Reconsidering Burn After Reading

I found myself thinking about God the other night, and the universe, and the term, “Third Rock from the Sun” (did that term originate from the John Lithgow television series?). Why is it that people have to anthropomorphize the source of creation? The Sun and the collected detritus that naturally found itself in its orbit is an organic product, something that occurred from an unconscious chain reaction, like the way the wind might knock over a pie sitting on a windowsill. The pie falls on the grass outside and over time is descended upon by a colony of insects that feeds off the seemingly unlimited resources of the pie for years. The insects birth larvae and the larvae never know a life of not existing in the toppled berry mush. Not having any conception of how the pie landed where it did, they invent a figure with a personality, who they give a face and a fabricated back-story, and this Being was responsible for creating the pie. Even if a more pragmatic insect concluded that the wind was responsible for toppling the pie, then the insects would want to anthropomorphize the wind and worship it as if was sentient. The Big Bang, or whatever you want to call the series of natural acceleration of energy and matter that set off a chain reaction that produced the cosmos, is not a conscious entity. It is an unconscious natural phenomenon. If you want to call an unconscious natural force God, so be it, but then it is not a thinking, feeling, caring, opinionated, aware Creator. God is science and vice-versa.

It may seem ludicrous for me to preface a reconsidering of the merits of an essentially minor work of the brothers Coen with a convoluted and probably belabored analogy of the difference between a conscious God and an unconscious god, but it helps me to remember that in all of their films, the universe is indifferent. The good suffer, and the bad do as they wish unnoticed, under an unseeing sky. So, it seems foolish of me, knowing the world of the Coen brothers so well, to suddenly be angry with them for continuing their trend of displaying a worldview they have always displayed. Burn After Reading is irony of the bitterest and cruelest sort: think about it: the impetus for everything that goes wrong is the shallow pursuit of maintaining fit bodies, either as a means to a hotter sex life or in Osborne Cox’s case, well I don’t know exactly why he was at the gym when he lost his CIA “shit.” Why he would take his electronic memoirs with him in his gym bag is a question that can be answered by surrendering that it is an implausible contrivance that must happen or else there would no film (or the Coen Brothers would have to exert more effort in finding better circumstances for superficial body-obsessed types to come into contact with the disc; this reconsideration of the film does not strike its slapdash manner from the record). But, surely, caustic commentary on the depressing culture of Youth, Sex, Bodies that has been eroding the priorities of our nation for a couple decades now is needed more caustic than ever? I think so. And perhaps, though he is the sweetest character of the film, Chad’s appalling murder is not so very pointless after all. Whether the Coens have any pity for poor Chad is not too ambiguous, as they don’t seem to have pity for any of the shallow, murderous, or shallow/murderous buffoons preposterously coming into contact with one another. The film’s poster says all you really need to know about Burn After Reading’s evil sense of humor: one person spies on somebody whose lethalness they are ignorant of, and the lethal person being spied upon, being ignorant of the spying ignorant’s innocuousness, shoots him dead. It’s a hideous misunderstanding. Such things do happen. And the universe doesn’t have an opinion.



The original C+ review

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+

Barton Fink: An Appreciation, Part 1

Barton Fink (John Turturro) wants to write a play about the working man, the guy in the streets; he voices exasperation with the fragmentary conception he has from the intellectual’s removed balcony of experience and background. How does one who never travels in such circles begin to write a comprehensive or progressive portrait of a working man based on “shopworn abstractions about drama” as Barton puts it when laying bare all these tormenting doubts that have left the paper in his typewriter with nothing, nothing but a few sentences:

FADE IN

A tenement building on Manhattan’s
Lower East Side. Early morning traffic
is audible, as is the cry of the
fishmongers.

The man who bears witness to Barton’s troubled confessional is Charlie Meadows (John Goodman) a genial traveling salesman who happens to reside on the same floor of the Hotel Earle where Barton is staying during a transitional period while trying his hand at screenwriting for the movin’ pictchas. Barton is a neurotic poindexter, highly intelligent, but devastatingly unconscious of the fact that all of the doubts, reservations, and discouragement he goes on and on about, ever preoccupied with his own thoughts of artistic inadequacy trampling his agitated screed all over Charlie’s replies, would be solved if he only listened to Charlie’s aborted attempts to join the conversation. Charlie is the very type of common man he so desperately wants to understand. Charlie barely ever gets a word in.

Barton Fink is, in many ways, as much of an agitated admission from the Coen Brothers as it is from the titular Fink: it is at once a mission statement, an artistic crossroads, and a resignation: Barton has good intentions, and his sequestered intellect has produced an idealized portrait of the working class, the noble savages, the dignified downtrodden, the real heroes as he sees it. His conception of the common man is as rosy and idealized as the painting of the woman gazing out at the ocean that hangs insinuatingly on the wall in his hotel room. By the end of the film, he will have experienced a shattering of this conception, and even the hotel itself rebels at his deluded conception – the walls the painting hangs on drips and the wallpaper peels, obstinate in its refusal to stick, even after Barton has gone to lengths to push it back against the sticky substance that seems to be sweating from the Hotel walls.


The Hotel is a living organism, perhaps a symbolic incarnation of Barton’s mind, but more likely a depiction of the human body in all its naked corruption.


The first night in the hotel, Barton’s face is descended upon by a mosquito, leaving a buzzing swollen mark where he has been fed upon/drained. One of the posters for the film depicts the mosquito prominently. What does the mosquito mean? What does any of it mean? This is one of the most secretive and brilliant films of the 90s, and never wants for contemplation. Pondering it is a rich and endlessly rewarding pleasure for me. It is my very favorite of favorite Coen films.

