Dir.
Ethan & Joel Coen, US/ UK/ France, 2008, 96 mins
Cast: Frances McDormand, Brad Pitt, George Clooney
Review by Carol Allen
After the drama of No
Country for Old Men, the Coen Brothers’ latest
offering is a comedy. Their subject matter this time is politics
and espionage, though a film in which everyone in both Washington
and the Virginia headquarters of the CIA, is either as thick
as two short planks or totally corrupt, and usually both,
may well be funnier to the Americans than to us.
McDormand and Pitt play Linda and
Chad, who work in the Hardbodies Fitness Centre. Linda
is obsessed with her plans for extensive cosmetic surgery
and how to find the money for it. When they find a computer
disc in the locker room, which they’re convinced contains CIA secrets, the two
friends think they’ll make their fortune by selling
it to the Russians — how sweetly old fashioned and
out of date of them. The disc is actually the memoirs of
CIA analyst Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), recently sacked
for his heavy boozing. Osborne’s hard headed wife Katie
(Tilda Swinton) is planning to leave him for Harry (Clooney)
a federal marshall, who’s also a serial philanderer.
When Harry also gets involved with Linda via the internet,
the two plots spiral into each other and out of control,
culminating in Harry, who’s never fired his gun before,
being responsible for a body in the bedroom closet, along
with a whole lot more mayhem and involved screwball plotting.
The strength of the film is the cast,
who all do their stuff well. But while it’s reasonably entertaining, the script
isn’t top class Coen Brothers and the film is neither
fast, nor furious enough and not nearly as funny as it thinks
it is. The funniest performance is Pitt, playing the sweet-natured,
endearing and totally dumb Chad, a body beautiful with a
pea brain and sporting a wonderfully silly hairdo. The bearded
Clooney is charming and sexy, which is not exactly stretching
him as an actor, but he makes Harry’s stupidity, which
is approaching the level of Chad’s, and his hypochondria
amusing. McDormand is incapable of giving anything less than
a good performance but any hopes that Linda with her blind
determination to re-invent herself would be up there with
Marge, the folksy, smart, pregnant cop from Fargo are sadly
dashed. Swinton, virtually the only one of the bunch who
isn’t stupid, is crisp, on-the-ball and a bit scary,
while Malkovich doesn’t have a lot to do except get
very, very cross. The only character the film’s makers
don’t seem to hold in contempt is Richard Jenkins,
as Linda’s kind hearted and diffident boss, who’s
secretly and hopelessly in love with her. In many ways the
funniest scene of the film is right at the end, when the
mayhem is over and no one, neither the characters nor us,
is quite sure what’s happened but the CIA chief (J.K.
Simmons) is congratulating himself on once more successfully
sweeping whatever it was under the carpet.
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