When Barton Fink won the Palm d'Or at Cannes back in 1991, the advance word declared that it was a Coen brothers movie for people who ordinarily can't stand Coen brothers movies (even though, in retrospect, that film introduced numerous stylistic flourishes and thematic concerns that remain major elements in their arsenal). The same can be argued, much more effectively, about their Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men--it's serious, and literary to boot! Which explains both why the anticipation for their follow-up effort was particularly feverish and why many of the critical reactions it's elicited have been lukewarm and rather befuddled.
It's a Coen brothers movie, stupid. Or, rather, it's a "stupid" Coen brothers movie--in the best sense, much like Fargo, their most generally well-regarded film prior to tackling Cormac McCarthy. In fact, Burn After Reading is, in a nutshell, Fargo relocated and re-imagined with real life movie stars, substituting the Greater D.C. area for the Upper Midwest, John Malkovich for William H. Macy, George Clooney and Brad Pitt for Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare, Tilda Swinton for whoever that lady was that played Macy's wife, and Frances McDormand in a blonde wig for Frances McDormand in a pregnant suit. In both instances, the casts are uniformly terrific, but here the Coen's pull off a neat trick that wasn't necessarily available to them a dozen years ago: they've convinced A-listers to play hysterically exaggerated versions of themselves--George Clooney's the say-anything womanizer, Malkovich is the uber-effete intellectual with an explosive temper, Swinton's the chilliest of ice queens--and, arguably, the most famous (and famously handsome) actor in the world to play a full-on dork.
Those who've accused Burn After Reading of being a film about nothing may have a point, but it's clearly not one that eludes its creators. This one is nothing if not ingeniously self-reflexive. J.K. Simmons' CIA boss is an audience surrogate of sorts, sighing and rolling his eyes at the increasingly convoluted and seemingly pointless narrative developments (which play more as digressions, natch). And when Frances McDormand's Linda catches a comedy on a date with a humorless government employee, his stone-faced lack of amusement suggests viewers expecting a more "mature" follow-up to No Country. You might say, then, this a Coen brothers movie for people who love Coen brothers movies, aimed less at folks who Tivo the Oscar ceremony than at the cultists organizing Big Lebowski-themed meet-ups and rewatching Raising Arizona on basic cable for the umpteenth time.
As new territory goes, Burn After Reading is a clever riff on JFK-style conspiracy thrillers, but all their signature touches and concepts are here: desperate people in way over their heads (the film's oft-echoed refrain is "What the fuck?!"), eccentric types congregating in highly specific locations (this time, a chain gym called Harbodies in lieu of a bowling alley), and, above all, Murphy's Law as an omnipotent force of nature.
As in Burn, the narrative momentum in Kim Ki-duk's stunning Time is propelled by an overwhelming sense of you-can't-undo-what's-done anxiety and (incidentally) by a desire for the fresh start promised by major cosmetic surgery. Kim's film centers on Seh-hee, a young woman so jealous of her boyfriend's supposed flirting with other women that she has her face completely surgically altered. From there, things (as in the Coenverse) spin dramatically out of control, as love, sex, fear, and (self-) loathing blur into a nightmare mosaic of modern life.
Kim tosses so much out there idea-wise, and leaves enough of it on the table, tantalizingly unresolved, that Time's lingering effect is ambiguous. In a film defined by the extremes of human nature (if this is ever remade by Hollywood, some game actress just might snag herself an Oscar), the final scene is a harsh stroke of organic poetry. It's also representative of a purposeful formal playfulness that Kim balances deftly with his story's tragic dimensions. The film's most haunting scene, however, comes just before the operation that sets the plot in motion: Seh-hee touches her face--lovingly, wistfully--for the last time before getting a new one, as if she's telling a loved one goodbye for a very long while. For a moment that goes (presumably) someplace most of us have never been before, it feels painfully familiar.
