The Coen brothers released what is arguably their best film ever last year: No Country for Old Men. Even though I felt that P.T. Anderson's There Will Be Blood should have won best picture (or, more precisely, that it was simply the best picture of the year if not of the last ten years), I had little to complain about since No Country would have been a knockout winner in just about any other year.
While Anderson, who is anything but prolific, has retreated back into hibernation mode (perhaps hanging out with Maya Rudolph and directing Saturday Night Live skits ... seriously, that's what he did in his spare time between films), the Coen brothers quickly came out with their follow up, Burn After Reading. As might be expected, the film is something of a letdown. It's just impossible to follow up such a perfect film like No Country. Of course, one could argue that the Coens had no intention of offering a "follow-up" ... that's why they went in a completely different direction, switching from a dark drama with an idiosyncratic comedy.
The Coen brothers went through this same thing in the 90s when they followed up the award-winning Fargo with The Big Lebowski. While Lebowski has achieved amazing cult status, it was initially slammed by both critics and audience. It was only years later that the film gained any kind of real popularity.
So, is Burn After Reading going to experience the same sort of cult status? Probably not. I think Burn is a perfectly fine film and I didn't feel like I had wasted two hours of my life watching it but there's a certain flatness to the film that doesn't quite work. The Coen brothers are masters of the one-dimensional: that is, they take characters that don't have much depth in the traditional sense, characters who are defined by a particular belief or ideology. Usually, they are able to create a unique one-dimensional depth -- a character may be defined by one idea but by the end of the film you know that idea inside and out (consider the characters of the Dude and Walter from the aforementioned Lebowski). In Burn, the Coen brothers redeploy this same strategy but, again, there's a complete flatness. It's not that I don't understand what drives each character (that's completely meaningless in this type of film), it's just that I don't care about them in any way.
The one great highlight of the film are the few short snippets featuring J.K. Simmons (one of my favorite character actors who has played everything from a criminal psychologist on Law and Order to a sadistic white supremacist in Oz and is probably best known today as the father in Juno). Much like Russel Brand's role in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Simmons' stellar moments only underscored how underwhelming the rest of the film truly was.
0 Comments
|
Archives
January 2016
|