Feel the burn

It’s not often one feels burned while watching a Coen brothers movie. The Hudsucker Proxy left me cold; O Brother, Where Art Thou? meandered in misfired jokes (I will exempt films they didn’t completely write, like Intolerable Cruelty and the Ladykillers remake). Somewhere in between these lies Burn After Reading, a black comedy starring the likes of George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Tilda Swinton, John Malkovich and Coen muse Frances McDormand.

You want to like this movie. It’s a CIA spoof, which sounds like promising material for the Coens. But its misanthropic nature seems more “laughing at” than “laughing with,” and somehow, it raises only a half dozen chuckles in its 90-minute run.

Osborne Cox (Malkovich) is a CIA operative who’s been demoted, ostensibly for his drinking problem, so instead he quits. He’s got a high-powered doctor wife (Swinton) who sees this as an opportunity to ditch the bozo and hitch up with her married lover, serial ladies’ man Harry Pfarrer (Clooney). Meanwhile, in the sort of contrivance that drives many a Coen brothers plot, Osborne has lost a CD of personal data from his gym bag at local health club, Hardbodies. There, gape-jawed gym employees Chad Feldheimer (Pitt) and Linda Litzke (McDormand) contemplate what to do with the CD — recovered by a janitor — which seems like high-level US State Department data but really isn’t.

Chad is the dumber of the two. Pitt plays him in full Johnny Suede mode, with highlighted pompadour, constantly sucking on a gym bottle. He’s actually the most likeable doofus in the movie, simply because he doesn’t realize what a dangerous world he lives in. When he’s onscreen, Burn After Reading rises to plausible “dumb guy” comedy status. He and Linda (slightly less dumb but afflicted with vanity, she desperately wants cosmetic surgery but can’t afford to pay for it) decide to trade the “top secret shit” on the CD to the highest bidder. This is the kind of misunderstanding that might drive a half hour of Seinfeld. Here, it’s expected to push a whole movie.

Now, I like a good “dumb guy” movie as much as anyone else. The Jerk, Dumb and Dumber — both classics. Burn After Reading reminds me more of Ruthless People, the ‘80s Abrahams/Zucker vehicle in which Bill Pullman’s goofball character (also with hair highlights) and his vixen partner get deeper and deeper into trouble trying to blackmail Danny DeVito. But that movie had a lighthearted streak to it: people didn’t get their faces blown off just for being in the wrong closet at the wrong time. Here, the Coens indulge their taste for random, senseless, graphic violence in what has been set up as a comedy. It feels out of tune, like stepping in dog poo at a carnival. Messy.

In fact, if you didn’t know this was a Coen brothers movie (and the A-list cast didn’t tip you off), you’d think it was a bad impression of Quentin Tarantino. The expletive-laced dialogue (which, admittedly, is there to reveal character) and out-of-the-blue violence reminds us that these guys did make Fargo and No Country for Old Men, but here it seems they’re trying to ape Pulp Fiction. (One more minor quibble: the boom man for this movie should be liquidated. We spotted the black boom mike descending into three different scenes — it really pulls you out of the movie. Maybe he has a drinking problem.)

Burn After Reading feels like a composite based on a template of six or so previous Coen brothers characters: you can tell that these guys occasionally like to depict humankind as a ball balanced on a handful of bad character quirks. Osborne, Malkovich’s character, gets ratcheted up into the kind of blind, incoherent rage that afflicted Steve Buscemi’s character in Fargo. Swinton plays the domineering shrew, a type we’ve encountered before in Coen comedies. And a scene in which McDormand brays at Pitt to “get the money” from Osborne recalls almost exactly Holly Hunter and Nic Cage’s (much funnier) exchange in Raising Arizona. (“You go back in there and get me a toddler.”) McDormand, a Coen brothers regular (she’s director Joel’s wife), has long played variations on her Blood Simple and Fargo characters; here, she lacks any noble impulses. But she does a good job of spouting Cold War and spy movie clichés, and she is the least loathsome character here. Plus she gets the last laugh, as she usually does in Coen movies.

Likeability is the main culprit here, because while an Achilles’ heel is often the downfall of Coen characters, many of them get by on sheer tenacity, dumb luck or an amusing personality. We root for them — and they escape the worst of fates — for these very reasons. It took a couple of viewings to fully appreciate The Big Lebowski, and it’s mostly because Jeff Bridges brings to life a hapless hipster burnout so memorably; the character’s there on the page. No such luck here.

In fact, Burn After Reading seems like it would be more fun to read as a script or novella than to watch as a movie. It has the pace and the timing of Ethan’s short fiction, and seems like a short story blown up at the margins to fill out 90 minutes. The whole setup (which takes quite a while to fall into place) is all leading, it seems, to a punchline about McDormand’s cosmetic surgery. It’s packed with details, as Coen brothers movies usually are, and juicy side roles (especially for Coens regular J.K Simmons as the shoulder-shrugging CIA superior). But it’s not side-splittingly funny — it’s forced funny — and it’s not for a second convincing as a depiction of the real world. This, however, may be asking too much of these zig-zagging filmmakers. As with most of their output, it’s really the Coen brothers’ world; we’re just watching.