Burn After Reading (2008)
Burn After Reading has a fuck-you charge. Joel and Ethan Coen’s hyperbole has found a sad, subtle, recognizably human dimension. The art-game tricksters haven’t left the building exactly, but their sleight of hand is more accomplished and deft. The CIA memoir that propels the sexual-murderous roundelay of Burn After Reading isn’t the true McGuffin - it’s distraction. The casual monsters of this picture only connect (or collide) in their thirst for their distraction of choice – whether it be an absurdly convoluted tummy tuck or lots of sex, or jogging or plotting revenge on an elaborately pointless bureaucratic government agency. These characters stink of desperation and psychotic longing, and they have a tunnel vision, brought on by self-interest, that rivals the characters of Used Cars. The greed never weighs us down though, never preaches to us – because the resignation of Burn After Reading, the same resignation that prevailed the Coens’ adaptation of No Country for Old Men, has a shrug oh-well matter-of-fact quality. The Coens have found a natural bee-bop groove amongst the inhumane – they tickle you. The comfort of banality is a target of derision here, but it’s an affectionate derision, banality unites us, for better and worse.
Burn After Reading is the most confident, pared down Coen Brothers farce – it has the streamlined assurance of their best thrillers; it’s the best performed of their farces, and the jokes don’t announce themselves as Jokes in the purposefully jarring way that prior Coen pictures, such as The Big Lebowski and, especially, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, have accustomed us to expect. There’s no Jesus the Spanish child molester here, there’s no acid flashback for the sake of ironically bad, detached effects. Everything is of a piece in Burn After Reading. Some people, even people who’ve enjoyed the picture, have characterized Burn After Reading as a step back or a breather from No Country for Old Men, but this picture may be subtler – it’s really a comic remake of No Country, and it may be even more mature in its immaturity. Burn After Reading offers the pleasures, and the potential, of two talented filmmakers stepping into the rank of master. There’s certainly no one in cinema like them, the Coens have become a genre unto themselves - not because they keep making the same movie over – but because of their obsessive urge to tunnel deeper and deeper into themselves - they amuse themselves in a way that amuses us. We watched certain past Coen pictures (and I’ve liked them all to one degree or another, excluding only O Brother) and we see the experimentation, the heavy lifting and the striving to be something “off” or below or above the radar. Burn After Reading bears the fruit of that experimentation.
All the characters here want something - their dunderheaded devotion to stupid things has a life-force, and all the actors are relying on, and parodying, the baggage they carry from film to film. Frances McDormand, an employee of a memorably below the mark Gold’s Gym knockoff, wants the body a few of the clients may have, or the people on TV, or to maybe be the female equivalent of her hunky, daft co-worker Brad Pitt. Brad Pitt wants to do something, that’s about as specific as the film gets; he wants to have the shit, be in on the shit, and know the shit. Tilda Swinton wants to, well, she may be even less specific than Pitt. George Clooney does his best freak-Coen acting here – we see what he’s been trying to get to in his past collaborations with the filmmakers. Clooney’s broad cartoon strokes resonate –he bugs his eyes and cocks his head and arches his hands - because he plays on your expectations to laugh at him. Clooney, as he did in Intolerable Cruelty, dodges your intentions, he anticipates your smug disassociation from the character and creates the most likeable character in the film (an admittedly not so difficult feat). Clooney cheats and cheats on his wife, and he lies and manipulates, and he is as incapable of a selfless thought as anyone else in the film, but he means it every step of the way – the others play counter to themselves or have some sense of things they disregard. Clooney’s character is a legitimate flake, devoted to nothing but immediate pleasure; he’s unable to comprehend how he affects people. Clooney’s a man on permanent mental channel surf. He’s a cipher, as fleeting as an American Idol contestant, or the Dermot Mulroney picture that periodically punctuates this picture.
