Bowen’s Cinematic

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.

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.