Burn After Reading: Burn Before Watching

There's a reason that the trailers for this movie say, from the "Coen Brothers, makers of No Country for Old Men." It's not because they won the Oscar for it, or because that's how most people know them. It's because this movie is almost exactly like No Country [For those who don't know how I feel about No Country, read here]. First, it begins with a premise that is promising, but later dissipates into irrelevance. Second, the main plot-mover is the seeking of a sum of money, but it eventually takes a back seat to senseless violence and all-encompassing paranoia. Third, the main instigator of mayhem is an amoral jerk with a page-boy haircut. And last but not least, it is, on balance, a bad movie, just like No Country was.

Before I continue talking about how bad this movie is, I'll give you a brief synopsis: Osborne (John Malkovich) loses his job at the CIA. With nothing to do, Osborne writes a memoir. His wife (Tilda Swinton) is cheating on him with federal marshall, Harry (George Clooney). She wants a divorce, so she copies the computer hard disk to get his financial info, and delivers the info to her attorney, whose assistant leaves it in a gym. Gym employee Chad (Brad Pitt) reads it, and he and gym employee Linda (Frances McDormand) think Osborne's memoir is classified spy data. They try to blackmail him, and trouble ensues.

Like No Country, this movie is NOT a comedy, though the marketing sure makes it seem that way. This is not the next coming of The Big Lebowski. This isn't even the next coming of Intolerable Cruelty or The Ladykillers. Amazingly, this movie isn't even as funny as the Coen Brothers' Oscar award winnning drama, Fargo. It is about as much of a comedy as Very Bad Things was.

Yes, I admit, there are some very funny moments. In fact, there are exactly three and half things in this movie that will make a well-adjusted, humane person laugh unashamedly:

(1) Brad Pitt's performance as Chad, the Gym Employee. Chad is basically just Brad Pitt doing goofy dance moves and laughing childishly. It is a great performance, and it is funny, but it is a mere blip on a larger screen of dreary nihlism.

(2) George Clooney's sex toy comedy. Clooney's character, Harry, does a lot of physical comedy with sex devices. That's it. No more description is necessary.

(3) The incompetence of the CIA. Whenever something happens (someone gets killed, something goes wrong), we get to see J.K. Simmons as a CIA director make remarks about not knowing anything and giving directions based on total misinformation. J.K. Simmons manages to make it light, even though the underlying material he's working with is dark.

(3.5) John Malkovich. Why half? Because this is dependent on whether you find Malkovich intrinsically funny. If you're like me, you think everything he says and does is hilarious. It's just his manner. There's nothing in this movie that he does that is funny besides being himself, so if you don't find him amusing, you're out of luck.

But the rest of it is just sad. When it comes down to it, half the movie is about a stupid gym employee that needs money to get unnecessary plastic surgery, and goes about it so poorly that a couple innocent people get killed, and the other half is about a federal marshall with a sex addiction and a severe case of paranoia who gets caught in the middle of a couple different unfortunate coincidences. Frances McDormand, who I usually like, is so cartoonishly over-the-top obnoxious, that it's impossible to take her lack of self-esteem, or anything else about her character, seriously. Clooney's character is totally arbitrary -- his presence in the plot is unnecessary, and I believe that both of his neuroses were completely contrived just to make some plot elements jive -- I think the sex addiction was written in just to get Harry and Linda together, and the paranoia was written in to create some sort of a climax. It was all just so . . . pointless.

I just didn't get it. Maybe it was just meant to be a critique of the CIA. Maybe you have to live in Washington D.C. to really understand any of it. I don't know.

But what I do know is that I'm washing my hands of the Coen brothers for now. Fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice, well . . . shame on you, Joel and Ethan.