And there’s John Malkovich, who walks away with Burn After Reading. Playing the former spook who (more or less) gets the proper story rolling, Malkovich has the role that’s most in danger of being overlooked. People may see this as Malkovich being Malkovich, and that’s undeniable, but the notes of self-entitlement here are as sharp as any I’ve seen in the actor before. Malkovich’s Osborne Cox could be Valmont all over again, deprived of the court to play out his ideas of proper indulgence, so he’s left with inanity – leading to the most shocking, mood-shattering act of violence in the film. Malkovich has the least-showy sharpest lines in the picture, they’re all about rattled ego, pathetic self-delusion – forget Valmont, he’s Don Quixote crossed with Steve Buscemi’s killer in Fargo crossed with the John Malkovich of Being John Malkovich – he’s a faux-upper-class wannabe sham, with shockingly deep reservoirs of hatred.
This picture manages the balancing act of certain De Palma – satire and parody that deepens the effects of the genre tropes being satirized and parodied. The heightened genre consciousness on display here (you’ll laugh simply at how long a shot of a man walking down a hallway is sustained) renews the espionage picture in a way that the Coens were clearly intending to renew the romantic comedy in Intolerable Cruelty. The ending here, again an echo of No Country for Old Men, is as heartbreaking as Tommy Lee Jones’ final words in that film. The people here may at least be luckier, they never wake up.
Quid Pro Quo & Married Life (2008)
One of the least appetizing prospects in the theatre is the identity-free little picture that always draws a few obligatory positive notices, normally from people who either pity it or give it a pass because they can’t find anything exactly wrong with it. People can’t find much wrong with these non-films because there isn’t much wrong - but there isn’t much else either. Give me a big trashy cash-in any day; give me yet another no-budget Texas Chainsaw Massacre clone. Hell, even give me a Michael Bay film, at least they have a sense of their casual immorality and play by their own rules accordingly, confidently. A picture driven solely by money isn’t an honorable picture, but we can at least understand it - it has a sense of purpose. The quaint little “indie” picture (the term “indie” of course having largely become meaningless) that strives for little other than critical and/or self-praise is the height of cinematic dawdling - they’re quickly forgotten, they please no one, and they usually, in their desperation to please, betray even themselves. Quid Pro Quo and Married Life are two recent examples.
Of the two, Quid Pro Quo is the lesser picture, but it’s not as irritating as Married Life, which is a missed opportunity. Quid Pro Quo suffers from a breakout of good intentions – tedious but forgivable. Married Life is more dispiriting - it’s another of those films, like American Beauty, that opens as a sort of domestic thriller-tragicomedy only to end as just another picture that buys the hypocrisy it initially claims to be lampooning. There’s a potentially promising joke buried in Married Life: that the picture’s narrator, Pierce Brosnan, slowly sells himself on the life he detests as he relives it for the audience, but that’s squandered in favor of the usual sentimentality.
Married Life’s opening hour has a poker-face devotion to the falseness and the ennui and the tedium that’s amusing, for awhile. Chris Cooper is a comfortable middle-class drone called Harry Allen, who decides the only humane way to dump his wife (Patricia Clarkson) for his mistress (Rachel McAdams) is to kill her – divorcing her would compromise her sense of purpose; murder allows her to remain an untarnished idol of domestic usefulness. One could accuse Cooper of being overly familiar with this specie of unsympathetic, purposeful mannequin, and one would be right, but Cooper has yet to run out of variations – his confidence in his character’s interior drive, and refusal to play to the audience - to court sympathy - still draws you in.
Married Life is Brosnan’s though. Brosnan may have been saddled with a few of the weakest James Bonds in the series, but they refined his timing and ease with himself (age and experience have similarly affected Richard Gere). Brosnan has always appeared ludicrously debonair; but over the last decade he’s informed those looks and that who-me?-faux-effortless-self-entitlement with a contemptuous inner-satire that just about always exceeds the films themselves. (Hugh Grant also has a similar charisma. A picture teaming Grant with Brosnan and Gere, directed by Alexander Payne, could be some sort of comic masterpiece.) But Brosnan has nothing to play here and no memorable lines - that he manages to make as much of an impression in Married Life as he does is a testament to his movie-star command.
