Inside Jokes Don't Make Outsiders Laugh

Rating: Null/10 (11 June 2009)

I watched Burn After Reading with some trepidation. Reviews had been largely positive and it was portrayed as a madcap kind of comedy, but other than Raising Arizona I have never laughed much at Coen Brother movies and usually end up with a mildly bitter aftertaste. And so it went. In the end I think it disappointed both myself and my husband for a couple of reasons.
One reason was that, with the exception of the poor schmuck who gets axed and shot to death, there were no likable characters. Isn't it kind of MOVIE 101 that you need to care about some of the characters? I mean, other than the one person with the least screen time? That doesn't mean the characters can't be flawed, but shouldn't they have some redeeming qualities too? Basically I don't understand why we're supposed to enjoy watching people who the Directors and Actors describe as "stupid" doing a bunch of stupid things for unsavory reasons. I also don't understand this notion that somehow stupid automatically = funny. (Christopher Guest movies, also so promising, mostly suffer from this same problem.)
The impression I got, especially from watching the extras, is that the actors enjoy these movies because people like Brad Pitt and George Clooney get to play against type, which must be fun for them. And all of the actors seem to enjoy working the Coens, etc. The Coens clearly have a vision of what they want and they have all the requisite skills to make great films, except, I don't know, heart. They write characters that they don't like. (I didn't see No whatever for Old Men which may have been a great movie.) They portray a world where the nice guy gets killed and the idiot shallow woman gets her cosmetic surgery. I guess we're supposed to see that as Irony, and/or Reality or something. Instead it just seems arrogant to me - sort of like good-looking people mocking that frumpy singing sensation from England for being frumpy - it diminishes the person doing the mocking.
We didn't turn the movie off - we waited to see how it ended. We agreed that the performances were good and, yes, Brad Pitt was surprising and fun (although the ultimate dumb blonde male performance not yet surpassed was Bill Pullman in Ruthless People). The fact that the movie held our attention just intensified the disappointment.