Not top drawer but always watchable

Rating: 7/10 (14 August 2009)

A meditation on the psychology of entitlement, this movie posits a world in which every living creature is a plaything, a patsy, a cog in a machine or a moron. It is twinned with a meditation on the psychology of pattern recognition; in this movie not a single person is capable of seeing what's in front of him or her because they are spring loaded to see something completely different; every character defines his or her own self interest so narrowly, and with such ludicrous emphasis on the wrong things, that a horrible outcome is pretty much guaranteed.
Every single character is rendered ugly by a character flaw. Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney) is a horndog SOB with no more ability to tell the truth than fly to the moon; Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) is obsessed with appearance to the point of being unable to make anything resembling a moral judgement; Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) is so gullible and malleable that he reminds me of that line out of the 1968 film No Way to Treat a Lady "A thought of yours would die of loneliness!" And it continues like that. John Malkovich's character (was there ever an actor who chewed scene with such slow-mo relish and verve?) is just an upper class man's son who evaporates as a viable mate when he loses his job, thereby causing his wife (Tilda Swinton, who must have been told "Please channel every gonad sapping fishwife with clipped English diction EVAR, thankyou") to run off to a divorce lawyer.
About halfway through the movie, my brother turned to me and said, "So, run into any likable characters yet?" And the answer was a resounding no, but that didn't make me want to stop watching. I wanted to see it through, because I wanted to see if anything like justice would occur, and it didn't.
I enjoyed the movie because it's brilliantly written and very well made. But those characters, hoo-boy. I am glad my life has more meaning, more friendship, and something resembling ethics and rationality, because these fictional folks abandon all such considerations in the first frame, and suffer the consequences all the way through, while the Coens hold up the magnifying glass. One question remains. Are we being asked to mock them or identify with them? Either way it's an uncomfortable, if funny film.