Brad Pitt in ‘Burn After Reading,’ which comes to the Del Mar midnight movie series this weekend.
The Coen brothers make three types of films. The first two are simple enough. There are the instant crowd pleasers like Fargo, O Brother, Where Art Thou? and No Country for Old Men. Then there are the movies they seem to make as a response to those successes, as if they really can’t stand to see people enjoying their movies so much: Barton Fink and The Man Who Wasn’t There are the best examples.
Like everyone, I like every film in the first category. I mean, have you ever heard a single person say they didn’t like Fargo? What would such a person even be like, besides a hideous human being? Good lord, have you ever even heard anyone say they didn’t like the True Grit remake? And that movie isn’t even that good! It’s just goddamn likeable. It’s impossibly charming, in a way that only the Coens can be, when they’re pouring it on. Don’t even get me started on Raising Arizona, a movie only disliked by horrifying freaks, who also hate kittens and rainbows. I haven’t looked up its Rotten Tomatoes rating, but I’m sure it’s around 5000 percent fresh.
Their second category of film is as unbearable as the first is irresistible. Barton Fink is a miserable, miserable movie about miserable people, and although people have been trying to make it into a cult film for years, they really ought to stop. I liked the bleak existentialism of The Man Who Wasn’t There, and I bought the DVD imagining hours of, I guess, somewhat depressing semi-fun. I have not even taken the wrapper off, to this day.
That’s the thing: I don’t find a ton of re-watchability in either the Coens’ crowd pleasers or their anti-pleasers. Certainly I’ve watched several of them more than once, but I don’t keep coming back to them over and over for new layers of meaning.
Luckily, there’s the third, rarest kind of Coen brothers film: the sleeper. The cult favorite. The masterpiece that comes on slow. The Big Lebowski is the most obvious of these, as it took years for it to go from box-office failure to possibly the most universally beloved comedy of the last two decades. And how did it get there? Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of multiple viewings by fans all around the world. It’s just the ultimate movie for seeing something new every single time you watch it. The Hudsucker Proxy has a similar cult following.
There’s one Coen sleeper, though, that I think is just in the earliest stages of being discovered, and that’s Burn After Reading. Like many people, I didn’t think much of it the first time I saw it. But something made me watch it again, and then again, and again—and every time I liked it a little bit more.
Now I watch it regularly, and it reminds me very much of Lebowski in that and so many other ways. (It’s worth noting that when it came out in 2008, Burn After Reading was the first film the Coens had written themselves in seven years.) Both films feature bizarre, exaggerated views of the world, almost like they’re set in alternate universes. And they’re such detailed worlds, too, with their own rules. They both have plots so complicated, you can’t even follow them on first viewing—and so meaningless that in the end their complexity amounts to nothing.
Instead, the joy in both films is watching the characters; not so much real people as twisted reflections of real people, turned up to 11 for maximum comedic effect. There is hopefully no one quite as vacuous as Brad Pitt’s Chad in Burn After Reading, no one as buffoonish as George Clooney’s Harry (his delivery of the simple line “Hello” after his run in with Pitt in this movie is the single funniest thing I have ever seen Clooney do), no one as pointlessly determined as Frances McDormand’s Linda. But they’re absolutely hilarious to watch, and like Walter, Donnie and the Dude, they make this a Coen Brothers classic with nothing but upside.
Burn After Reading plays Friday and Saturday at midnight at the Del Mar in Santa Cruz.
