Coming Up Daisy: The Coen Brother's Burn After Reading

How do you follow up a film like No Country for Old Men?

As we all know movies are continually built upon expectations and many viewers are so film literate that pleasing the box office surge is always a tricky situation, not to mention the venomous critics who sway opinion as well as any huckster. Thankfully the Coen bros. have always honed their craft despite all the bullshit. They are obviously very intelligent and savvy guys who know their craft inside and out, and who know how far they can subvert the framework they create within.

One can always admire just how astute these guys are as filmmakers, but the last few years has been something of a revelation in regards to their work. They have made many, many, great and profound films, but No Country and now Burn After Reading have set new benchmarks in their body of work.

So how do you follow up a masterpiece? You create something that everyone expects and yet no one expects.

Anyone familiar with the Coen's work can see a kind of pattern where their 'serious' films often followed by comedies or more lighthearted affairs, the comedies at times are a mixed bag in comparison to their more serious offerings, but even a Coen mixed bag is better than most of the crap that fills the screens.

The central idea of the film involves Pitt and McDormand's characters Chad Feldheimer and Linda Litzke who find a disk containing CIA material they imagine is more than it is and attempt to reap a 'reward' for its return to the caustic Osbourne Cox (John Malcovich.) Amidst all of this is the paranoid, pathological liar and sex addict Harry Pfarrer (Clooney) who is wresting Cox's wife (Tilda Swinton) away from the aforementioned Osbourne, among other subplots that are woven throughout, not to mention Linda Litzke's desperate need to get money for a series of plastic surgery procedures.

Burn After Reading starts out innocently enough and readies the audience for the Coen's usual ironic and quirky humour, but something seems different right off. In many of the Coen's previous films they tend to create a world based on fatalistic choices made by the characters and show how the results of those choices unravel what before had seemed so well planned. The humour is pointed squarely within the realm of the film itself and there is a sympathy for the characters in whatever purposeless roads they are on. It is rare one feels the Coens are 'saying something' or trying to make profound statements, which is what often makes their films so profound.

Burn after reading feels much different and much more pointed, which doesn't detract from the nature of the film in anyway, but instead it feels, like No Country, much more mature, much more refined. The excesses are pared away and the focus is tight. The Coens have something to say and they don't pull any punches saying it. Don't get me wrong this isn't some overt and didactic film with a message hammering you over the head; it all takes place within the world of the film, but there isn't as much of a filter between the world of the film and the audience as in their previous efforts. It's as much a meditation on the pulse of our times and of watching film itself (so many inside jokes and nods to things outside of it - Sledgehammer!) as it is an entertaining, intricate and challenging work. Far from a routine comedy (remember this is a comedy) Burn After Reading has the feel of a simple film that is working through Big ideas.

As I mentioned, the Coens often give us a sympathetic view of their characters, even at their most vile, a lot of times loaded with irony, but the characters are who they are. You can condemn their choices, but you can't really condemn them for who they are. Not so in this film. The characters are likable and enjoyable in their own idiosyncratic ways, but there is also something ugly about them as well, something nearly unforgivable at their core, and something the Coens aren't as compassionate about this time around, with exception of one, who ultimately recieves the heaviest penalty for his spark of innocence. We've seen the morality tales play out in nearly all of their films, almost as a warning against egotism and self-interest, coming to a head with No Country's relentless and indifferent fatalism. Burn After Reading takes those reins up and steers us right back into that abyss. This film borders as closely on cynicism as possible without giving into it. It is hilarious, but the humour is aggressive and jet black.

It's hard to miss the aggression that shows itself right in the beginning of the film with the copious and unexpected use of the F-bomb that carries throughout. One has to ask themselves, with guys as intelligent as these, why they would choose to pepper the script with this single word so many times and often unnecessarily so? There's a subversion going on here that feels almost like hubris at times, as if our noses are being rubbed in it, sometimes feeling like it's a big 'fuck you' to either the industry or the audience, one can't quite tell, but they do nothing to hide the fact of the presence of this word and its effects. Why does a sentence suddenly become comedic by inserting the word 'fuck'? Are the Coens simply showing the audience that they'll laugh at anything - at cues or by simply by having the right buttons pushed? In the end, though, it never feels quite like an all out attack on the audience, but instead a kind of insight into why these institutions have the effects they do.

It becomes apparent that the bros. are wrangling with the idea of just how impressionable people are in light of the great bounty of unknowns. The characters in the film are never in control. They are either too naive, but imagine they are intelligent, or they are too intelligent and manipulative in a world of similar sharks who are trying to eat their way to the top (of what we don't know.) The great analogy for all of this is the seeming godparent of this mess, the CIA, who, so seeped in 'intelligence' has no idea what is happening, or for what reasons, but who can quickly, and indifferently, sweep everything under the rug to maintain the status quo.

Similarly the audience is drawn into this mix as the Coens spin their yarn and truly show their mastery. If for nothing else this film is an exercise in showing how in control the Coens are of their art and how simply they can subvert all our expectations, sometimes so shockingly so that we don't have a second to compute the shift (wait, that didn't just happen did it?) We simply must adapt to the whim of the artists, to let them have control over us and go along for the ride, but not passively. In a world filled with people bent on feeding us things we don't need and inflating our desires it's easy to coast along on expectations, which simply dilutes everything around us to mass packaging, and it seems that this is what the Coens are attempting to subvert. Simply taking an ubiquitous and powerful icon like Pitt and having him play a character completely contrary to his usual idolatrous presence, and using him the way they do in this film is amazing. Everyone knows the draw Pitt gets at the box office...a very savvy move.

When our desires are subverted in Burn After Reading there is a sense of shock, but also of relief as well. There is a relief in letting go and seeing something different, allowing someone to show you something like an alligator in a septic tank. It changes the landscape dramatically. One key scene involving the revelation of Harry Pfarrer's secret 'project' is so revelatory it carries a resonance that is sublime in every way, both in its utter simplicity and its inexplicable vastness. It's one of those Ah-ha moments that leaves you breathless. The Coen's expertise with timing in this film is scary. They are spot on in each moment and what seems loose and carefree to begin with becomes wound so tight it's mystifying. They are playing us like a one stringed guitar, and they reward us with a profound melody.