The UK’s finest and most respected film magazine, Empire, has sent their reporter, Damon Wise, to the Venice Film Festival to blog on all happeneings there. Of course he too checked out Burn After Reading yesterday and, while it doesn’t sound like he had a very nice time, he did seem to enjoy the movie. Here are his thoughts…
“The Venice film festival opened today with its usual farrago: ineptitude and shambles. Luckily, I’d been at the Locarno film festival in Switzerland, on the Italian border, just the other week, so I felt like I’d eased myself into the way of life here, but it still gets some getting used to. For the daily press, the day started with a screening of Burn After Reading, the new film by the Coen brothers, starring John Malkovich, George Clooney, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton and Brad Pitt (I put them in that order because it pretty much reflects their screentime). For “Periodici” (an Italian euphemism for “Get to the back of the queue and stay there”) media people like me, however, it began with a very weird press conference that, as it turns out, rather perfectly reflected the themes of the film. Because it was such a bunfight, I retired to a quiet area of the press area to watch it on a TV feed. I say quiet because nobody had thought to turn the sound up.
If you’ve never been to a press conference in Venice, or anywhere, they’re frighteningly amateurish. As a journalist, I’m terrified that my friends and family – who don’t know what I do at the best of times – will, for some reason, turn up at one of these things and say after, “Is that IT??? Is THAT what you DO???” Well, for the record, no, I don’t ask George Clooney when he’s going to settle down and get married. Or Brad Pitt whether he’s thinking of having more children. And I don’t, before you even think about it, change into a T-shirt and a pair of shorts and ask Brad whether, if I joined a gym that he might hypothetically own (which he doesn’t), he would chase me. So no, these are not my people, and, come to think of it, I’m not entirely sure who would claim them.
Anyhoo… if I’d seen Burn After Reading beforehand, the whole surreal (and not in a good way) affair would have made a berserk kind of sense. As it was, the film was a little anti-climactic, even though it is far and away the most (broadly) anticipated film in Venice this year. I cannot reveal my sources, because Working Title have sniffer dogs, and men in black, and half-octopus nuclear ski-tractor devices (perhaps), but I’d been given to believe that their follow-up to the (excuse my French) fucking brilliant No Country For Old Men was something of a screwball comedy, or perhaps a satire of America’s heightened post-9/11 paranoia. But to me, though, neither of those things rang very true: for a while (about half an hour), all I could see was the film’s bleakness.
The one correct piece of information I’d been given is that it plays like Fargo without a Marge (well, there is the Marge, but she’s not, like, you know, Marge). But the thing about Fargo is that, for a while, it led you down the garden path, and here it seems that there are several garden paths, and whose garden path do we go down? Do we follow that of Osbourne Cox (Malkovich), a fired, boozy CIA agent whose wife is playing away? Harry Pfarrer (Clooney), the lonely hearts-stalking lawman who’s having an affair with Cox’s wife? Chad Feldheimer (Pitt), the dim-bulb gym manager who finds Cox’s less-than-earth-shattering memoirs in the ladies’ locker room and thinks they’re sellable government secrets? Or Linda Litzke (McDormand), Chad’s surgery-obsessed co-worker, who, after failing to blackmail Cox, tries to sell them to anyone who might be interested?
I think you can see from this outline that this film is very much about the games people play, and even after that first half-hour passed I’m afraid I struggled a bit to find much humanity in it. Though there are elements of their other comedies (The Hudsucker Proxy’s “You know, for kids” becomes a filthy “You know, for adults” here), this is more like one of the Coens’ dramas, especially Miller’s Crossing, with which it shares a similarly detached vision of self-preservation in the face of desperation. Stories collide and intertwine, but they don’t add up (this is not a criticism, believe it or not!) or become anything other than strands of a convoluted plot, and even the government, whose secrets these are, don’t seem to care much (as JK Simmons’ baffled CIA chief puts it wearily, “Follow them, watch what they do, and tell me when it all makes sense”).
HOWEVER!
I’m sorry I shouted then, but I had to get your attention: these are just tonal complaints. If I hadn’t seen The Ladykillers I’d say the Coens were incapable of making a bad movie. Now, this may no longer still strictly be the case, but they certainly do know what they’re doing, and what they do in Burn After Reading, they still do very well. Dialogue, as ever, is beautifully written, with an excellent sense of the absurd, especially the insane, hilarious repetition of the name “Osbourne Cox”. It might actually be the sweariest of their films too, outpacing even Mamet and Tarantino with its rat-a-tat f-words and s-words, and the cast, as ever, are outstanding. The Visitor’s Richard Jenkins deserves a nod as Ted Treffon, “the soulful manager of the Hard Bodies gym” (as it apparently said in the script), but though Clooney gives another great performance in the third of his ‘idiot’ trilogy with the Coens (after O Brother Where Art Thou and the unfairly maligned Intolerable Cruelty), for me the standout is Brad Pitt, who totally commits to his nerdy supporting role, stoopid hairdo an’ all.
I don’t want to spoil things, or sound like a US test-screening audience, but I wanted to see more of him, and that hair, and the fragmented nature of the film doesn’t really allow that to happen. Still, like all Coen brothers movies, it’s a deceptively rich feast, and long after they’ve laughed off any suggestions that it’s, like, you know, about something, it’ll become apparent that actually is. But don’t worry, though. As this Burn After Reading sort of portends, we’ll all be long dead by then.”
Interesting to read about the subversion of the Hudsucker line from which this site takes it’s name (“You know, for kids”) and, since I’ve read the screenplay, I know what it’s in reference to and cannot wait to see how it’s applied.
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