Burn After Reading

Les Fréres Coen deliver another one of their HitchockoHawksian wet dreams of a comedy – inspired, they claim, by the Bourne franchise, lensed in no way coincidentally by Children of Men cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (who also shot The New World, one of the best photographed films EVER!), and w/ a musical score familiar to viewers of any number of generic contemporary, Washington-set espionage thrillers – this time to the dead-on tune of contemporary politics both public and private, unlike, say, the a-couple-years-ago-in-Las-Angeles-county anti-heritage historical masterpiece The Big Lebowski. We are in Bush country the sequel, and it is as lonely a place for the punters as it is celebratorily, self-satisfactorily idiotic. Burn After Reading is an indictment of its characters, certainly, but the dour humanist critics who are always lining up to point out the misanthropy of the Coens are the real misanthropes, because they refuse to acknowledge that the stupid things that these complex caricatures stupidly effectuate through their affection and affectation are done in order to avoid the loneliness of this world, which paints their present a prison and is no kind of future – no country for old men (as it were). This is the loneliness of the Hardbodies manager (pathos master Richard Jenkins as Ted Treffon) ordering his seven-and-seven, in love w/ a dolt who breaks his heart w/ an unfeeling that is not unfeeling so much as selfish-feeling; it is the loneliness of that very dolt, McDormand’s Linda Litzke, who will step on anything and anybody to get plastic surgery procedures performed – including selling an ex-C.I.A. operative’s burned-to-disk memoir-fragments to a Russian envoy comically named Krapotkin – procedures she knows will save her from dying as alone as her hapless, eternally crooked-glasses bedecked introductory internet date, a sad sac sex fiend, who sits unlaughingly next to her through a particularly execrable Dermont Mulroney comedy to get to the pussy, a pure portrait of pastel loneliness, one dog playing poker; it is the loneliness of the career spook, bounced from his job for his drinking and mile-wide mean streak, attentively watching the host of Family Feud, Richard Karn (who is also probably a lonely asshole), unloosen those withheld “survey says” Intel specs in the middle of the afternoon, as he mixes his drinks to volitile effect. Only Charles Schultz and Jules Feiffer do work w/ caricatures who we love and need like these Coens do. Once again, in our era of freedom’s ferocious marketing, freedom means, as the beautiful and brilliant Arundhati Roy says, the freedom “to stay home with your washing machine.” So, watched with the right eyes, Burn After Reading, for all its cartoon ambivalence and gale-force goofery, is a film about puff-headed peons who evoke pathos all the same, similar in spirit and letter to Blood Simple, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and No Country, the Coen films it now, for my dollar-vote, joins at the head table in their gallery of giddy grotesques. Its murder set-pieces-de-résistance (the Coen special sauce as usual) alone guarantee it a spot not only with those films, but w/ Psycho and To Live and Die in L.A. as well. Tilda Swinton’s underdrawn “cold, stuck up bitch” and the curt pacing (part of the parody) are the only things holding the film back, and critics who are this week trashing it will once again have to listen to the rest of us quoting its bon mots ten years hither, Lewboski style. Yes, there is a god, then. A god of these small things.