Another Coen private joke

Rating: 6/10 (30 October 2008)

I have had mixed feelings about the Coen brothers for some time. For me, their movies fall into two distinct categories. There are those which I have enjoyed - Fargo, Lebowski. And there are those where I have felt that a good idea has become inaccessible to the audience (ie. me) because it is excessively dressed up in the brothers' private sense of humour (Hudsucker, O Brother).
Burn After Reading joins the latter group.
The idea - assorted misadventures concerning a revealing autobiography written by a disgruntled ex-CIA operative - is great, and would work as either a screwball black comedy or a thriller. Burn After Reading is clearly intended to be a comedy, but the comedy (as is so often the case with the Coens) remains somewhat inscrutable. It's like the couple of kids in your class at school who would laugh uproariously at some private joke which completely passed by everybody else.
It's a shame this is so, because at least two of the performances are screamingly funny - JK Simmonds as a befuddled CIA executive and, especially, Brad Pitt as a terminally dim personal trainer. Richard Jenkins delivers a touching portrayal of a man who desperately loves Frances McDormand's character but is completely at a loss as to what to do about it, and Tilda Swinton gives us an ice queen. These performances belong in two other films - both are excellent, but neither is even slightly funny. Nor, for that matter, are the two savage on-screen killings, although I distinctly got the feeling that both are meant to be hilarious. Malkovich chews the scenery and looks like a cartoon.
Which brings us to Frances McDormand. She is the central character, playing a shallow woman with tunnel vision as far as raising the money for cosmetic surgery is concerned. I like Frances McDormand, and I think she is an excellent actress, but I strongly feel that she was miscast in this movie. A fading bimbo is what was needed, and Miss McDormand is not a fading bimbo. Her marriage to Joel Coen may have had a bearing on her casting.
I wish I shared the Coens' sense of humour - I would have enjoyed this more.