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our four star review of Burn After Reading
In Venice, it’s hard to avoid that sinking feeling. In the Lido’s grand
Casino, at the press conference for Burn After Reading, a petite Spanish
journalist hasseized the microphone. Dressed in a redT-shirt and shorts, she
is jogging on the spot before the dais on which sit the film’s players,
including Brad Pitt and George Clooney. “What must I do to join your gym?”
she jabbers (though “gym”, in a machinegun Castilian accent, comes out like
“him”). “George,” she adds, with a furious wiggle. “If I joined your him,
would you come running after me?”
In the film, a comedy caper setaround the intelligence community in
Washington, DC, it is Pitt rather than Clooney who plays the him trainer.
But this seems of minor importance. Another hand goes up: an inquiry about
Brad’s new twins. A further concern: does George have plans to father twins
of his own? Amid the gathering pandemonium, Pitt switches on a strained
Colgate grin, while his co-star Tilda Swinton, who lives in a hut in
Scotlandand eschews the fame game, slumps with a face like thunder. Even the
usually affable Clooney is finding it a bit much. He turns to the sporty
señorita, still jiggling. “By the looks of things,” he growls, “we’d be
running from you.”
That night, the official premiere kicks off an hour late as Pitt and Clooney
work the red carpet, weathering an adulation of Beatles-at-Shea-Stadium
decibelage. Inside the Sala Grande, while an interminable ceremony is
compered by a sort of Eurovision male/female duo, a big screen relays
panoramic shots of the actors’ wearied faces - every twitch, every grimace,
every nose pick. The female presenter drags a perplexed Brad up to the stage
to give him an award from last year, something he seems unaware he’d
actually won. Then she whips out a flower. “George,” she simpers, “this is
for you.”
At the back of the auditorium sit two men - bearded, bookish, bespectacled,
but displaying the same look of bemused patience they had worn during the
press conference. It is Joel and Ethan Coen’s film, but nobody seems to
care...
“They’re a weird space-alien thing” - Tim Robbins
The morning after, the Coens are at the Excelsior Hotel. George and Brad have
disappeared, driven by the him bunny to their respective babe and baby
lairs. While one can understand the fuss to a certain level, I wonder
whether this bobbysoxer hysteria is not a little disrespectful to the
film-makers? But no. “The George/Brad thing is good,” Ethan insists. “The
benefit of having them as actors is that you’ll get all the media crap,
which is good for the movie.” The press conference, though, had even this
pair stumped. “It was extremely idiotic,” Joel adds. “I wouldn’t want to be
George or Brad.”
The Coens aren’t recluses, just rather private. Dressed in matching white
shirts and jeans, Joel, 53, is the older - and taller, darker, a little more
brooding. Ethan - younger at 51, fairer and a little geeky - is the front
man, taking the heat while Joel rocks back on his chair, chewing over the
bons mots. “They’re a great two-headed director. They finish each other’s
sentences,” says Tim Robbins, star of their 1994 film The Hudsucker Proxy.
“They’re kind of like this weird space-alien thing.”
Not quite, but one knows where he’s coming from. As they loosen up, the Coens
become pretty interchangeable, exactly as they are in their work. In the old
days, there was a line of demarcation - Joel directed, Ethan produced. Now,
though, all pretence has been abandoned: they co-write, co-produce,
co-direct, co-dress. When, in February, they won best picture, best director
and best adapted screenplay Oscars for No Country for Old Men, they received
them as a unit.
Over 23 years and 14 films, the Coens have specialised in a unique brand of
quirky, dark, often homicidal comedy. From their debut, 1985’s Blood Simple,
to Burn After Reading, “Coen brothers” has become a recognisable stamp, the
director’s name as adjective - like Hitchcock or Woody Allen or Tarantino.
The Coens bear comparison with them all: Tarantino, for their cultish,
independent sensibility; Woody Allen, both for packing their films with
exaggerated neurotics, and for the fact that their quintessential
American-ness has been embraced in Europe (Barton Fink, about a blocked
screenwriter, swept the top honours at Cannes in 1991, long before their
American ascendancy). And Hitchcock? Because the films, from an overt,
intricately plotted suspense flick like Blood Simple to a covert one like
The Big Lebowski, display a passion for blackmail, kidnap and murder that
would have done the Master proud.