I don’t presume to know exactly what everything means, but I believe at the heart of the film is a pessimistic realization that the noble savage may just be a savage, the seemingly too obvious conclusion that living low is just as capable, perhaps more so, of producing irredeemable, base individuals. This is the same thought that struck me while watching Lars Von Trier’s Dogville – the fearless and potentially offending proposal that the conception of the dignified working class that so many patronizing liberals hold, is flat out naïveté. Pity for a starving dog clouds the truth that the dog is, indeed, starving, and such neglect and maltreatment inspires nasty, selfish, even violent behavior. The mangy cur is something that invites solicitous affection until its mistreatment sinks its fangs into your hand.

If you haven't seen Barton Fink, I'd strongly recommend not continuing.


As we learn to chilling ends late in Barton Fink, our lovable sad-sack Charlie is a sex-starved monster, who exploits his transient occupation as a means of gaining entry to homes and murdering scornful housewives.

Charlie: Jesus, what a day I had. You ever had one of those days?
Barton: Yeah. Seems like nothing but lately.
Charlie: Jesus, what a day. Felt like I couldn’t have sold ice water in the Sahara. Okay. So you don’t want insurance. Okay. So that’s your loss. But, God, people can be rude. Feel like I have to talk to a normal person like you just to restore a little of my…
Barton: No, it’s my pleasure. I could use a little lift myself.
Charlie: Good thing they bottle it, huh, pal? (pauses to take a swig from flask) Did I say rude? People can be goddamn cruel, especially some of these housewives. Okay. So I have a weight problem. That’s my cross to bear. I don’t know.
Barton: It’s a defense mechanism.
Charlie: (angry) Defense against what, insurance? Something they need? Something they should be grateful to me for offering? (calms) A little peace of mind.

On Barton’s second night in the Earle, a disturbing thing happens: he hears, through the thin walls, something that, at first, sounds like laughter. Mad, insane laughter. It isn’t laughter. It is the sound of a man sobbing. Barton calls down to the front desk to complain. He hears the phone ring through the wall, muffled conversation, and then heavy footsteps which sound purposefully to his door, followed by a loud knock. Turns out it’s Charlie. He is a big affable man, and his wide grin only hints at the cracked personality beneath on repeat viewings.


Charlie: Those two lovebirds next door driving you nuts?
Barton: How do you know about that?
Charlie: Know about it? I can practically see how they’re doing it. Brother, I wish I had a piece of that. Seems like I hear everything that goes on in this dump (pressing fingers against his ears and wincing in pain) – pipes or something.

His mild irritation at the wall-penetrating sounds of passion from the Hotel Earle’s resident “lovebirds” conceals a raging resentment, a dark sadness that gives way to psychotic vengeance. On his third night at the Earle, Barton hears through the walls sounds of sex, a woman moaning. Shortly thereafter, he hears it again, mingling with the muffled moans, the disquieting sobs of someone deeply distressed coming from the opposite wall. No doubt this is Charlie. You take a guess at the reasons for his crying.


Barton Fink: An Appreciation, Part 2

“At first, I didn’t believe it, that this woman who looked as fertile as the Tennessee Valley could not bear children.


But the doctor explained that her insides were a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase.”

Happy Birthday Frances McDormand

I think everybody agrees that Frances McDormand is great. Even people who don't get all warm and fuzzy when watching Almost Famous. In terms of leaving a powerful cinematic legacy, she's got an ace in her deck: her husband. He has a brother who helps him make films now and again, and occasionally, they bring home to work, and cast her in small parts to make her feel appreciated. She had a tiny little part as Jon Polito's secretary in Miller's Crossing.

But seriously, no matter how many terrible movies she makes with Charlize Theron, she'll always have the one-two-three punch of Blood Simple, Fargo, and The Man Who Wasn't There (all three directed by her husband and his brother - their names escape me).

These three punches would knock out most any other actress who got in the ring with her. She was the relatively uncomplicated heroine in distress in Blood Simple, she had a brief cameo in Raising Arizona and Miller's Crossing, and then played the celebrated character of Officer Marge Gunderson in Fargo. Five years later she appeared in her husband's The Man Who Wasn't There, a brilliant, brilliant undervalued, little-seen film in the Coen oeuvre.

She has done good non-Coen work, such as in Almost Famous, Mississippi Burning, and Wonderboys. As Marge Gunderson, I find her mixture of idiosyncracies amusing every time I revisit Fargo; she is part mother-hen, part Colombo, possessing a cunning unshared by the other police officers and locals in Brainerd. She is also sweet, kind, and fearless in the face of circumstances that are not sweet and kind.

However, she can play a fiery bitch when she wants to, as when she plays the unsatisfied, adulterous manipulator of her taciturn husband in The Man Who Wasn't There: "I hate wops" she says about her own family after her brother's wedding party. I've heard her belligerent performance in the movie Friends with Money steals the show from her fellow actresses, Jennifer Aniston, Joan Cusack, and Catherine Keener. And I've read she is fantastic in Laurel Canyon. I will get around to seeing both films eventually, but, it really doesn't matter, as her MVP status has already been cemented in my mind by her tremendous Coen triumvirate.






Previous "My Favorite Actresses" Birthday Retrospectives:

3. Samantha Morton
2. Uma Thurman
1. Judy Davis

The Red-Band Trailer for Joel & Ethan Coens' newest film Burn After Reading