It's been said over and over that good artists borrow, but great artists steal. And the Coen brothers make a career out of theft, reworking story clichés and character stereotypes into absurd visions of the world around us.
The Coen brothers are genre filmmakers of the highest form. Although the term is often seen as an insult, the Coens use their wild imagination to deliver plot expectations in unexpected ways, pushing the idea of "genre film" to its absolute limit. In this way they created The Big Lebowski from the skeleton of noir, No Country for Old Men from the well-trod ground of the western and now, in their new film, Burn After Reading, they offer up a spy thriller.
This new release from the brothers landed in the number-one spot at the domestic box office last weekend, pulling in $19.1 million. A modest opening, but it was enough to beat out Tyler Perry's The Family That Preys by almost $2 million.
If anything, one has to credit the Coens for their timing. There has been a noticeable rise in the amount of government thrillers since September 11th launched the intelligence community into the public eye. From The Good Shepherd to The Recruit to Breach, the plot is the same: A na've young patriot enters the annals of government bureaucracy to do his part, when he suddenly senses a subtle hint of corruption. Upon investigation, Our Hero single-handedly rights these wrongs against society, thus making America a safer place and strengthening the agencies created to protect it. The time is certainly right for a closer examination of this type of propaganda film, and Burn After Reading pushes the spy thriller to its limits.
The film's opening, a shot of Earth from space with a slow zoom to the CIA headquarters as the credits roll, immediately signals what world we are in. The movie can be thought of as Enemy of the State if Will Smith was not an unheralded genius but instead a normal, everyday rube.
The plot follows Linda Litzke (played by Frances McDormand), a gym manager in suburban Maryland whose best friend, Chad (Brad Pitt), finds a disc of government documents on the floor.
Linda, who has been arguing with her health insurance company about the merits of extreme reconstructive surgery to no avail, sees the disc (and the money they will no doubt be rewarded with upon its return) as the fast track to the body she has always wanted, and so the two set about blackmailing the disc's owner, a recently fired CIA analyst named Osborne Cox (John Malkovich).
The less said about the plot the better. Although the film revels in coincidence and chance in a way that can sometimes feel contrived, it is completely unpredictable, with twists that shock, entertain and contain a heaping dose of the unflinching violence that make the Coens' films so volatile.
The same can be said of the acting. Some of the performances work much better than others (Pitt is hilarious but Clooney has, for once, succumbed to overacting), but each actor seems to have been given free reign, and they all turn in performances that are singularly ridiculous and collectively genius.
This movie will no doubt be one of the brothers' most polarizing. It is a spot-on parody of the spy thriller, complete with a Carter Burwell score that adds tension to a morning jog and over-the-shoulder camera shots that turn every pedestrian on the street into a government agent.
However, the characters indulge a bit too much in their eccentricities and the plot is fast and confusing, with an ending that I think was pitch perfect but will surely leave some complaining about how the Coens hate to end their movies.
Above all, one must celebrate the brothers for their fearlessness. They have taken a distinctly American genre and infused it with distinctly American characters. Each one feels more entitled than the last and none feel particularly bad about their despicable behavior. Only the Coens can write a script that reads like a screwball comedy and load it with themes of class, education and a seething portrayal of an intelligence community that operates with the implicit trust of the American public but seems to be as clueless as the rest of us.
In an interview about his performance in The Big Lebowski, Philip Seymour Hoffman said of the movie, "It's not a naturalistic film to me. The film is a little big on another plane, so the characters are allowed to be bigger than life."
It is the success of this in Lebowski that illustrates the shortcomings of Burn After Reading. The Coens have written larger-than-life characters but have placed them too much in the real world. D.C. is too recognizable and the CIA agents too familiar to what we have repeatedly seen in film.
If the movie seems contrived and the acting fake, it is ultimately because we expect a level of realism in the spy movie that the Coens abandon early on. It is best to appreciate it for what it is: two hours of hilarity from the most original film-making duo today.