The women, as usual, don’t fair as well, and I’m especially beginning to worry about Patricia Clarkson. Clarkson is a talented actress, an even stronger, livelier personality, but her recent career resurgence has led to little more than predictable supporting parts in predictable, marginal movies, the non-films. More filmmakers and more actresses (like Clarkson, and Julianne Moore and Jennifer Connelly and Charlize Theron) need to accept that women mustn’t necessarily suffer for their art – they don’t have to be bleached or crying or drug taking, or hidden under layers of hypocrisy, or losing their children, to achieve cinematic transcendence. (Watching these sorts of pictures triggers an even stronger longing than usual for Hal Ashby and Robert Altman.) Here’s hoping that Rachel McAdams – sharp in Red Eye, Mean Girls and The Family Stone, doesn’t follow suit – we need more breezy comediennes who refuse to carry the sins of the world on their shoulders.
I haven’t figured out whether Vera Farmiga is an actress yet or not, but I’m thinking there may (at least) be a 1980s Nic Cage freakster dying to leap out of the largely thankless roles she’s been given thus far. Farmiga’s wife in Running Scared was “the wife”, but Farmiga, with her wide-deep-eyes that could potentially swallow you whole and her siren’s body and her topsy-turvy, kinda perverse presence, had a spunk beyond the script’s call of duty. Farmiga was lost in Breaking and Entering and The Departed, those parts were constructs – but she still managed to avoid embarrassment. Farmiga needs her Vampire’s Kiss, and Quid Pro Quo, with a premise that’s suggestive of an early Cronenberg picture, could’ve been it. Unfortunately, the writer-director Carlos Brooks, tackling a group of more unusual than usual fetishists, is stuck navigating between exploitive and redemptive, and cancels himself out. Farmiga has nothing once again. Nick Stahl, the proper lead of the picture, has even less. One watches Quid Pro Quo and wonders, as one wonders with many non-films, what drove its creator to create it – the mystery driving the mystery of the picture is unintentional and off-camera.
The Band’s Visit (2008)
Major plot points are described. Or at least implied.
There are occasionally romantic comedies that acknowledge the despair that fuels their existence. The cliché says we go to films for escape, and that might be most true of the romantic comedy. We want to be told that that can happen to us - it doesn’t matter if we’re single or married or dating - we want, at least sometimes, to be told that something above us can happen, that we can knock together and spark sparks. Romances are driven by loneliness of course, but they’re even more about a fantasy of self-actualization. Bukowski wrote something to the effect that a man doesn’t need love, he needs success in something, and that something can include love. Most romances aren’t just selling romances; they’re selling the notion of life deciding on its own accord to improve you. A longtime friend and I once called a certain variation of the romance the “asshole redemption fable”; recite the romances in your head and you’ll be surprised how many will fall into this category.
I don’t write this with any degree of self-righteousness, but as a sucker as stuck in the muck as anyone else, and as someone who appreciates the romantic movie brand of massage - provided the clichés are handled carefully. Few genres can sink so suddenly into tedium; few everyday failures are as embarrassing as the flat or obviously disingenuous romantic comedy. Sideways was deservedly applauded, but that picture is still essentially a fantasy - a lonely not-quite writer’s daydream of redemption, of a pretty, fairly undemanding girl coming along and refusing to allow him to talk her out of him – she excuses him. There’s a suspense to Sideways, particularly in that long, beautiful exchange between Paul Giamatti and Virginia Madsen in the middle - we dread the moment that Giamatti finally says something too pathetic, too self-loathing, and pokes the cloud he and the audience have been floating on.
