Joel and Ethan Coen's Arm's-Length Scoff at the Modern Age

Rating: 10/10 (24 October 2008)

"I would tell students to make their characters want something, even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time. One of my students wrote a story about a nun who got a piece of dental floss stuck between her lower left molars, and who couldn't get it out all day. I thought that was wonderful."  Kurt Vonnegut
This comedy, Joel and Ethan Coen's arm's-length scoff at the modern age, never started from ideas but from character. And what interesting characters they are, all embodied sharply by a dream team cast of some of the most wonderfully enjoyable actors and actresses working today. We have never seen Brad Pitt or George Clooney play such inane and idiotic characters, and they are in top form. Pitt just got finished giving a chillingly real and bafflingly evil performance as Jesse James. Now he is playing a happy-go-lucky fitness trainer with nothing but air inside his head and a pompadour on top of it. Clooney, who even in his least emblematic performances as the title character in Michael Clayton and Bob Barnes in Syriana, has always played cool, level-headed earthy 1960s throwbacks, here plays a jittery, quick-tongued swinger with a double life. As such, not only do we feel as if Clooney is making fun of himself but he does as well, and accordingly his character's paranoia and overreactions are squared and cubed.
I have not laughed as loud and as extensively in a long long time as I have at John Malkovich, a poised and sophisticated veteran CIA analyst brimming with frustration and stress, thus a drinking problem, whose therapeutic endeavor to write a memoir is sabotaged by a bunch of complete idiots. His enraged reactions and bloodshot peeks through the cracks of his elegance are some of the funniest comic acting in the world. He reinvents the phrase "F***ing morons!!!!"
What you know of the plot from trailers and TV spots is enough. It is not a film that relies on plot. The plot hinges desperately upon the inanity of the unabashedly modern characters that screw it up to the point where the film itself basically resolves with two sideline characters, one of them a government man played with the trademark dry and straight-faced insensitivity of J.K. Simmons, implying that there really hasn't been much point to any of this. "What did we learn? Not to do it again. I don't know what we did, but..."
The absurdity of its characters, with the exception of Malkovich's CIA rogue Osbourne Cox and his shady wife, played with Tilda Swinton signature brand of pompous feminine callousness, is silly in every way. Their reasons for doing the things that they do are regarded by them with such ardor and desperation, which causes you to find yourself laughing even when there is no verbal or visual punchline. And what makes this comedy what it is is that there is no real farcical contrivance. It is a farce sparked by the decisions of these goofy dimwits, the most determined and driven of whom is Frances McDormand's Linda Litzke, who has the same go-getter willpower of most of her characters. How does she always seem faultlessly cast in everything she does?
What is most admirable about this work by the Coen brothers, still spinning with the oomph from their inordinately brilliant landmark comeback No Country For Old Men, is that they initially intended to sit down and write a spy movie, because, what the hell, they had never done one before. But they came up with this, the only espionage-related traces of which are in the mere occupations of very few of its characters and the incidental effects of the rest of the characters on two CIA superiors and the very confused Russian Embassy. Joel and Ethan were fine letting the ideas come and the juices flow and letting the script go where it wanted to go. If they had worked through any doubts with what it was turning into and restricted it to the bounds of a spy movie, it would not have been nearly as good and we would never have been granted this skillfully pointless portrait of, as CIA analyst Osbourne Cox puts it, "the idiocy of today."
What the Coens have maintained is the sleek cinematography and occasional and completely unexpected outbursts of brutal violence that one expects from an espionage film, not to mention completely facetious typewriter-font captions as displayed by the main credits and location footers. This is really the scaffolding of the film's charm.