Burn After Reading, round 2.

"Either you get, agree with and derive enormous delight from dry misanthropic humor... or you don't," writes Jeffrey Wells. "And it's the genius of Burn After Reading, [the Coens'] latest, to offer another serving in a way that may seem slight or irksome to some, but it is in fact - I mean this - a major satirical meditation about everything that is empty, wanting, sad and hilariously absurd in these united and delusional states of America."

Updated through 9/14.

"Burn After Reading is a deft little piece, directed with a straight face and performed with a roiling comedic energy that matches brio with precision," writes Jim Emerson. "That's what makes it funny. Emmanuel Lubezki's cinematography, Carter Burwell's score, Roderick Jaynes's editing (yes, we all know that's a pseudonym) could proudly serve any modern espionage picture. All serve a ridiculously plotted absurdist farce, which is what the best spy stories usually boil down to, whether they're comic or tragic."

"It's basically a one-joke movie - thin stuff," writes David Edelstein in New York. "But the Coens juggle their genre tropes nimbly; they're like birthday-party clowns for cinephiles.... Burn After Reading plays as if it was great fun to make - maybe more fun than to see."

"The Coens have often worked out their private sense of amusement and disdain onscreen," writes David Denby in the New Yorker: "in the baffling gangster jargon and reversals of loyalty in Miller's Crossing; in the bizarrely punitive disasters that beset the left-wing-prig screenwriter in Barton Fink; in the openmouthed idiocies of the three escaped cons in O Brother, Where Art Thou? In those movies, one could detect the brothers laughing at a world of fools who never understand what's happening to them and mess everything up. But it's hard to sense much laughter behind Burn After Reading."

"The Coens may treat their characters like puppets, but the delight they take in working with such gold-plated actors is palpable - equaled only by the lip-smacking relish the cast takes in bringing this colorful menagerie of nincompoops to life." David Ansen in Newsweek.

"I can't pretend this movie is anything less than a slight, broad comedy, and I imagine that many people will find it too mean-spirited and trifling after the Coens' Oscar-winning adaptation of No Country For Old Men," writes Noel Murray. "Me, I thought it was frequently hilarious and brilliantly constructed, with a script that adds and subtracts elements exactly when necessary." Also at the AV Club, Scott Tobias: "The Coens have made many funnier films than Burn After Reading (though John Malkovich, as a belligerent laid-off CIA agent, is a hoot), but here it's the plotting that pays off in spades."

"Burn doesn't aim for the poetic subtlety of No Country or the goofy generational statement of Lebowski," writes Eric Kohn at the Jaman Blog. "Instead, the Coen brothers have doodled in the margins of their acclaimed careers, presenting a wild send-up of America's mangled security procedures and the West's revitalized fear of it."

"I would rank it up there with my two favorite Coen films, Fargo and O, Brother Where Art Thou?," writes Kim Voynar. Also at Cinematical, James Rocchi: "[T]he pleasure of seeing the big ensemble cast bite down hard on small parts until the juice drips down their chin is dry, funny and rich."

Paul Matwychuk and Michael Hingston of SEE Magazine discuss the film.

Eugene Hernandez explains himself.

Kevin Kelly chats with Pitt at the SpoutBlog.

FilmInFocus offers some behind-the-scene photos snapped on the set. Also: Jason Guerrasio talks with Will Russell and Scott Shuffitt, founders of Lebowski Fest and authors of I'm a Lebowski, You're a Lebowski: Life, The Big Lebowski, and What Have You.

Earlier: Reviews from Venice.

Updates, 9/10: "Say this for the Coen aesthetic: There's nothing these boys can't hold up to ridicule," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "Still, ethics more than aesthetics demand that a successful Coen film - namely The Big Lebowski - include at least one minimally sympathetic link on its chain of fools. [George] Clooney's amiably rancid charm doesn't quite serve; hence, Burn After Reading is a comedy without consequences."

"Burn After Reading may not have the sparse majesty of No Country - it may not go out of its way to tell you that We Are Getting Deep Up In Here - but in its own way its even more brutal assignation of moral confusion," argues Karina Longworth in the SpoutBlog.

"It's fair to call it a grim farce about vanity in an age of constant surveillance, but that might imply more ambition than does the movie itself," writes Jonathan Kiefer.

Burn "strikes me as one of the most willfully awful movies I've ever seen," declares Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer. "What makes it even worse is that every one of the 'name' performances - George Clooney, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich, Frances McDormand and Tilda Swinton - seem determined to best each other in projecting the idiocy of their caricatured middle-aged losers."

"[W]hat might have been a searing parody of contemporary Washington comes off instead as slight - a Me and You and Everyone We Know for misanthropes," writes Benjamin Strong in the L Magazine.

Updates, 9/12: "Jerry Lewis has made a brilliant career out of playing stupid, but you never feel as if he loathes his disorderly orderlies because they're slow on the uptake," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "The Coens in turn have made their careers with impeccable technique and an exaggerated visual style - they sure love their low-angle shots and traveling cameras - but it's a wonder they keep making films about a subject for which they often evince so little regard, namely other people."

"[I]t's entirely possible that Burn After Reading is some multifilm concept comedy - that No Country for Old Men was a feature-length diversionary tactic from the Coens' strategy of trying the patience of their most dedicated admirers," suggests Richard Corliss in Time. "They started with that aimless farce The Ladykillers and bring the geste to fruition with their latest enervating caper. If this is so, they've managed a pretty complex joke, and it's on you. Too bad it isn't funny."

