A Washington
[Edits done 12/5/12 & 12/9/12. Edits 4/1/16.]
This movie may seem a little insubstantial on the one hand, and (in its short-scene, efficiently-edited way) complicated on the other, but it does a good job satirizing two things: in a more pitched way, spy/action movies and a certain air of Washington, D.C., self-importance on the one hand; and on the other hand, with more gentle satire, “the cry of the middle-aged person,” in terms of encountering midlife crises, obsessing about health, maybe stuck in a sort of personal rut….
Joel and Ethan Coen, the directors, speak in a making-of segment on how this movie came together (it had been started before or during the development of their Oscar-winning adaptation of the thriller No Country for Old Men [2007]), and they note that in part this one formed as it did because it made use of its several worth-getting actors at a point when they were all available. Hence, perhaps, the sketchy aspect of some points in the film, though throughout, it seems fairly well written on a line-by-line basis. So maybe one way to start a look at it is via its colorful characters, as a humorous use of the marquee actors playing them.
A set of distinctive characters for a hectic-accidents story
* Osborne Cox, played by John Malkovich, is a CIA analyst who is apparently erratic to the point where he is required to be demoted, in an interesting first scene in which a supervisor and others handle him (no exit is shown, with him allowed to collect his things in a box): he has a drinking problem, it is cited, and hence he is being taken out of “sig int” (meaning “signal interpretation”?) and the “Balkans desk.” Cox, defensive, goes into a fury, accusing them of playing office politics and performing a “crucifixion,” and heads out. He ends up quitting. Of course, next scene, he is making a mixed drink as his pediatrician wife comes home and he, knowing how dicey the prospect is, wants to tell her the news of his quitting. The role of Cox was written specifically for Malkovich, whom the Coens had never worked with before.
* Katie Cox, Osborne’s wife, played in cool-cucumber manner by Tilda Swinton, is later not pleased to find her husband has quit. It also happens she is having an extramarital affair with Harry Pfarrer (below). She is efficient and self-serious, and generally speaking, is disappointed in, or comes to have the basis to be disappointed in, the men in her life: her husband and boyfriend.
* Harry Pfarrer, played by George Clooney (with this role his third for the Coens since 2000), a federal marshal whom we first see Osborne and Katie mix with at a small party they host, including as guests Pfarrer’s wife and a few others. Pfarrer, a rather bumptious sort who has an eye for the work of wood flooring, is leery of Osborne’s sniffing out his affair with Katie. Meanwhile, his wife, a writer of children’s books played by Elizabeth Marvel, already seems to detect Harry’s affair.
Pfarrer, by the way, seems to have a surfeit of testosterone or something; as the movie winds through its subplots, we find he has affairs with other random women, including one less “fancy-pants” SES-wise than Osborne (and his wife), who is…
* Linda Litzke, played by Frances McDormand (who has worked with the Coens through several films, back to the 1980s), is a worker at a gym called Hardbodies, and in a sense she is the heart and soul of the film. We meet her in a plastic surgeon’s examination room, as she is getting surveyed, so to speak, for surgery to improve her physique. She is very conscious of her appearance, in part because she is rather obsessively interested in dating (while she also claims to an insurance rep that her job and its required exposure to customers mean she needs to look her best), but she finds that cost becomes a block to her getting those surgeries. She finds with her patient, careworn-looking boss Ted Treffon (Richard Jenkins, in another of his few roles for the Coens since at least 2003) that her employer’s insurance won’t cover the surgeries because they are elective. This is a setback, but she is determined.
* The most popular role and actor in this film, to judge from a cursory Google search—and probably not surprisingly, given the young who shape so much of the Internet’s “metes and bounds of values determining content”—is Chad Feldheimer, he of the tall-and-ill-streaked hair, played by Brad Pitt. Chad is the dimmest bulb in this set of characters, offering the most obvious comedy (e.g., as he is dressed in an ill-fitting formal suit, staking out Osborne’s Georgetown apartment, waiting to go in to search for more “marketable intelligence files,” he sings “Shake it down!” to whatever ass-moving swill he is listening to as ear-bud–pumped fare of choice for shooing away boredom, or accompanying vigorous workouts).
