By REED TUCKER
Posted: 2:20 am
September 7, 2008
OR such smart guys, Joel and Ethan Coen sure know idiots. The brotherly team - which writes, directs, produces, edits and does everything short of catering their movies - has made a string of films, going back to 1984's "Blood Simple," that usually feature people so dim, they would have lost on the rigged quiz shows of the 1950s.
Remember Nicolas Cage's H.I. McDunnogh in "Raising Arizona" who held up a liquor store for diapers? Or Jeff Bridges' pot-addled Dude (see related story) in "The Big Lebowski"? Or the world's worst kidnappers in "Fargo"?
These are not guys who would ever be recruited for sperm bank donations.
Last year's Oscar-winning epic "No Country for Old Men," as brilliant as it was, felt like a bit of a departure for the Coens. Its dusty cinematography and brutal violence didn't quite feel at home tone-wise in the brothers' catalog.
About the only idiotic thing in the whole movie was Javier Bardem's pageboy haircut - or maybe Josh Brolin's decision to return to the drug-deal massacre site. But with "Burn After Reading," opening Friday, the brothers get back to doing what they do best - absurdist comedy featuring a bunch of rubes.
This time the brothers are taking on Washington, DC, idiots, a topic more fertile than the Mesopotamian crescent. If you can't find absurdity inside the Beltway, you should just give up and become a priest or an accountant. Or run for Congress.
"Burn After Reading," as Coen movies so often do, revolves around an inept attempt at crime. Two air-headed personal trainers (Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand) find a CD they think contains CIA secrets, so they set out to blackmail the disc's owner (John Malkovich) in order to pay for McDormand's much-desired plastic surgery.
It will shock no one to learn that nothing goes quite according to plan.