The Band’s Visit is another such picture. Think Sideways by way of Jarmusch and you’re tonally close. Like Sideways, we watch The Band’s Visit with hesitation, sensing that Lt. Col. Tawfiq (Sasson Gabai) could, at any moment, say something just idiotic and closed-off enough to blow Dina (Ronit Elkabetz), the improbably collected, beautiful woman, away. Tawfiq is an Egyptian lost with his band in a small Israeli town. Dina is a woman who helps them out. Tawfiq, his face and body frozen in compliance to a non-existent command, his eyes tentative and melancholy, tries, more obviously desperately than he realizes, to exert control, over his band, himself, and, for a night, over Dina, who laughs his chivalry off and calls it out as the emotional cowardice it is. The Band’s Visit, remarkably, doesn’t sentimentalize Dina’s attraction to Tawfiq. Dina isn’t drawn to Tawfiq because she recognizes something deep and nocturnally decent in the man; he’s just another of her experiments, a prospective check mark in her internal book of dares.
Dina and Tawfiq are a classic kind of romantic movie mismatch – self-delusional in opposing-complimentary ways. Tawfiq is a tight-ass, seen by many of his band-mates as a laughable anachronism. Dina is the “free-spirit” who’s (perhaps) stuck herself in a public perception she no longer enjoys. The couple fence endlessly over the one night Tawfiq’s small band is stuck in town. The Band’s Visit is, like many films, about a woman who immediately invites a man into her bedroom, out of curiosity, out of a bit of pity, but who refuses to connect all the dots, she won’t compromise her pride that much, won’t chew his food for him – he has to make a tiny gesture – a leap of faith. In this case, another, younger, musician, Haled (Saleh Bakri), waits in the wings, free of the burden of taking things too seriously.
I’m in danger of making Eran Kolirin’s film sound more pained and labored than it actually is. The Band’s Visit has an appealing sense, beginning with the opening words, of perspective – it’s a modest picture that resists underlining its own modesty for false pathos. The other members of the band are barely defined, but Kolirin knows just when to cut to them for a brief comic beat to offset or accentuate the tremors between the couple. Kolirin stages the band of The Band’s Visit in consciously blocked poses that could be winking at our conceptions of these sorts of intimate comedies that almost always earn strong notices that are quickly regretted. Little Miss Sunshine also had these everyone-in-a-cute-direction compositions, and they highlighted the picture’s smug faux-indie-franchisitude. Kolirin, and this is where the Jarmusch influence figures, uses similar camera placements as a deflation of the emotion that a Little Miss Sunshine desperately trumps up – as an extra little roundabout flavor to the principle proceedings. The Band’s Visit really concerns one thing – a heartbreakingly casual missed opportunity, a potential memorable night reduced to a gesture – a wave of the hand – that’s destined to be over-sentimentalized in the imagination of the waver. Tawfiq, like many unhappy people, is resigned; he compensates for his unhappiness by striving for quiet, wounded dignity. Sadly, it rarely occurs to people like Tawfiq that it’s the dignity that spurs the unhappiness. The Band’s Visit promises yet another romantic odd-couple daydream, and pulls the rug out – it’s a romantic picture made for people who need romantic pictures, and it respects them and tweaks them in fair measure. Tawfiq is a poignant idiot – a man too clouded to take his clichéd movie express-train to brief fulfillment.
Tell No One (2008)
There’s a moment that pops up about half-way through Tell No One that had me laughing - a little giddy at what I was buying into. Our hero, Alex Beck (Francois Cluzet), having recently come to suspect that his long thought dead or missing wife Margot (Marie-Josée Croze) may, in fact, be neither, breaks into a sprint - something occurs to him, and it has something to do with hearing U2’s “With or Without You”. The co-writer-director Guillaume Canet allows the song to play through, and we watch as Alex runs toward a computer lab - his years of desperate longing giving way to a bit of hope. Why don’t more pictures acknowledge how we catalogue our lovers with pop music? How we relive our loves with pop music? No other medium quite serves the same function - we, of course, can remember our past heartbreaks with film and books and so forth - but there’s something intangibly purer in popular music. Perhaps it has something to do with our love of movies after all - they’ve conditioned us to soundtrack our lives - to rationalize pain with, usually, the most banal distractions available. Tell No One, for the four or five minutes that U2 is allowed to comment, gets at this confusion, this pain, this search for comfort -in a funny, loose, relaxed way. And the scene has been, for the better part of the past hour, built to beautifully. Alex has been in a funk - morose, yet touchingly un-self-pitying, and we see how this macabre adventure has ironically allowed him to bloom again.
