Burn After Watching

Today I saw the Coen Brothers' new movie, Burn After Reading. I am pretty big fan of their movies, particularly last year's No County for Old Men, Fargo, The Hudsucker Proxy, and the terribly underrated Blood Simple. While this new flick had received mixed reviews, I decided early on that I was going to see it because I am a Coens fan, plus it has several actors I like including John Malkovich and Brad Pitt, who, I have to say, is himself an underrated actor who possesses the versatility of a top character actor in a leading man's body. I think that this is the highest praise an actor can get.

Anyway, let me just say that the reviews were right: this movie is lousy. Very lousy. The movie seems to have no direction, no plot, no point. While most of the audience in the half-full theater (which sits mere blocks from where a lot of the movie's action was filmed) was in stitches with some of the film's stunts and black comedy, I have to say that I didn't crack more than a handful of laughs during the entire thing. It just wasn't very amusing. Malkovich's rantings, Tilda Swinton's icyiness, Clooney's foolishness, and Frances McDormand's innanity didn't do it for me. Even Brad Pitt stunk: portraying a world-class dunce, he was too dopey, and thus wasted with the script.

Two solid performances in the movie came from two very dependable character actors: Richard Jenkins as McDormand's boss, a gym manager secretly in love with her, and J.K. Simmons (who is better known as J. Jonah Jameson in the Spiderman movies), who plays a high-ranking CIA official. Still, because their roles were so small, they were unable to salvage this mess.

Maybe fresh off winning the Best Picture Oscar last year for No Country made the Coens listless and lazy here, I don't know. This simply was not one of their better works. I would definitely rank it below Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers, two of their movies which are generally panned as among the brothers' worst products. Personally, I liked the latter if for no other reason than to see Tom Hanks in a villain's role, and the former to see Catherine Zeta-Jones in any role.

There are certain movies that you probably have to watch more than once to get a full appreciation for what the director was trying to say or do. No Country was certainly one such film, and I had to see it three times before I understood a lot of it. Perhaps this is another film like that, but given its overall crumminess, I will not be forking over another $10.50 to see it; nor will I stop on it for more than a couple of minutes when I inevitably come across it while channel surfing about four years from now.

If you really want to see something better from the brothers, rent No Country, assuming you have not already seen it. If you've watched that one, get your hands on Blood Simple, one of their very first movies. Released on a shoe-string budget in 1984, the movie sports a superb cast of actors including McDormand, Dan Hedaya, and M. Emmet Walsh (one of those great ones you've seen 100 times, don't know by name, but would know him the instant you saw him), in one of my all-time favorite roles as a slimy private investigators.

Two out of five stars.