Kelly Wand"Burn After Reading" review
September 26th 2008 05:07
Pitt forgets the third rule of Fight Club: always wear a cup.
Note: In the interest of analyzing art more scientifically, from here on out I will assign movies a flat numeral score on a scale of 1 to 2. These numbers represent the objective worth of every aspect of the production, both technical and creative, and should under no circumstances be construed merely as opinion or a gimmick. Thank you all for your time and Google Ad Sense pennies!
Burn After Reading, the Bros. Coens’s’s best movie since No Country For Old Men, is also their best movie featuring George Clooney as a dumbass, although that’s not saying much.
The Preston Sturges plot is too complicated to describe in mere online words, but suffice to say that, just as in the old riddle, no character in the movie would have died if not for the gym membership of an elderly secretary we see briefly in only one scene. Or maybe it wasn’t even her duffel bag. It’s not important, really, just as what winds up happening to the money in Fargo wasn’t: the whole idea is to watch skilled actors playing stupid grownups acting self-destructively for our amusement. The most relatable character is an unnamed CIA superior played by J.K. (Spider-Man’s “J.J.J.”) Simmons, who’s introduced by telling underling David (“Sledge Hammer”) Rasche to come back with more updates “when things make sense” or “something happens”. It’s kinda how one envisages closed-door discussions about $700 billion bailouts on Capitol Hill sounding.
John Malkovich plays an alcoholic CIA analyst who’s losing his job and his wife (Tilda Swinton, playing the usual heartless Oscar-winning bitch she’s played in every movie ever). Tilda’s understandably banging George Clooney, an affably mindless Air Marshall who’s building something pretty ingenious in his basement and has never discharged in his weapon in 20 years (although for fun I pretended that they were both playing the same characters from Michael Clayton a few more years down the line). He likes to jog after he snogs. To make a long spoiler short, after Malkovich gets fired for having a “drinking problem”, he decides to ramblingly dictate his memoirs into a cassette-recorder that he puts on his computer which Swinton, who doesn’t have the slightest interest in them, copies onto a disc that inadvertently winds up in the hands of Brad Pitt’s scene-stealing Chad Feldheimer, a semi-retarded fitness instructor at a nearby gym called Hardbodies. He’s platonic buddies with Frances McDormand’s slightly less dumb but ferociously resolute Lady Macbeth/Sarah Palin, Linda Litzke, who promptly co-opts the disc and Pitt into helping her sell its innocuous contents to the Russian embassy (the only competent faction represented), so she can afford to get extensive plastic surgery even though she works at a gym. Then things get wacky.
Pitt’s vibrant performance as a clueless protein shake is getting all the press (his solitary scene with Clooney is as meticulously timed as the Chigurh-gas-station-guy-coinf lip scene in No Country), but Malkovich made me laugh more: he’s enraged from the first scene and his outrage fuels every conversation he winds up in. He’s like Macy in Fargo – things never go his way – and it just makes him angrier and angrier, Daffy Duck without the greed.
I got the sense that the audience I saw it with on a Monday night, a tiny old man and a vaguely anthropomorphic trio of stoned teenagers who staggered into the theatre midway through the movie in a flurry of mouthfarts and giggles, were unanimously disappointed by the deliberately abrupt, expository ending (unless middle-finger shadow puppetry is more nuanced than scripture indicates), although upon further reflection, I’m pretty sure their intentions were nobly ironic: they were critiquing a smart movie about dumb people by being dumb! Hope they vote!
MOVIE GRADE: OVERALL – 2
ACTING – 2
SCREENWRITING – 2
DIRECTING – 2
CINEMATOGRAPHY -2
TITLE – 2
FOLEY WORK – 2
REPEAT VALUE – 2
NUMBER OF HARDBODIES GYM EMPLOYEES KILLED BY MOVIE’S END – 2
As with all American institutions, all numbers are subject to judicial review and oversight.
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