Random Acts

Tilda Swinton and John Malkovich in Burn After Reading

Stephanie Bunbury
October 7, 2008

Contrary to popular assumption, the Coen Brothers are not especially wacko; unless you work with them, when they apparently turn into all five Marx brothers and keep their casts in stitches, they are not especially funny, either. Journalists turning up to press conferences expecting them to roll out off-the-wall one-liners worthy of The Big Lebowski or to be as crazed as Barton Fink are invariably surprised, then annoyed. Why aren't they being funny? Why won't they perform? Why aren't they like their films?

Actually, it's surprising the people who actually turn out to be really funny. Tom Hanks in real life, for example, has a great throwaway delivery, which is perhaps why the Coens wanted him in what turned out to be their least successful film, the remake of The Ladykillers. You can sense how hilarious the Coens must be when George Clooney does his corker imitation of Joel asking him to work on O Brother Where Art Thou? That film was a commercial success in the United States but critically dismissed elsewhere, partly because Clooney playing jokes was such a terrible ham. Off screen, he's relentlessly funny.

And on screen, Brad Pitt is something of a revelation in the Coens' new comedy caper about the Washington spy business, Burn After Reading, in which he plays a dim-witted gym instructor permanently encased in Lycra. Some critics have damned Burn After Reading with faint praise by saying that, whatever the virtues of the Coens' bizarre camera angles, it just isn't funny enough to be classed as a comedy. Perhaps not, but seeing the blond half of the world's most famous adoptive parents sitting in a car arm-dancing to his iPod, however, is certainly one of the funniest things I hope to see on screen this year.

But that's the thing about the Coens: they are not knee-slapping funny men. What they are, in every sense, is random. The way they shoot a film, coming at the action from every angle but straight-up, suggests ways of thinking that cannot keep to any beaten track. Their conversation proves just as disorienting. Talking about Burn After Reading, they treat questions about corruption in Washington's corridors of power in exactly the same way they do the cracks about Brad Pitt's hairstyle: as if they, too, were faintly baffled by all of it. Why did they make a spy movie? Joel Coen says he thinks it was because they hadn't done it before. "Honestly, it could have been a dog movie," he says, bemused. "Or an outer space movie."

There is nothing random, however, about the Coens' approach to a script; Burn After Reading, as befits its subject, has a plot so tightly knotted within itself that nobody could hope to unpick it all in a couple of hours. John Malkovich plays Osborne Cox, an enormously self-important CIA analyst who, finding himself sidelined, walks out threatening to write a book that will blow the lid on the agency. He then proceeds to write a turgid memoir during the gaps between consolatory drinks.

Little does he know that his irascible wife Katie, played by Tilda Swinton, is plotting to dump him for a philandering federal marshal, Harry Pfarrer, played by George Clooney, the third in what he calls his "trio of idiots" he has played for the Coens.

Their affair is on the rocks, however, a fact clear to everyone apart from sourpuss Katie. On the advice of her lawyer, she hacks into her husband's PC whenever he is out of the house to download anything financial that might come up in a future divorce settlement.

What she actually downloads is his memoir, which she then unintentionally leaves in her gym locker. The disk is found by Pitt's Chad and his colleague and buddy Linda Litzke, played by Frances McDormand, who is desperate to raise money to pay for plastic surgery. When they download it to discover Osborne Cox's dissertation on spying, Linda thinks she has found something secret she can sell. She and Chad have seen a few spy movies themselves, as it turns out. Off they go to the Russian embassy.

Tilda Swinton is the newest recruit to the Coens' fold; many of their team, on both sides of the camera, have been with them since they made their first film, Blood Simple. "The Coen brothers are a very unique phenomenon in that they write these immaculate scripts," she says. "And it's a particular thing to go into their universe. One of the pleasures of having worked for 20 years and having seen someone else you admire also work for 20 years - while being an enormous fan - is that you know what that universe is. There it is: they make Coen Brothers films. What else would they do?

"But what became very clear to me when I met them, which wasn't a surprise but was new information, was that what they want is for people to come and play. Some filmmakers ask you to leave yourself outside, sometimes with incredible effect, really using the raw material of you in ways you couldn't on your own, but with the Coens it's more like a skipping game, where they constantly dare you. They do this thing where they laugh during the takes - I don't know how it works, but very often you are in the middle of a shot and you can hear them guffawing in the background." If you don't hear that laughter, she says, you can start to panic. The pressure to be funny comes from every which way, it seems.

The day after she sees the film for the first time at the Venice Film Festival, however, she agrees quite emphatically that Burn After Reading is not really a comedy, just something like one. "I was amazed that my American colleagues had constantly told me how funny it was. It is genuinely funny, but it isn't a comedy, I think. And on one level it is very depressing: these characters are all so obsessed, paranoid, isolated and alienated, infantilised and kind of up a gum tree."

It would be quite possible, in fact, to read Burn After Reading as a satire on a society that is sick to death of itself, but with a conspiratorial twist: something in the spirit of The Manchurian Candidate or Dr Strangelove. The brothers have consistently denied making their films with any political intent and maintain the same line with this one; Burn After Reading, according to the Coens, is not a political film in any meaningful way. "Although it does hark back to the paranoia movies that were kind of popular in the '60s," offers Ethan. "Our movie is more about those movies than politics."

Frances McDormand's character, Ethan goes on, was based on Linda Tripp, who was the sinister older friend of Monica Lewinsky who instructed her not, on any account, to get her stained blue dress dry-cleaned. As the Lewinsky affair dragged on through the presidential impeachment, Linda Tripp had a succession of cosmetic surgery procedures. "She completely redid her appearance from the beginning of this political scandal to the end of it," says Joel, wonderingly. "So take away all the political intrigue and the character itself is interesting."

For Swinton, the fact that the story takes place in Washington, which thus becomes a cauldron of human error, has its own significance. "We've all suspected it for a while, but it's good to see it played out. In terms of my own character, there is something really funny about being so angry all the time." In real life, she says, she is scarcely ever angry. "I can always find an alternative; the few times I've been angry I've very often laughed at the same time. I appreciate anger exists, but it always seems the most exhausting option to me. So it amuses me, but it also moves me; I find it touching that someone has decided to be angry all the time." In a strange way, she says, Katie is like the younger sister of the vicious go-getter she played in Michael Clayton, the role that won her an Oscar as best supporting actress last year.

She was one of the few, it seemed, who wasn't picking up a gong for the Coen Brothers' last film, the modern western No Country For Old Men. There was another seemingly random event in their shared anti-career. From the outside, there seemed no particular reason why it should be this film, above all the others, that scooped all those awards. They still seem to be puzzled by that entire experience. "It's funny," muses Ethan. "There is something very odd about it. It goes right in the Life is Strange box. It was never an ambition to ... win an Academy Award, so when it happens you go 'weird!'"

What about Oscar night? Do they enjoy it? "Well, you know," says Joel in the drawl Clooney does so well, "the first time we went was really interesting because it was a new experience. It's like a lot of things. You know the saying: once is an experiment; twice, you're a pervert. You know, it's long and tedious." Ethan chips in. "Well, there is a bar." Who knows if they will be propping it up again? If it happens, it happens. And it will be, as always, slightly weird.

Burn After Reading screens from October 16.