Cluzet is terrific in a role that’s trickier than it may appear to be. Cluzet has the every-man at the wrong place at the wrong time role; the helpless, at the mercy of everyone else in the movie kind of role that can be thankless, or dull. Or, if trusted to a superstar, unbelievable – stars normally have too much ego to convincingly convey desperation, or helplessness, or pity – they must continue to prove they have the biggest cock in the room, regardless of the circumstances. Cluzet manages to be convincing and charismatic; commanding, yet dialed down and average enough to allow for pathos – but in a graceful way. Cluzet gets our sympathy because, as the saying goes, he doesn’t ask for it. But Cluzet isn’t even self-conscious about not asking for our sympathy. Cluzet is a new generation Hitchcock hero – an everyman without the irony of the everyman being played by a God – such as Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart. Tell No One derails just as you totally give yourself over to it, but I wouldn’t dream of advising you to skip it. Our thrillers are generally so impersonal and divorced from any interior drive that one performance, and one true poppy-flakey moment, has to qualify as at least a partial success – even if these filmmakers seem to always insist in getting in their own way.
De Palma’s great thrillers are great because they understand (even if the audiences don’t) why audiences actually seek them out – that resolutions are beside the point. We seek empathy; we want something that connects to our inner drives in a down-home way. We want something to rile us up and get us tittery – laughing at the human acknowledgement that we’re all, more or less, scared and turned on by the same things. We don’t need complicated resolutions because that’s just shallow justification – mechanics that were dreamed up seemingly long ago, but that serve no logical function. George Sluizer’s original The Vanishing remains one of the greatest horror pictures ever made because it understood that the truest explanation is the simplest, the most obvious and boring, or that there isn’t an explanation. David Lynch understands that resolution only dampens the mood – perhaps too well, he sometimes ties himself in knots trying to clear himself of the obligation; but Sluizer pulled a far more organic hat-trick – he turned the yearning for explanation into the ultimate black kick of his picture – he punished his hero for trying to cook up something where there’s nothing to cook.
I go on about this because I’m not really interested in recalling the proper plot of Tell No One. I’ll give you a hint – imagine watching the first half of The Vanishing on TV, and then having your cable box go out. You manage to turn it on again, only to get the wrong channel, The Vanishing having, at an instant, given way to some sort of ludicrous, labored, John Grisham-flavored conspiracy thriller. Grisham, as dull as his novels and pictures tend to be, at least bothers to pave the way for his revelations as he goes. Canet doesn’t have the storytelling instincts for that, he trips up (he may have felt too obligated to the Harlan Coben novel that’s inspired him). The missing/dead wife’s disappearance has something to do with her job, and, for the life or me, I don’t think I was aware of her occupation until it was introduced as the Explanation for Everything That Has Transpired. Canet, after a brisk first half, gets bogged down in the introduction of one expository character after another, and One Big Explanation doesn’t suffice, we hear parts of it over and over. The picture becomes so unwieldy that I wondered for a moment if Canet was, perhaps, working toward the kind of resolution that was briefly in vogue a few years ago – the kind of ploy that would cancel two-thirds of the picture out as merely Alex’s grieve-stricken fever dream. I normally don’t go for that (it worked in Mulholland Dr. – beautifully) but it would have given Canet, and us, an out.
There is an unintended poignancy to the sloppiness of Canet’s construction. Tell No One has, even in its shakier passages, a consistence – that empathy that we seek from thrillers. Tell No One has a fragile, completely un-post-modern quality, the picture captures grief; and its ultimate, regrettable, absurdity only reinforces the strength of the picture’s relation to its hero. Tell No One feels like the film Cluzet watched to soothe himself the night after he lost his wife – to loose himself in mechanics. You damn near buy the ending in spite of yourself, because Canet and Cluzet have poked through the rules of rationality we use as our defenses against nonsense. Simply, you want Cluzet to find her.
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