In my effort to get back to posting regularly I actually went out to a movie. I'll wait while you collect your wits after that shock.
Much as I'd like to go out to a movie two to three times a week like was the norm in the earlier days of this site, the demand of kids and a job and the lunacy of rebuilding a house largely single handed simply suck up too much of my time. This is not to be read as whining on my part, but a simple statement of fact. This what life requires of me right now. It will not always be this way but for the moment, it does cramp my movie going style. So if you wonder why I don't review movies much anymore, there's a bit of an answer.
Now, as to the Coen brothers' latest work, it does not match the brilliance of their last movie, No Country for Old Men. But that shouldn't keep you away from this screwball comedy. It is intricately plotted and yet that intricacy serves primarily to set J.K. Simmons up for punchlines in the later stages. The plot is not the point in this movie, which is really an unusual thing to say about a movie with this carefully constructed a plot.
The point of the movie is the characters. They are mostly all barking mad and self-involved to a mind boggling degree. It starts with John Malkovich as a CIA analyst getting the boot because of his drinking problem. Then we meet his wife, played by Tilda Swinton. She's so absorbed in her perfect party that she never lets him get a word in to tell her he's lost his job. And then later chews him out for not telling her. She is sleeping with George Clooney's character. He is married too, but that almost seems like a fallback position for him on those nights when he can't find a date. He's the sort of person who talks constantly as a way of keeping control of situations. If he stopped talking, someone might be able to ask him a question and answering a question would reveal him to be an idiot. And then there is the pair of Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt, playing trainers at a gym. She is obsessed with getting plastic surgery to reinvent a body that clearly doesn't need any help. Both of them are completely obsessed with image. Pitt's character takes this to an extreme by not seeming to having anything in his life besides working out. Just putting on a suit is a hassle to him because it interferes with working out. Pitt hasn't played a character this dim witted since his first leading role in Johnny Suede.
Come to think of it, most of these actors are playing characters much dumber than normal for them. And that is the joy of this movie, watching these people careening off of each other as they scheme their way through their lives. All of them think they are much smarter than they actually are and so it is always coming as a shock to them to discover that other people aren't in awe of their intellect. There are plenty of other character flaws bouncing around giving them flavor. Greed, vanity, paranoia, lust and over inflated egos come to mind. The Coens have written a cast of morons but have smartly played them as real people rather than exagerated buffoons. That makes the start of the movie a little rough as you were probably expecting a comedy and it plays fairly serious early on. It's only as we get to know them that the absurdity of their behavior starts to become visible. So the movie starts to move slowly from serious to smile inducing and then to a little funny and then pretty funny and then at the end it goes right back to being fairly serious. Conversely, this last shift gets the biggest laughs of the movie.
I said this isn't among the Coen brothers' great movies, but they have set the bar awfully high for themselves. The biggest problem with Burn is that it follows No Country and thus suffers by comparison to something of a masterpiece. Burn After Reading is not going to meet the expectations set by that previous movie. But once you accept that, it's solidly entertaining. And I suspect it will age nicely as repeated viewings builds appreciation.
