Zany caper without much heart

Rating: 4/10 (19 January 2009)

Setting out to do what they do best, a zany caper film with bizarre characters and delicately acidic dialog, the Coens proved once again that they've been to this well a few times too often. Not that the film is terrible or that it's particularly worse -- but also not better -- than the average comedy of its type. The weight of the film's apparatus drags down its momentum; there are too many big-time actors playing cute and overemphatic character roles, too many "look at this!" moments, and not enough real heart or appealing characterization to carry the thing through.
The set-up is rather delicious -- a routine CIA analyst (John Malkovich) has his secrets stolen by his cold-hearted wife (Tilda Swinton) as part of a divorce investigation, and they end up in the hands of 2 ludicrously ambitious and foolish gym employees (Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand), who try to use the "secrets" on the cd/rom to blackmail the CIA guy or get cash from the Russians. George Clooney plays a guy simultaneously having affairs with McDormand's character and Swinton's.
Let's get the messy stuff out of the way first -- George Clooney is very funny in the movie, as he usually is in the Coen's films (although they all seem like one performance), but he was terribly and disastrously miscast in this film. There is just no way that a guy who looked like him would be trolling on the internet and picking up a woman who looks like McDormand, much less carrying on an ongoing affair with Tilda Swinton. I was wondering whether he had a fetish for unattractive women, since that would be the only thing that could explain his character's motivations considering how rich he was. Frances McDormand hasn't been particularly attractive since she was in her 20s (a lot of this movie stunk of Joel Coen's obvious and understandable blind spot in this department), and Tilda Swinton looked enough like a man when she was in her 20s to play one in "Orlando." It's just ridiculous -- there are plenty of other good actors who they could have cast who don't look like the reincarnation of Cary Grant, so they must have been trying to make a point by pairing Clooney with these women. But I can't really see what the point is -- if they were saying, "this is how it really is in adult life", then they shouldn't have cast such a gorgeous leading man. It's true that in Hollywood you often see rather ordinary men paired with fabulously beautiful women, but there's not much point in reversing the trend just for the sake of being unconventional.
Brad Pitt has some funny moments, the only parts of the movie where I laughed. But his character became annoying too after a bit too much screen time. The only character I could really relate to was McDormand's, but there was a bit too much obvious appeal from the directors to overcome the character's moronic behavior. Richard Jenkins gives a good performance as a sad-sack former priest who has fallen in love with the McDormand character, but the film-makers spend too much time making him sympathetic, to the point where it becomes manipulated as well. In the midst of these pathos-laden struggling "little people" are all these relatively beautiful strivers and seekers who seem to have 2 dimensions only in their better moments. The Clooney and Malkovich characters are particularly void of any real emotion or interest.
To put in a good word for the film, it's not quite as bad as "Intolerable Cruelty"... but in the same territory. It doesn't degenerate towards the end into a much worse film like "Cruelty", but it never really soars or pays off on the initial promise of the opening scenes, the cast and creative people and so forth. I think back to Gene Siskel's comments on "Raising Arizona", about how none of the characters had any emotional weight or appeal, and although I never felt that way about "Arizona" I feel like he described "Burn After Reading" to a tee. The characters are all either smothered with emotion or left hanging as caricatures by the director(s) who've gotten too carried away with solid craft to pay attention to the larger purpose of the piece. When the Coen Brothers say in the "bonus features" of the DVD that they concocted the story merely to support a handful of characters that they'd like to see played by Brad Pitt, George Clooney, and Frances McDormand, there's no evidence in the film that would contradict the claim. And it seems to me a risky and far from ideal way of making a story to entertain audiences. Putting dramatic actors in funny roles or funny actors in serious roles seems to delight the Coens, but this film sorely lacked real comedians. David Rasche was the only really funny guy in the movie, and he wasn't in enough of it.
Hopefully the Coen Brothers are just sinking into a temporary rut, and they'll come back after this with something that holds together better. I'm starting to get the same feeling that I had when "Hudsucker Proxy" and "Fargo" came out, that the best days of the Coens are behind them.