Forget after watching?

I went to see the latest Coen brothers film, Burn After Reading, with my 16 year old niece. I find it impossible to resist the Coens even after No Country for Old Men which I hated. And had I written this review that Friday night immediately after watching the film, my comments would be a little different.

The film sets up 2 inept employees of a gymnasium, who seek to blackmail an ex-CIA man, John Malkovich, who is having marital problems. It is a kind of black comedy farce with Brad Pitt playing, with a lot of skill, one of the hopeless blackmailers and Frances McDormand, the other. Pitt is really funny; I liked him far more in this film than in anything else I’ve seen him in. And on the surface, that is what it is; a comedy filled with mostly unlikeable characters with the regular sprinkling of surprising violence. The Coens always do good dialogue, like Tarantino, and there are scenes in the film which are very funny.

George Clooney features as a philandering diversion and creator of the most bizarre sex aid I’ve seen in any movie (porn included – in fact it’s the 15 year old boy part of the Coen brothers on display here. They obviously couldn’t help themselves). The Coens said that idiocy was a major central theme of Burn After Reading; Joel Coen said he and his brother have "a long history of writing parts for idiotic characters" and described Clooney and Pitt's characters as "dueling idiots". Pitt said of his role, "After reading the part, which they said was hand-written for myself, I was not sure if I should be flattered or insulted". He also said when he was shown the script, he told the Coens he did not know how to play the part because the character was such an idiot: "There was a pause and then Joel goes...'You'll be fine.'"

Tilda Swinton, who plays the wife of the Malkovich character, described Burn After Reading as a kind of monster caper movie, and said of the characters, "All of us are monsters – like, true monsters. It’s ridiculous." She also said, "I think there is something random at the heart of this one. On the one hand, it really is bleak and scary. On the other, it is really funny. ... It's the whatever-ness of it. You feel that at any minute of any day in any town, this could happen."

I laughed a bit but found the violence abrupt and unexpected. It also took out the only characters with any pretensions to likeability in the film. But I was entertained. And also entertained by the idea of calling the review ‘Forget after watching…”

And then I heard Julie Rigg and others talking about the film on “Australia Talks Movies”. Several callers made points that I wish I’d thought of. “John from Brisbane” provided the most interesting perspective of the conversation. He said that he felt it was a Coen Brother classic, that it was a very serious film. The central character, McDormand, has superficial obsessions about her appearance which ultimately have really horrible consequences for the characters around her. He said that he felt that the film is warning us about what society is coming to, that our feelings of emptiness or uneasiness at the end of the film are because of the self-centredness of the characters, the moral emptiness of their decisions and the fact that no one can find love in the film. We are reminded of this on several occasions in the film as the camera returns to the location in a park where people wait to meet their Internet dates, strung out on park benches as other people wander along wondering if that man on that bench will be the person of their dreams.

"John from Brisbane" went on to talk about how the CIA is positioned; an organisation usually associated with menace seems out of its depth, on the back foot. Ruth Hessey, another contributor to the Radio National program, spoke about the film reflecting “the paranoia of the modern world” that may mean it ages well. In fact, we live in a society where people are more and more accessible - the film opens with a great zooming shot as Google Earth pans down from on high into CIA headquarters, but increasingly people are less and less connected and more fragmented. It suggests that we have lost touch with what is important but hang on desperately to the magic wand of things like cosmetic surgery to change our lives and bring us joy.

I began to see the film differently - the Radio National comments have made it less forgettable and I am grateful for this.