High and dry comedy from the Coens
I could never really get a handle on the Coen Brothers, and I've always had the nagging suspicion that they’re faking it; that their main frame of reference, and thus their interest, lies in the many multitudes of movies they’ve absorbed, not in life itself. So I begin to see their films as mostly meta-works and not something I can really use.
For that reason, I think The Big Lebowski is their best, and the film that lies closest to their aesthetic hearts. Essentially a shaggy dog story, it's the most suitable vehicle for them to riff on movie stereotypes and plot devices, utilizing their unique and highly attuned sense of drollery. The movie's the thing, not the idea.
The misanthropic comedy Burn After Reading feels close to Lebowski in temperament. The film's jumping-off point is the paranoid American spy film – post-Watergate thrillers like 3 Days of the Condor or The Parallax View. The joke here is that a lonely health club worker, in need of cash to pay for plastic surgeries, can spur various factions of the national security complex into action. The hypocrisy that beats at the heart of the free enterprise system is an easy but well placed target. One of the Coens' great talents lies in the way they leverage the small indignities of daily life into sublime moments of comedy. That stock in trade is frequently evidenced in reaction shots to some particularly preposterous bit of dialogue or action. Here, we see several mercenary professionals paying lip service to ethical behavior: A plastic surgeon making a feeble attempt at objectivity during a consultation with McDormand, and a divorce lawyer doing the same in a meeting with Tilda Swinton. The Coens also eavesdrop on several of what is fast becoming the classic metaphorical American commercial experience: the customer service call.
The comedy here is both high and dry, carried smoothly by the ensemble cast: McDormand; George Clooney as a philandering G-Man; Swinton playing yet another ice queen; John Malkovich as a supericilious and on-the-verge-of-a-meltdown agent; Brad Pitt as a ditzy fitness instructor; Richard Jenkins as McDormand's lovelorn boss; and J.K. Simmons as a spy boss who delivers a a very funny plot summation then asks the question at the heart of the Coen Brothers conundrum: "What have we learned from this?"
Well, maybe nothing. But the movie's still a hoot An example of the kind of dry-witted moments that you don’t see much of in a national that treats Adam Sandler vehicles as pure gold: Malkovich catches Jenkins burgling his house in a completely out-of-character act of lunacy, and recognizes him as the guy who works at his gym. Caught red-handed in a criminal enterprise by a man with a gun, Jenkins still finds it necessary to utter the disclaimer, “I’m not here representing Hardbodies.”
His last words, and an appropriate epitath for a character caught in the absurd machinations of another irony-laden world, courtesy of the Coens.
Linkateria:
- More Burn reviews
- Coenesque - devoted to the filmmakers
- Coen Heads (David Edelstein, New York)
- Narrative Junkie review - No Country for Old Men
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