The plot (somewhat beside the point) gets underway
So there are different sets of mostly middle-aged people: on the federal-government side, Osborne who just left his job, and his snooty wife; and Harry Pfarrer and his author wife [added 4/1/16: the wives, by the way, aren't federal employees; my point should have been obvious]; and maybe you can throw in Osborne’s former colleagues at the CIA, who end up, in sober review of the wacky facts, somewhat doing a comedy routine in trying to comprehend the others’ inadvertent shenanigans in deadpan. On the Hardbodies side are Linda, Ted, and Chad
The secretary happens to patronize Hardbodies, and accidentally leaves the disk behind. Manola [sp?], a worker there, passes the disk on to Chad, who reviews the contents (there are both Osborne’s draft of the memoir he started writing after quitting, as well as his financial info) and is stunned and feels it is “secret intelligence shit,” and that it is valuable. He and Linda become partners in a venture mainly to help her: in returning the disk, as they plan, to Osborne (Chad
This is all the setup, pretty much, and I won’t tell too much more about the plot. This is a film to watch a few times, because though, on first viewing, it may seem a bit confusing at points, you appreciate how much it does in efficient style as you grow to understand the fancy plot. Especially appreciation-apt are the touches portraying middle-aged people’s simple styles of dealing with some muted version of despair due to aging: an obsession with fitness, worry about a body no longer so pretty….
Interestingly, the sex maniac Harry seems to have a lot in common with Linda—they both become daters, with Harry the real idiot in maintaining his affairs with both Katie and Linda [he also dates a third woman, briefly, amid the others]—and they both are also obsessed with physical fitness: Linda is a gym worker as well as concerned to get plastic surgery, and Harry is so fitness-obsessed that, more than once, no sooner does he finish in the commode after sex than he thinks he can “get a run in.” Toward the end of the film, grappling with depression understandable in the wake of his wife’s having filed for divorce, he gropes at the realization he can think better if he can just exercise, “butt-crunches, anything.”
(Another tiny subplot involves his working clandestinely in his cellar workshop, and it turns out he has been making an elaborate sex toy….)
And by the way, part of the spy-satire aspect of this film is the mysterious shadowing of various of the people in portentous cars…which we find are not only, in some instances, CIA operatives (in connection with Osborne’s situation) but also, more humorously, at least one private investigator hired in connection with a divorce action.
Glimpses of middle-aged “failure”
This movie is especially interesting, to a middle-aged sort like me, for its humorous look at the type of doldrums peculiar to the American middle-aged. The two actors who do the most to portray this are Malkovich and McDormand. (George Clooney’s Harry Pfarrer seems mainly a permanent sexual 16-year-old, and Brad Pitt rides the idiot button so hard for his Chad—he certainly is amusing—that he even is seen spinning in a swiveling chair at Linda Litzke’s apartment like a boneheaded high schooler.)
Malkovich’s Osborne Cox covers all the bases amusingly as someone who has lost (or abruptly left) his high-paying job, and has no prospects on the immediate horizon. He whiles away his time at home in a bathrobe, starts his memoir with lines read into a dictaphone that seem like self-parody (“We were young and…committed, and there was nothing we could not do”). When a call comes over the old-fashioned tape-style answering machine in the cellar (which greets callers with a portentous reference to the “Cox Group”—amazing how unimaginative we Americans are, to so often tart up a nothing business with “…Group”), he hastens downstairs only to find the caller is trying to reach his wife. He watches an idiotic daytime game show. He peers out a window desultorily in his bathrobe. Finally, when the proper time comes, he fixes his “ritual” drink. All this is probably too subtle for young viewers, but so funny to those of us who suddenly (newly “ascended” to the status of “redundant unemployed”) have to practice the voodoo—sometimes in stinky at-home clothes—of getting a new career going.
One detail of his life that I personally can’t relate to (but don’t need to) is how, after he’s seemed to have drifted in unemployment for a while, he goes to a class reunion at his old Ivy League college, and we see, in one long master shot, a set of aging/beefy sorts (some with cigars) gathered around a feast table in a “luxe” paneled room, like a nightmare of a Skull and Bones get-together, singing an asinine class song whose words you can’t fully understand, and don’t need to. And there is Osborne, recognizable amid the anonymous revelry, seeming consoled for one smoky night.
I went to only one college class reunion, in 1994, and it was OK (and actually, I was surprised how few classmates came to that one). What Osborne’s reunion reminds me of is what I think was called, at my university, the “University Club” on the third floor of the six-level Marvin Center, the huge student union at George Washington University that I worked at for a few years (while I was a student, and for a year-plus after graduating). The University Club was the only part of the Marvin Center (MC) that my job almost never required me to have anything to do with. It was a club dedicated to old alumni, and may have had special events that were of an exclusive variety (typically, students on the university grounds never went in there; certainly, there were numerous other eateries within the MC that catered to them). And as I look back, I think a fair amount of the University Club’s purpose was to allow wining/dining (hefty see-gars optional) of the sorts of folk who would eventually donate an appreciable sum to the university, or otherwise be of particularly efficient financial (and/or connections) use to the school. As I knew even then, the university—as they all are—was so often concerned to raise money. I don’t think I focused much, at age 23, on what purpose the (in particular) snooty University Club served in terms of keeping the school’s coffers as close to filled as possible.
