One of the things I’ve always admired about Joel and Ethan Coen is how effortlessly they wear their genius. They rarely give interviews, and when they do, they mostly just joke around. It’s not that they’re rude or pretentious about it. They just want to do their job rather than talk about it. Their quiet demeanor contrasts sharply with the passion of hard-core Cobroheads (I’m one of them) who marvel at the self-paced nature of these middle-class Midwesterners.
18 classics in 40 years (with a few near misses or not) is quite an accomplishment, especially when you’re working with family. I don’t begrudge them for being apart now, but I can’t say their solo career hasn’t been a disappointment.
Joel and Ethan Coen are not strict Jews, but the artist they most remind me of is Flannery O’Connor, a devout Catholic, whose work is also full of comical grotesquery.
Joel’s “Macbeth”? It’s hard to get the script wrong, but anyone could have performed it. Ethan’s new film, “Drive Away Dolls,” a 1990s lesbian/crime tale, is self-conscious and uninteresting. (You could have easily said that if you saw Cohen’s wife and co-author Tricia Cooke talk openly about “queer identity” and “activist spaces” in interviews.)
The Coen brothers are emotionless engineers. They ignore their feelings from there. Critics often mistake this for cruelty. They accuse the brothers of torturing the characters and watching with ruthless amusement as they meet horribly violent ends. But it is their godlike detachment from the world they create that makes their time there so rewarding.
2008’s Burn After Reading opens with a scene looking at Earth from space, with CIA boss J.K. Simmons half-heartedly trying to figure out the gist of all the intricate conspiracies we’ve witnessed. , and ends with failure. “Please report back when you know what I mean,” he shrugged.
Unlike Simmons, we get to see all the comically flawed deep staters (George Clooney as a flirtatious FBI agent obsessed with cardio, John Malkovich as a cranky Princeton-educated groomer) I understand why the CIA guys do the things they do. They are too self-centered and arrogant to correctly interpret any “intelligence” they come across.
As a result, many unnecessary massacres occur. The movie doesn’t tell us how we’re supposed to feel about it, so for example, the scene with the stupidly overconfident personal trainer played by Brad Pitt (“He thinks that’s the problem”) Now let’s laugh at the absurdity of it. schwinn!Or that the only semi-likable character (played by the soulful Richard Jenkins, an unlocked Orthodox priest turned manager of Hardbodies Gym) is that no good deed goes unpunished. When you embody the old adage,
Do our desperate attempts to make sense of things look more competent from above? Featuring the most blinkered and clumsy ghost this side of Russiagate, “Burn After Reading” surprises us. Joel and Ethan Coen are not strict Jews, but the artist they most remind me of is Flannery O’Connor, a devout Catholic, whose work is also full of comical grotesquery. Human existence is a conspiracy, and none of us are smart enough to unravel it ourselves. If you look past the hilarity and watch “Burn After Reading,” you’ll find it to be quite humbling.
