, dizzy and weirdly lazy comedy these guys just keep insisting on making. It’s a movie that feels more like a series of private jokes than the satiric thriller that it purports to be. Sometimes the Coens’ “Wouldn’t it be funny if…” sensibility pays off, as with most of The Big Lebowski, but Burn After Reading is just more diminishing returns.

Set in Washington, D.C., the film opens with CIA agent Osborne Cox (a very angry and, it must be said, entertaining John Malkovich) losing his job due to alcoholism and what looks like a congenital inability to be a team player. Despite the scoffing of his ice-cold wife (Tilda Swinton), who herself is having an affair with treasury agent George Clooney, Malkovich starts writing his memoirs, only to lose a disc of vital notes in a local health club.

Those notes are then seized by dimwitted employees Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand, the latter whom needs money for plastic surgery and who figures she can pass it to the Russians for the necessary bucks. As this is a Coen brothers film, the ill-thought-out scheming of these ambitious dimwits ends in chaos and violence.

There’s something admirable, sure, in the guys’ stubborn refusal to take themselves seriously—they made Lebowski right after Fargo, and now this follows No Country—but the movie isn’t funny or thrilling enough by far. The writing seems distracted, as if they couldn’t be bothered to tie up the plot’s loose ends, or really, concoct a strong enough plot to justify their few sort-of funny ideas in the first place. A disappointment, though they’re still likely to surprise us with another masterpiece sooner or later.

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