Joel & Ethan Coens' Burn After Reading (2008)

If for whatever reason you are looking at this review and have not seen Burn After Reading, DO NOT continue reading.

I repeat: If you have not seen this film, do NOT continue reading.

SPOILERS AHEAD. STOP NOW if you have not seen Burn After Reading. Seriously.

No one is more inclined to defend the Coen Brothers than me. No one, in the face of a flawed or unimpressive work of theirs, is more insistent on finding the silver lining. But this is the hardest it’s ever been to excuse them.

Burn After Reading is pointlessly mean-spirited. When a director is malevolent towards his characters in order to bolster thematic material, that’s wholly understandable, but here, the two most sweet and innocent characters in the film are brutally, glibly murdered, and for what? A laugh. I was shocked when George Clooney’s Harry Pfarrer, in a hilarious (not to me) misunderstanding, blows Chad’s brains out the back of his head. After that I kind of glazed over for the remainder of the film, which was why I didn’t understand the reasons for Richard Jenkin’s character’s presence in the basement of the house belonging to Katie Cox (Tilda Swinton). His presence leads to another misunderstanding and the brutal murder of Jenkins at the hands of Katie’s soon to be ex-husband, Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), whose character was disgruntled at the start of the film, and by the end, a delirious psychotic. My brother, whose attention had not been blunted from shock, told me that Jenkins had been asked by Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) in a scene I had watched but not really absorbed, to find more information on Osborne Cox for reasons too complicated and pointless to explain. The film is simply an exercise for its own sake. It has no reason for being, other than, I guess, the Coens’ fear of their movie-making skills getting rusty if they sit on their laurels for too long? For shits and giggles? I did not giggle when Chad’s brains were blown out the back of his head. He (Brad Pitt) was the most likeable character in the film; dim, yes, but his dimness was endearing, more endearing than the repellent self-absorption of the other characters. McDormand’s character points out that he was a “can-do kind of guy” or something along those lines while everyone else she knew, in reference to Clooney’s character, is “defeated.” Perhaps that's the ironic point, but...

I've seen all 12 of the Coens' previous films, and can read them about as well as one can, and when they have a serious point they want to make, no matter how caustic, they find a subtle way to infuse a little gravity into the tone of the goofball antics (an example being the strangely moving description of H.I.'s dream at the very end of Raising Arizona, or the sober manner in which they consider Norville's preparations for suicide in The Hudsucker Proxy). The only gravity in Burn After Reading are bungled moments of earnestness, such as when McDormand's character sits in her lonely living room after a profoundly unsatisfying date. This shot is framed from a distance, and is lit beautifully, diagonal pale yellow diaphanous folds of light refracted from the moon off the softly flowing drapes in the window reaching across the carpet. The music becomes serious for a moment, as does the film, but it is totally out of place here. Chad's appalling murder, on the other hand, is portrayed as a joke. So is the hatcheting of Richard Jenkins. I know "the hatcheting of Richard Jenkins" sounds funny, but to witness it is not. Frankly, this is a callousness that is beneath them. The Coens transmit an invisible disgust with just such callousness in Fargo when their camera looks upon Carl Showalter's pitiless giggles at Jean Lundegaard's pathetic attempts to run away in the snow with a bag over her head. Now, Joel & Ethan are the ones pitilessly giggling at the poor sap, Chad, as he finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, and with a fountain of gore totally out of character with the effervescent goofiness that has preceded it, point at his horrifying misfortune and snort, 'What a dope.' The last expression on his stupid face is a big 'Whoops, what a pickle! Let me just explain..' smile and then that stupid face gets fired into at point-blank range.

At the end of the movie, two CIA officers congregate to discuss all that has happened. One says to the other, “So what did we learn?” The second one shrugs, and the first officer answers his own question, “Uh, I guess that we shouldn’t let it happen again.” Yeah.


Grade: C+

Step Brothers (2008)

The first 15 minutes of Step Brothers had me sweating up the lenses of my glasses I was laughing so hard. I was laughing so hard and so loud that when I paused to wipe the steam off my glasses, I felt like one of those boorish dolts who bray like asses behind me in the theater during comedies that leave me stone-faced. I guess that makes Step Brothers what is commonly referred to as a “guilty pleasure.”

