Hola all. Massawyrm here.

Sigh. This is one of those talkbacks I just won’t be reading. It’s no secret that I’m not the world’s biggest fan of the Coen brothers. It’s not that I have anything against them, I just tend not to like what they do. I dig the hell out of a few of their films – Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, O Brother, Where Art Thou. You know, the ones everyone loves. And while I can appreciate entire chunks of some of their other films Fargo, The Big Lebowski and No Country for Old Men, I dislike the endings to all of them. More importantly, I dislike the experimental storytelling techniques they often employ that have become their stock and trade. But even more importantly than that, I dislike the Coen fanbase that I have to interact with after I’ve seen their films.

It’s that look they give you. They way they begin to explain what the Coen’s were doing as if to a child, as if you didn’t understand it. Because clearly, once you understand what they are doing, you’ll have to like it. But when you explain to them that you do in fact understand it and simply do not like it, they look at you with this befuddled expression, completely confused as if you’ve just spoken in some form of ancient Sanskrit. And then they try to explain it again.

”You don’t understand. It’s like a Raymond Chandler novel, except that NOTHING ties together rather than everything tying together. Isn’t that great?” No. When someone gives me information to process and hints that it means something, only to later tell me that everything I just saw meant nothing, then I don’t think it is all that great. I think they were jerking me off. ”Okay, have you ever read a Raymond Chandler novel?” Yes. ”Well, it’s like that, only you know how there are always two unrelated cases that are really related? Well here, they’re actually completely unrelated. Nothing’s related! Get it?” Yes. So why don’t you like it? Because that is just jerking off. Okay let me try this again…

And in what appears to be an effort to repeat the success of The Big Lebowski they copied much, but not all, of that original formula. This time in place of the Chandler novel they’ve taken the notion of the convoluted spy thriller, populated it entirely with a cast of completely unlikable characters and then once again offer up a story that doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. It is a story about nothing. There is a plot and there are characters and things do in fact happen. But they never lead anywhere. There’s no hero, no true main character, no one you give so much as one Iota about. Only a troupe of lecherous, lying, cheating, arrogant, cardboard cutout high society lowlifes who we are never offered a single reason to care about who fuck with, fuck over and just plain fuck each other in what becomes a nightmarish web of repugnant interpersonal behavior. Which is the point. Get it?

The main problem here is that once again the Coen’s have offered up a film in which they have no love for any of their characters. Sure, the Coen’s occasionally love some of their characters - No Country for Old Men is a perfect example of that. They LOVE Llewelyn Moss, his wife, Tommy Lee, hell, they even love the hell out of Chigurh. But this isn’t that kind of movie. I know I mentioned Lebowski, but even then this isn’t that kind of movie either. The Coen’s love The Dude. And everyone around him skirts the shores of actually being cartoon characters rather than real people. That movie isn’t reality – it’s a warped alternaverse where few listen to reason. The Dude keeps trying to explain that he has nothing, and wants nothing, to do with what’s going on around him and no one will have it. He just wants his rug taken care of. Because it really brought the room together.

Burn After Reading is very much set in the real world. There are no cartoons here, although a few of the characters come close to being stupid enough to qualify for animated status. They are all ugly, shallow, self-absorbed, insipid wastes of flesh, most of whom manage to find their way to terrible ends at the hands of their own greed, ego or lust. While the film occasionally lingers on Frances McDormand, it really is an ensemble film. You’re following a tangled knot of relationships that leads to the overarching story – the acquisition of a mysterious disk – that ultimately pans out to mean nothing at all. Like a child in the sandbox slamming trucks together for endless, violent amusement, so do the Coen brothers slam degenerate buffoons together to watch them interact and ultimately do one another in, one way or another. But there’s no point to it…other than the fact that there is no point.

In fact, the only likable characters are the CIA agents (played hilariously by J.K. Simmons and David “Sledge Hammer” Rasch) who act as a mostly truant Greek Chorus who only occasionally show up to scratch their heads and ponder the meaning of all the stupid mistakes and unnecessary violence that occurs during the film. In fact, the main reason I liked them was that they mirrored my own thoughts about the film and its characters, only seeming satisfied when we weren’t ever going to be troubled by one or more of them again. But you don’t care about these guys either– you just feel for their having to even commit brain cells to unraveling something that will never amount to anything. Because that’s exactly what you spend the film doing.

This film isn’t about telling a story, it is an exercise in developing characters we’re not supposed to care about. It is an exercise in developing plot threads whose ends we aren’t supposed to unravel. It is an exercise in putting some of the most talented actors in the world into one film and not doing their performances justice. On the positive side, everyone here immerses themselves in their characters. The only person whose performance actually grated on my nerves was Brad Pitt, who plays his ignorant gym rat character so far over the edge that it becomes sheer lunacy. He’s not just stupid, it is a wonder he can actually lace his shoes in the morning and operate a motor vehicle. I’m a huge fan of Pitt’s work and have never in my life breathed a sigh of relief when he has exited a film for good, but when I discovered that it was unlikely that he was going to reappear, I did in fact breathe easy. At least in the cases of Swinson and Clooney and McDormand and Malkovich, I hated them for who they were as characters - what they actively did to the people around them and how exactly they went about doing it. With Pitt, I just wanted to smack the shit out of him. And yes, I get that this is the point. But then again, I’m also not a fan of characters that deliberately exist to annoy the audience.

I just didn’t like it. While it shares the same kind of storytelling technique of Lebowski, this bears little resemblance to it. It feels more like Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers. This had the same lack of love for its characters and the same level of humor to its jokes. But at least there I felt like I was watching something with a beginning, middle and an end. Here the end is SURPRISE! There is no end! And yeah, I get it. Life is messy and complicated and sometimes it doesn’t all tie up nice and neatly together. So in case that doesn’t happen to be a lesson you learn every day of your life that you wake up and poke your head out into the world, then perhaps this has a lesson for you. But as I happen to be a person that goes into movies because I want, for two hours, to exist in a world where it does all tie together and nothing is supposed to be superfluous…well, this just doesn’t cut it for me.

Until next time friends, smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em.

Massawyrm

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