Although the Coens picked up screenwriting Oscars for Fargo, their most famous
film until this year, the success of No Country has dwarfed everything. The
story of filched drug money and a hitman in pursuit of the filchee was pure
art-house - initially released in only a handful of theatres in America,
starring the little-known Josh Brolin.Burn After Reading, by contrast, will
open on 2,000 screens with big A-list stars. They are now members of the
establishment.
“Unfortunately, we are. There’s no point in denying it,” Joel laughs. “There’s
actually a ceremony we’re not supposed to talk about where we kiss a dead
chicken’s ass,” Ethan quips. “That’s why they entrusted us with Brad and
George.”
“This is a Tony Scott movie done by incompetents” - Joel and Ethan Coen
Wind back two months and the Coens are on the phone, conference calling from
LA, where they have made a reluctant business trip from their base in New
York. The set-up for Burn After Reading, they explain, revolves around a
couple of hapless fitness-centre employees (Pitt and Frances McDormand) who
find a potentially valuable computer disc, mislaid by an ex-CIA bigwig (John
Malkovich). Their attempt to wring some money out of the situation, as ever,
finds them way out of their depth: “A Tony Scott/Jason Bourne kind of movie,
without the explosions,” as their own publicity material has it.
Ethan: We would always say, “What would Tony Scott do?” when trying to
figure out a scene.
Joel: How much to shake the camera.
Ethan: It’s a Tony Scott movie done by incompetents.
Joel: It’s a bunch of idiots trying to ape his style. We don’t have any
explosions or people running away from snipers. I mean, we took all the fun
stuff out of it.
(Truthfully, given the similarity in their voices, coupled with their tendency
to overlap, nobody really knows who the hell said what. “I wouldn’t worry
about that. You can attribute anything we say to either of us or anyone else
you care to,” offers Ethan. Or maybe it was Joel.)
Comparing their film to the works of Scott, the cigar-chomping action
director, is a joke. But to bracket any movie of theirs with another’s is
not an entirely misplaced venture. Every Coen film has been a pastiche of
sorts - Miller’s Crossing (gangster flicks), Barton Fink (Sunset Boulevard),
The Hudsucker Proxy (screw-ball comedies), The Man Who Wasn’t There (the
noir novels of James M Cain). Their 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou?
went even further, coined from the film-within-a-film in Preston Sturges’s
1941 Hollywood satire, Sullivan’s Travels. Set in the Deep South, concerning
fugitives from a chain gang, it proved, bizarrely, to be the Coens’ most
influential hit, prompting a bestselling country album and a revival in
American bluegrass music.
No Country for Old Men, by contrast, is incredibly bleak, making it their
least typical film. Adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s novel, it is also
unusually spartan when it comes to the dialogue. Not that Javier Bardem is
complaining. The Spanish actor won a best supporting actor Oscar for his
role as the relentless, bowl-haircutted assassin Anton Chigurh. Before him,
McDormand, Joel’s wife, had bagged a best actress statuette for Fargo’s
waddling-pregnant North Dakota cop, Marge Gunderson. There is no shortage of
actors wanting to work with the Coens - witness Dermot Mulroney’s brief and
very sporting cameo in their latest.
If Burn After Reading is equally irregular in that it uses not one but two
Alist heavyweights, then at least it accords with the Coens’ standard
routine of doing their best to disfigure them. Pitt preens in an absurd
quiff. Clooney, in his third film for the Coens, playing a security
expert-cum-swinger, sports a nasty Action Man beard.
Ethan: He’s always up for playing an idiot.
Joel: He said to us on the last day of shooting, “All right, boys, I’ve
played my last idiot.” And Ethan said, “Well, I guess you won’t be working
with us again.”
Films such as Fargo (the snow-covered Midwest), The Big Lebowski (LA) and No
Country for Old Men (west Texas) are drenched in the local landscapes,
peoples and dialects. In Burn After Reading, it’s the American capital the
Coens are showcasing, albeit filmed in Brooklyn.
Joel: We wanted it to be about Washington in quotation marks.
Ethan: A kind of “movie Washington”, where people make important
decisions and high-stakes things happen . . . a Tony Scott Washington.
The Coen brothers grew up in the 1960s in a Jewish household in Minneapolis.