The man-child has become his own genre and multi-million dollar enterprise, but not because of Judd Apatow or Adam Sandler. This is a character that has been around as long as Benjamin Braddock, maybe longer. In Step Brothers, it has been taken to its most grotesque extreme: Will Ferrell, dressed slovenly in pajama bottoms and a long-sleeve YMCA shirt is introduced dumping shredded cheese on Dorito’s corn chips to create makeshift nachos. When the microwave has melted the cheese to his satisfaction, he plops a bowl of chocolate donuts on top of the plate of nachos, grabs a cup containing some sort of blue beverage, and sits down in front of the television in a well-furnished and tastefully decorated living room that clearly would not look the way it looks if he was the sole resident. This is Brennan. He is 39(!) and lives with his mother (Mary Steenburgen), who on her way out to work, checks in on this sloth without pausing to gawk at the shameful absurdity of it, and asks what he’s watching. Brennan, preoccupied with the show, mumbles, “Oh…just the show…with the lady…” He is watching a Jane-Fonda type work-out show. She leaves. He munches on his nachos, wipes his orange fingers off on his pajama pants, and then proceeds to lift the waistband of them, slide the other hand down, to begin the masturbation process (Dale Doback (John C. Reilly), another man-child, later refers to one of the rooms in his Dad’s house as his “office” and “Beat-Laboratory;” because his drum set is in there, perhaps it has two meanings).

Now depending on who you are, you might find all of this shaggy slothfulness wretched and maybe even disturbing (Roger Ebert sure did), but me, I’ll be honest, as a homebody who often finds himself in supine torpor on a couch in front of a television with crumbs on his T-shirt and juiceboxes, soda cans, and wrappers lying on a table nearby, I found this opening moment with Brennan to be rather sadly accurate, and I think most single adult males would: even normally productive ones must find themselves reclining in a sort of mild squalor now and then on the weekends or on holiday.

I used to love Will Ferrell back in 2000 and 2001 when every single breath and gesture from him on any of the various skits in which he was involved on Saturday Night Live had me in hysterics. I thought Anchorman (the first film by Step Brothers director Adam McKay) was pretty goddamn funny, but then Ferrell got overexposed, became a huge movie star and produced one comedy after another, usually revolving the story around some sort of sporting event, that just put him off to me until I actively disliked him. I disliked him going into Step Brothers, but I’m pleased to say he is rather adorable in Step Brothers, as is John C. Reilly, who also has a puppyish pillow-face. These puppy faces of both men are all the funnier when they are being fashioned into mean looks of resentment, as when the two first lay eyes on the other on opposite ends of Dale’s front yard, framed to evoke two dueling gunslingers, except both are dressed like children (Reilly is wearing a Yoda T-shirt), and reluctantly offer hellos. The combination of childish accoutrements with the fully-grown libidos of 40 year old men is an incongruity that often provides laughs, though the film never considers the plausible social commentary of this contradiction.

Don Draper of Mad Men Dale and Brennan are not, but their obscenity-spewing infantilism is often taken to delirious heights of feverish hysterics that left me giddy. The movie has no pretenses about itself and doesn’t stretch the running time to the mind-numbing and wholly unnecessary 2 hour and 30 minutes of Judd Apatow’s second film, Knocked Up. At 90 minutes, Step Brothers does feel a tad long, and it groans under the tiresome obligation of a five act structure with perfunctory crisis, predictable dilemma (Dale and Brennan’s antics drive a wedge into the marriage between Brennan’s mother and Dale’s dad (Richard Jenkins) and they announce that they’ll be divorcing), and routine fixing of the problem by the two incorrigible slackers who must face reality, learn to grow up, try and get their parents back together again, etc. etc. The second half of the movie’s plot mechanics are as rote as a Sandler vehicle hand-me-down. But the vivid depiction of slothfulness is inspired, as is the squinting, slack-jawed stare-downs between Reilly and Ferrell. The attention to little-boy/adolescent male minutiae (their wardrobe, toys, the way Reilly lies under the covers of his bed) is meticulous, and reminiscent of the bric-a-brac in Steve Carell’s apartment in Apatow's first film, The 40-Year-Old Virgin (a film I plan on revisiting soon because of my enjoyment of this). Except Steve Carell plays a sweet man-child. Brennan and Dale are pug-faced vulgarians, but their rude behavior is hilarious because it is undercut at every turn by their pajama pants, bed head, and potato chips.


Grade: B-