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A Juicy Role For Brad Pitt | Everyone’s favourite heartthrob plays a slow-witted blackmailer in Burn After Reading.

BURN AFTER READING
Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. Starring George Clooney, Frances McDormand, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton, Brad Pitt. Opens Fri, Sept 12.
*** 1/2

It was less than a year ago that Joel and Ethan Coen released No Country for Old Men, the sombre, Oscar-winning adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel that many critics regarded as their masterpiece. Their followup, Burn After Reading, has, if anything, an even more illustrious cast — George Clooney, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, Richard Jenkins — but this one is a much goofier, light-hearted affair.

The premise is a classic Coen bumbling-criminal scenario: a pair of gym employees (McDormand and Pitt) discover a computer disc belonging to a disgruntled former CIA analyst (Malkovich), and decide to blackmail him for the return of his “highly sensitive shit.” But their plan, inevitably, goes awry, with McDormand’s new boyfriend (Clooney), Malkovich’s unhappy wife (Swinton) and McDormand and Pitt’s boss at the gym (Jenkins) all complicating matters, both wittingly and unwittingly, while a pair of senior CIA supervisors try, without much success, to make sense of the ever-growing mess.

SEE film editor Paul Matwychuk and SEE film reviewer Michael Hingston both attended a screening of Burn After Reading last week and sat down immediately afterward to share their thoughts.

Paul: What were your expectations going into this movie?

Michael: Well, I suppose the trailers led us both to expect a sort of light, funny shoot-’em-up coming after their dark masterpiece No Country for Old Men. So the big question was whether this light, throwaway movie would get panned by critics hoping they’d do something as weighty as No Country for Old Men.

We were both talking before the movie about how this reminded us of when the Coens followed up their earlier Oscar-winning film Fargo with The Big Lebowski.

Paul: Right, because when it came out, The Big Lebowski did not get great reviews — it was regarded as this rambling disappointment, whereas now it’s probably the Coens’ most beloved movie. Do you think a similar fate awaits Burn After Reading?

Michael: Well, I don’t think there’ll be any conventions built around this one. I might as well state on the record here that I despise The Big Lebowski. I think it’s every bit as posturing and hollow a comedy as those critics originally said it was. I’m sure I’ll receive plenty of hate mail for saying that...

Paul: Of course you will, because you’re completely wrong. The Big Lebowski is awesome. But go on — make your larger point.

Michael: Sure. My larger point is that Burn After Reading seems like a far more effective kind of palate-cleanser, particularly after all of those claustrophobic scenes in motel rooms and intense, nail-biting chase sequences in No Country for Old Men. Here, they do that comic trick of having everyone taking something very seriously when in fact the stakes are quite minimal — in fact, you could argue that in this movie, the stakes are nonexistent.

Paul: It’s a favourite Coen Brothers tactic, to have a whole lot of complicated action and plotting and counterplotting and violence take place over nothing: in Fargo, it’s a fake kidnapping, in The Big Lebowski, it’s a fake kidnapping and a fake ransom payment, in Miller’s Crossing, the murder that sets everything in motion is a random accident. But I had an odd reaction to Burn After Reading: I laughed at it, and I really admired the deft plotting and the way the Coens juggle a whole lot of balls at once, but at the same time, there’s something kind of heartless and mechanical about the whole thing. It feels a bit like a screenwriting exercise and nothing more — they don’t really seem to care about the fates of any of the characters and the ending especially has a kind of cold, indifferent quality to it.

Michael: Yeah, the movie ends with a character closing a file folder, and you can almost picture the Coens putting their pens down at the end of the screenplay or closing their laptop screens. It’s very self-contained. But while I agree with you that that last moment is fairly mechanical, I still thought that the movie as a whole is a joy to watch. The way they pile on the miscommunications and have the characters all operating on partial information really makes it work as a chaotic movie, although it does take about half an hour to get going.

Paul: That’s certainly true. Its tone is much more tamped-down than, say, Raising Arizona. The characters are older, their emotions are a little more bottled up, the colours are a lot less garish. And there aren’t any over-the-top “virtuoso Coen Brothers setpieces” in this one either. Which is fine — it’s a different kind of movie.

Michael: The movie’s stance toward its characters is a little unexpected, too. When you hear the Coens are doing a movie that involves the CIA, you kind of expect that some kind of bumbling agency bureaucracy is going to be one of the factors complicating the story. But the twist in Burn After Reading is that the people in the CIA, without exception, are the smartest people in the film — certainly smarter than the people working in the gym. The highest-ranking guy in the movie is the guy played by J.K. Simmons, and he’s the smartest person in the movie.

Paul: And that left me feeling a little uneasy, especially the way they treat Frances McDormand’s character. In Fargo, McDormand’s character was easy to dismiss at first too, this pregnant sheriff with the funny accent who eats greasy, deep-fried fast food and waddles around the crime scene. But by the end of the movie, you see that she’s actually pretty sharp, and she’s become this really admirable figure — the moral centre of the movie. In Burn After Reading, McDormand plays this not-too-bright, fairly shallow woman — the only reason she participates the blackmail scheme in the first place is to raise money for some cosmetic surgery. I think we’re supposed to see her as pathetic, and nothing that happens in the movie ever changes that view. Even late in the film, when Clooney, this guy she really likes, abruptly breaks up with her, that ought to be kind of a heartbreaking moment. But the Coens don’t film it that way.

Michael: Yeah, instead they play up Clooney’s spooked expressions as he suddenly thinks everyone around them is a spy. I don’t know if I was bothered by the tone of the film to the extent you were — it’s just such a slick, well-put-together movie and the actors are so much fun to watch — but I recognize that it doesn’t really have any larger connection to the world. What did I learn about the world or human nature from this film? Not much.

Paul: Maybe this is a good springboard to talk about the actors. Who were the standout performers for you?

Michael: I really liked the contrast between John Malkovich and Brad Pitt. Malkovich is only 10 years older than Pitt, but they really push the age difference as far as it can go — Malkovich has no hair, he’s grey, he’s drinking like an old man, and Pitt looks like he’s supposed to be in his mid-20s.

Paul: It’s really amazing — he’s 45 years old and yet he’s completely convincing as this dimbulb twentysomething personal trainer. I think Pitt’s a terrific actor, and a lot funnier than he gets credit for.

Michael: He really nails this part — the way he punches the air, with the iPod earbuds permanently lodged in his ears. And he’s great in the scene where he meets with Malkovich and tries so hard to pretend he has leverage over him, only to have Malkovich quickly make it clear he has none at all. Pitt affects this menacing squint throughout the scene, but there are three or four times where you see him slowly forget and then suddenly remember to start squinting again. That seemed like genuine acting to me, in the best sense of the word.

Paul: That’s a nice bit. And I hope I haven’t sounded too negative, because the movie is filled with truly enjoyable stuff. There’s something violent that happens to one of the characters midway through the film that’s a genuine shock. And the scene where we finally get to see what it is that Clooney is building in his basement is really hilarious. I think it’s safe to say that neither of us saw that one coming.

Michael: It’s true. And the hints he drops along the way — it’s homemade, it costs less than $100, he got the inspiration from a similar product in “a gentleman’s magazine” — really don’t do it justice. It’s a nice, subversive twist in a film full of polished ones.