Burn After Reading
US 2008
Starring: George Clooney, Frances McDormand
Directors: Ethan Coen and Joel Coen
Bigga Than Ben
UK 2008
Starring: Ben Barnes, Andrei Chadov
Director: SE Halewood
How To Lose Friends and Alienate People
UK/US 2008
Starring: Simon Pegg, Kirsten Dunst, Megan Fox, Jeff Bridges
Director: Robert Weide
JOEL and Ethan Coen have always been connoisseurs of irony – the more bitter, the better – and so they probably appreciate the fact that, of their three outings as co-directors (the first 10 pictures, from 1984’s Blood Simple to 2003’s Intolerable Cruelty, were credited solely to Joel), the most award-garlanded and critically-lauded has also been the least satisfactory. The status of No Country For Old Men started to ebb the nanosecond it was named Best Picture at the Oscars (the Coen brothers also nabbed twin Best Director statuettes), and posterity will surely recognise 2004’s woefully underrated Ladykillers remake and now Burn After Reading as much more praiseworthy achievements.
Then again, august bodies such as the Academy are always keener to award ostentatiously serious/tragic work like No Country, even if it’s actually much harder to pull off the lighter, more straightforwardly comic genre which Burn After Reading so unashamedly occupies. This is a neo-screwball farce with darkish geo-political undertones, executed with intelligence, flair and genuine wit, resulting in one of the year’s most enjoyable, most jauntily larkish releases.
The plot is a daft and deft gavotte revolving around a misplaced disc which contains the (absurdly self-aggrandising) memoirs of whisky-supping, ex-CIA analyst Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich). Said McGuffin inadvertently finds its way into the maladroit hands of a pair of Washington DC-area gym employees Linda (Frances McDormand) and hyperactive dim-bulb Chad (Brad Pitt – never better and eminently Oscar-worthy), who embark on a clumsy form of blackmail. This causes all manner of complications for Harry (George Clooney), the satyr-like Federal Marshal who’s having a fling with Linda and has also been canoodling with Cox’s über-arch wife (Tilda Swinton). Complications rapidly ensue, with results that are always amusing and occasionally downright hilarious: this is that rare film which is as just much fun for the viewer to watch as it seems to have been for cast and crew to make.
Although its aggressively flip, take-no-prisoners cynicism may not please everyone, Burn After Reading has a puckish brio which barrels us along through situations which are objectively ridiculous but which, in this context, seem to make perfect, if slightly skewed sense. Grace-notes and delicious dialogue come thick and fast in a film which may not, in the day’s coldest light, add up to anything resembling a hill of beans, but is perhaps the most purely satisfying thing the Coens have put their names to since Blood Simple.
In 2001, Sergei Sakin and Pavel Tetersky made an unlikely splash in the Moscow publishing-scene with their debut book Bolshe Bena. A runaway youth-market bestseller and also named the year’s best literary debut, it’s the slangy diary of the pair’s hectic 1999 sojourn in a London apparently teeming with opportunity. The self-confessed “scumbags” eked out a living by whatever means necessary: petty theft, minor scams and breezy frauds. The Moscow Times wrote at the time that their cross between A Clockwork Orange, Trainspotting and Down and Out in Paris and London “brilliantly captures the cliché of the contemporary young Russian male: hard-edged, dishonest and callous, distilling his creative flair into nefarious, if not criminal activity. Sakin’s example is not exactly luminous. Now he’s waiting for Hollywood to call.”
In fact it wasn’t Hollywood but Halewood – SE (Suzie) – who came calling and has now produced this adaptation. Bigga Than Ben is, given the subject matter, a suitably scrappy, low-budget debut from the writer-director. Digitally-shot around many of the capital’s seamier backwaters, it follows Spiker (Andrei Chadov) and Cobakka (Ben Barnes) as they “study capitalism” in “foggy Albion”, commenting on their own adventures and misadventures via copious voiceovers. This technique is just one among countless post-modern tricks deployed to spice up visuals and audio in a movie which firmly embraces the MTV-aesthetic so beloved of youth from Victoria to Vladivostok.
Cast long before his career-making turn as Prince Caspian, Barnes is unrecognisable from the clean-cut hero of Narnia. Scraggle-bearded, chain-smoking, the 27-year-old is sufficiently Slavic-looking (he resembles a dissolute version of tennis player Goran Ivanisevic) to pass muster alongside real-deal Chadov. While bolstering his pin-up status, Barnes also serves notice that there’s also talent beneath the smouldering exteriors. His dour charisma helps to ensure the protagonists prove intriguing company over the brisk running-time and it’s commendable that at no stage is their all-too-believable racism soft-pedalled – although exposure to London’s melting-pot soon erodes such unappetising tendencies. Initially larky and jaunty, proceedings lose their brio somewhat in the latter stages as events take a more serious turn, but the slick cinematography by Ben Moulden (remarkably, this is his first feature) remains a constant plus.
Neil Young
THE screen adaptation of Toby Young’s entertaining memoir, How To Lose Friends and Alienate People was one of the autumn’s most anticipated Brit flicks. Why, then, is the result such a laughter-lite experience?
The first mistake was to fictionalise the account in order to preserve the reputations of all those tarnished by Young’s crash and burn. He was head-hunted by the editor of Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter, and given a contract to work at the magazine’s New York headquarters in an unspecified position. Once in New York, he succeeded in alienating not his friends but his benefactors, failing to find an outlet for his laddish, slightly irreverent humour.
Producer Stephen Woolley downplays Toby’s class origins by casting Simon Pegg as Sidney Young, an every-prat who leaves behind the squabbling over the fax machine at the Post-Modern Review (headquarters, a flat above a kebab shop) for an apartment in Lower Manhattan (another flat above a kebab shop). This is one of the better inventions of a screenplay credited to Peter Straughan. The other is a line about Sidney’s philosopher father (Bill Paterson), who thinks that: “Brad Pitt is a cave in Yorkshire”. The plot then involves Sidney becoming besotted with a rising starlet, Sophie Maes (Megan Fox) while bonding with a rejected co-worker, Alison (Kirsten Dunst).
Readers familiar with Toby’s memoir will recognise Gillian Anderson playing a younger version of the publicist Pat Kingsley and the star quizzed about his sexuality as Nathan Lane. Most of the crude humour involving a stripper, a pig and a dog (in separate scenes, you will be relieved to note) comes directly from the book. The scenes involving a wunderkind director (Max Minghella, son of the late Anthony Minghella) whom Sidney is keen to rubbish do not. They are used to illustrate Sidney’s alleged loss of idealism.
The film attempts to make one good point about the difference between the print media in the United States and in Britain, namely that stars in the US court journalists to make or re-make their reputation, whereas in this country they don’t. But actually, the only difference is that in America stars can earn more.
At his core, even as played by Pegg, Sidney Young remains hard to like. One suspects that Toby Young would have dearly wanted to play the part himself. How to lose Friends is structured like a conventional romantic comedy. It feels as compromised as Sidney’s piece on the director whom he despises. It certainly does not need the big farcical movie awards setpiece at the climax. Crucially, it lacks verisimilitude. The title is misleading, since Sidney does not make friends much less lose them. It only lives up to the alienating part, as mainstream audiences fail to see the funny side.
Patrick Mulcahy