McDormand’s Linda Litzke is comic, and pathetic in a way, and yet winsome (and she turns out to be almost the only main character who doesn’t come to a bad, or weirdly fleeing, end). She is obsessed with getting her body worked on. She can be fast-mouthed, a bit bitchy, hectoring in talking to others with an end to getting her money for her surgery. She spouts platitudinous middle-class-ass talk when trying to move someone (she chides Ted, who usually is patient and kind enough to her, with, doesn’t he know the power of positive thinking?, when the issue is dealing with a payroll company in a manner that she refuses to understand is not feasible). Eventually, she berates Ted with his failure, in her eyes, to be a “can-do” person, and (absurdly, per the movie’s comic style) claims that goofy Chad
Coens’ technical helpers add class to a “small” movie
Carter Burwell, the “underscore” composer for many of the Coens’ films, adds his usual tasteful music here. Of course, in good part it is meant to underscore the satire side of the film—drums that are meant to playfully echo the pomposity of less ironic fare, making this, as Ethan Coen remarks, their version of a “Tony Scott/Bourne Identity” movie, “without the explosions” (this, of course, was recorded years before Tony Scott’s death, on which see early in my August 28 entry, which is a review of Ridley Scott’s American Gangster). When Burn’s trademark drums aren’t adding a little levity, Burwell can add tasteful strings or such that underscore the occasional mood of tragedy, or a certain afternoon-of-life melancholy, to this film, rather as he does with the one that immediately followed it, A Serious Man (2009).
Important production notables who often turn up in the Coens’ making-of docs speak on the DVD for this film, too: Jess Gonchor, the production designer, and Mary Zophres, the costume designer. Anyone who wonders what these two kinds of moviemaking professionals do can hear these two’s comments on the DVDs for this film, A Serious Man, and the remake of True Grit (2010), and realize what an art (and set of time-consuming labor) their functions can be.
Roger Deakins, who has been the distinctive cinematographer on most of the Coens’ films back to the early 1990s, was not available to contribute to this movie. Instead, the Coens used Emmanuel Lubezki, whose work here gives this film a sort of clear-eyed but digital-video look, not the usual “clinically clear” analog-type photography Deakins can render.
Note: This film has some nasty curses (apparently to contribute the kind of “porn thread” that I’ve previously suggested films, for wide distribution, have had to have). This can be compared with A Serious Man, where, interestingly, the adults largely don’t curse too terribly (and, the story being within a Midwestern Jewish community, referring to “Hashem” and other ritual usages pop up), but the main character’s two kids use pretty coarse language (with each other) at times.
Added 12/5/12: I was remiss in forgetting to say something about J.K. Simmons, who plays the CIA supervisor of the underling (the character Palmer) who has proceeded to demote Cox when Cox quit. Simmons is pungent in his two short scenes with Palmer (and Simmons has worked with the Coens before, too--at least in The Ladykillers [2004], as the factotum/handyman Garth Pancake among a group of thieves, who always envisions the solution to a sudden problem with "Easiest thing in the world!"). In Burn, Simmons is alert and pithy in performing his role (and shows part of why the film got an R rating--his use of the term clusterfrig [not the exact word] to describe in thumbnail fashion what tragedies have befallen the group of Cox, Pfarrer, Litzke, and others). Simmons is a solid character actor, having done such side-character work as the bombastic newspaper editor in the Sam Raimi-directed Spider-Man films. He is somewhat like the actor Mort Mills was in the 1950s-60s; Mills played the roadside cop in Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), the assistant D.A. in Welles' Touch of Evil (1958), and the fake-farmer/government agent in Hitchcock's Torn Curtain (1966). Mills was a flavorful small-part player in major movies--not leading-man material, but memorable in his roles. Simmons is the same way today. And he isn't entirely picky about his choice of acting work. Lately, along with all else, he has played a sort of nondescript manager in TV commercials for an insurance company.
Amusing details about the legal profession
If you thought I was, actually I’m not going to remark much on the aspects of the legal profession that are vividly portrayed in this film (how do you like the weaselly private investigator whom Harry tackles, who works for the fictional law firm of [phonetic spelling] Tuckman Marsh Halperin and Rodino?), I don’t need to. For further information on that area of detail for this movie, see my blog entry of March 14, “Served. Witnessed. Have a Nice Day: The Coen brothers’ edifying portrayal of practicing lawyers in their movies, Part 1 of 2.” (You can also find a sort of “director’s dossier” in this March entry.)
