At the Movies – The Little Lebowski
 
– By Mitch Silver –

If, like me, you loved the Coen brothers’ “Raising Arizona”, “Fargo” and “The Big Lebowski”, you’ll like “Burn After Reading”, their latest go at turning simpletons loose and watching them mess up.
What “Burn” has is a terrific cast having a terrific time. What it doesn’t have is a central character we can root for, an H. I. McDunnagh (Nick Cage), a Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) or a Dude (Jeff Bridges), showing us the world through their eyes and holding it all together. Instead, things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, and mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, as Yeats would have it. If you’re willing to settle for mere anarchy, “Burn After Reading” is an embarrassment of riches.
A disk containing the memoirs of Osborne Cox, a CIA agent who “doesn’t have a drinking problem” (John Malkovich), ends up in the hands of two grasping Washington, D.C., gym employees with thinking problems (McDormand and Brad Pitt), who attempt to sell it back to Malkovich and then, when that doesn’t work, to the Russians. Meanwhile, Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney), who can’t keep it in his pants, is having an affair with Malkovich’s uptight wife Katie (Tilda Swinton), who’s about to serve her husband with divorce papers, while he’s also “dating” McDormand’s Linda Lietzke, who is secretly loved by her shy gym manager, Richard Jenkins from “Six Feet Under”. Got it?
It takes about 20 minutes to get all the character introductions out of the way, and then the movie takes off. At which point, merriment ensues. Kind of.
Brad Pitt is really, really funny as boogalooing personal trainer Chad Feldheimer, whose only problem with extorting money from Malkovich is that he has to wear a suit. Clooney’s character has been given another of those bizarre tics. He had the thing about his hair and pomade in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and now it’s flooring. An accomplished DIYer who spends the middle part of the movie making something mysterious in his basement workshop, every time Clooney enters a room he looks down and tries to guess the hardwood underfoot. Just remember, you can’t spell “Clooney” without “looney”.
Actually, I thought the funniest single moment in the whole movie was when Swinton, in full “Michael Clayton” frostiness and with her British accent set on “snob”, turns out to be a pediatrician.
What there isn’t, is John Goodman. Remember him in “The Big Lebowski”, insisting to Steve Buscemi that he “doesn’t roll on Shabbos,” even though it’s his ex-wife who’s Jewish? He brought a passionate, monumental urgency to the trivial pursuits of that film, raising the absurd to the sublime.
The wonderful thing about the Coens is that they refuse to box themselves in: every “Fargo” is followed by a “Lebowski”. But sometimes you get
“Intolerable Cruelty”. Or, more intolerably, “The Ladykillers”.
The experience of “Burn” for me was like watching one of those Rube Goldberg contraptions where you set the little ball in motion and, on the way down, all sorts of wacky, improbable things keep it moving along until it gets to the bottom. And then it lies there.
What “Blood Simple” did for film noir and “Miller's Crossing” did for Warner Brothers gangster pictures and “Barton Fink” did for social realism, not to mention what “No Country for Old Men” did for westerns, “Burn After Reading” tries to do for political thrillers. Unfortunately, what it accomplishes is closer to what “The Hudsucker Proxy” did for ’30s screwball comedies: swing and miss.