Sons of academics, they made Super 8 films as kids and Joel ended up at New
York University film school. Ethan, meanwhile, read philosophy at Princeton.
Intriguingly, the film they have since started shooting, A Serious Man, is
set in a Jewish academic home in a Minneapolis suburb in 1967, suggesting
something autobiographical. “The context was completely the one we grew up
in,” Joel concedes. “But that’s where the similarity ends.” Probably because
of impending blackmail, kidnapping and/or murder.
In the early 1980s, Joel got work as an editor with the cult director Sam
Raimi, which provided an in to the business. If Blood Simple demonstrated
that the Coens were skilled film-makers, the follow-up, Raising Arizona
(1987), with Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter as infertile abductees of a
millionaire’s surplus quintuplet, demonstrated a knack for crowd-pleasing.
It was never the plan that they would do everything together. “It’s a very
weird person that would have a design worked out, even in the roughest way,
when you’re starting out to make movies,” Joel muses. But it wasn’t broke,
so they didn’t fix it. Despite the odd solo diversion, such as Ethan’s
off-Broadway play Almost an Evening, their combined fingerprints are over
every aspect of their films.
Their longstanding film editor, Roderick Jaynes, is actually the Coens under a
pseudonym. “Since our names are in the credits so many times, it seemed bad
taste to add another one,” Ethan insists. In entirely Coenesque fashion,
Jaynes has been lauded in his own right. “There’s only one Academy
nomination certificate we have framed in our office, and that’s the one for
Roderick Jaynes,” Joel says. “He’s also a member of Bafta.”
After a prolific run through the 1990s, the Coens departed from their usual
pattern and made two mainstream films - Intolerable Cruelty (2003), a
romantic comedy with Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and The Ladykillers
(2004), a redo of the Ealing comedy starring Tom Hanks. Neither set the
world alight. “After those two films, they got to the point where they were
like, ‘Okay, we got to go back to the stuff we really enjoy’,” says Clooney.
As such, No Country for Old Men marked the proverbial return to form. They
have been down this road before. After Barton Fink, the Coens were thrown a
huge amount of money to make The Hudsucker Proxy, a lavishly produced
picture about a dolt who becomes the head of a large corporation. The movie
tanked, making $2.8m at the American box office on the $40m it cost to make.
“We’ll take it. That’s fine,” Ethan says. “Return to form. Let’s go with
that.” This year marks the 10th anniversary of the film Coen aficionados
regard as the brothers’ meisterwerk - not one of their more garlanded
outings, but The Big Lebowski, their idiosyncratic version of Raymond
Chandler’s The Big Sleep, featuring the iconic hippie-stoner Jeff “The Dude”
Lebowski (“Quite possibly the laziest man in Los Angeles County,” the
laconic voiceover observes, “which would place him high in the running for
laziest worldwide”). In America, the film has inspired a festival, an online
religion, Dudeism, and other celebratory events – probably because wearing a
dressing gown, listening to Creedence and smoking your face off is deemed
preferable to wallowing in a snowdrift or executing people with a hydraulic
cattle gun.
“The Coens came to me and said: ‘We’ve got a project we’re writing with you in
mind’,” Jeff Bridges recalls. “I said: ‘Great, I’d love to work with you
guys.’ Then they showed it to me, and I was like, ‘What were you thinking?’
He was won round, of course. In his honour, a Dude action figure is now
being marketed, the very definition of “contradiction in terms”.
The Big Lebowski says a lot about the Coens. First, that they choose the cast
before starting on a script. “I wish I could say there was some overarching
idea behind Burn After Reading, but the choice of the subject matter was
incredibly arbitrary,” Joel explains. “We essentially wrote down the names
of the actors we wanted to be in the cast, then just decided what the plot
would be.” “If we’d known it was going to be a spy movie, we’d have put Matt
Damon on the list,” Ethan says. Second, that the Coens have always been hard
to fathom. At early critics’ screenings of The Big Lebowski, hot on the
heels of Fargo, there were walkouts. “They went, ‘They madethis?’” Joel
says. “So we’re kind of anticipating the same here,” Ethan adds, “because
the press don’t like to praise two in a row.”
They have been in this business long enough. American critics have indeed been
fairly lukewarm towards Burn After Reading. But the film has given the Coens
their first American number one .. .
Burn After Reading opens on Oct 17