"Part of the problem is a plot twist two-thirds of the way through that abruptly changes the tone from devil-may-care lark to nihilistic joke," argues Slate's Dana Stevens. "I've written before on the Coens' sadism toward their audience. The brothers' penchant for pulling out the rug from beneath our feet and then snickering when we fall down was what kept me from giving myself over to the otherwise powerful No Country for Old Men. A similar tactic undercuts the momentum of Burn After Reading; when something awful happens to one of the few characters worth rooting for, the energy simply rushes out of the movie."

"The film is hilarious in patches, shocking in patches, utterly convincing in patches and close to brilliant in patches," finds Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "As with the much-laureled No Country for Old Men, the Coens seem to be Mixmastering themes and elements of their earlier films; there are traces of Fargo, The Big Lebowski and Blood Simple in the DNA of Burn After Reading. But those comparisons aren't likely to benefit this work of lightweight inside-the-Beltway misanthropy, which possesses neither the morbid, cinematic gravity of their better crime films nor the absurd delirium of their best comedies."

"[T]he transition from Oscar-winning masterpiece to this mess is especially depressing," sighs David Fear in Time Out New York. "Burn After Reading is a disposable lark, and it's treated by the filmmakers as such; Forget After Seeing would be a far more honest title."

"No classic for old Coen fans, their new film... is nonetheless a perfectly enjoyable yarn," writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun. "It's a little like observing mice in tutus and tuxedos scurrying their silly ways through a maze, and, well, you couldn't ask for better choreographers."

"Burn doesn't look like comedies - especially those with such antic performances - are supposed to look, all bright light and reflective surfaces," notes Sam Adams in the Philadelphia City Paper. "It isn't edited that way, either. The Coens leave just enough air around their punch lines to give the movie a deadpan feel, as if reminding us that some jokes are funny right up the point that they're not."

"[T]his is about as dark and nihilistic as comedies are allowed to get before the laughter dies bitterly on your lips," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times.

"This is not a great Coen brothers' film," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. "Nor is it one of their bewildering excursions off the deep end. It's funny, sometimes delightful, sometimes a little sad, with dialogue that sounds perfectly logical until you listen a little more carefully and realize all of these people are mad."

"[W]hatever emotions are built up in the film's first two-thirds make the abrupt, goof-off ending feel that much more like a slap in face for even caring," writes Josef Braun in the Vue Weekly. "My advice would be not to bother caring, but still see the movie. It's pretty slight, adds up to very little, but nonetheless features enough inspired non-sequiters to entertain."

"It's like finding the current American condition unexpectedly reflected in a funhouse mirror. You may first resist the forced archness (an all-star, Oscar-rich cast cavorting like they don't know any better), but something's poignant in all this anarchy - even though the Coens never go for pathos," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "Expert satirists, the Coens leave modern absurdity in suspension. Burn After Reading pulls an enormously bold switcheroo: It evades the title's implied political parody - that hideous Borat shtick of laughing at others - to suggest that the most ridiculous, laughable Americans are ourselves."

"Burn's land of the perpetually deluded works as an amusing place to visit, but an even better place to flee," writes Keith Phipps at the AV Club.

Updates, 9/13: "Complaining that the Coen Brothers can be a little too smart-alecky is like bitching that de Sica was excessively humanistic: more than a little obvious, and completely beside the point," argues Glenn Kenny. "They am what they am, and putting aside the proposition that there's some moral/ethical prerogative to privilege humanism over smart-aleck-ness, how well you'll appreciate/enjoy these filmmakers' works depends on how readily you're willing to key into (which doesn't necessarily mean agree with) their perspectives. For myself, I found the Coens' latest, Burn After Reading, to be their most perfectly constructed live-action-cartoon film since Raising Arizona."

"A convoluted plot about misplaced documents is supposed to provide hilarity, but generic jokes about internet dating, automated phone systems, and daytime television aren't my idea of fun," writes Jürgen Fauth. "With nobody to care for and nothing at stake, Burn After Reading goes through its paces in fits and starts, lurching through scenes in which nasty, stupid people get increasingly nasty and stupid, with predictably violent results."

The Coens are "not just messing with you; by taking their last film's most significant criticism and making it even more noticeable, they're also making fun of themselves, and that idea of self-parody reverberates through every frame of their latest movie," argues Matt Singer at IFC.

"Tonally, Burn is something of a mess," writes Bill Weber in Slant. Still, "The jokey wrap-up of the film sees nearly all the principals' fates summarized or foretold by a flummoxed pair of intelligence higher-ups (David Rasche and JK Simmons) who've shrugged their way through developments surrounding the Cox disc ('Get back to me... when it makes sense'). While this smells of recurring Coen misanthropy, as a state-of-the-union punchline, it'll do; as obsessed as you may be about your serial fucking, cosmetic surgery or future in consulting, you're a few accidents away from having it all checkmarked away in a bureaucratic Olympus."

At the SpoutBlog, Kevin Kelly chats with Tilda Swinton and a bit longer with the Coens themselves.

Update, 9/14: "[O]ne gets the impression that with just a few cuts, the film could be a gut-busting laugh riot or a taut bit of suspense," writes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC. "What actually wound up on screen, however, feels like all and none of the above at the same time."

Posted by dwhudson at September 9, 2008 8:39 AM