George Clooney (32 page)

Characters are surrounded by ambiguities. For example, we do not know if Ozzie is actually good at his job. From his confidence, slight high-handedness to others, and constant swearing, we might assume this to be so. He acts in an extremely eccentric way, from his drinking and falling asleep facedown on a chair to finally storming back to his house, still in dressing gown, wielding an ax. We never really know if he has a drinking problem or just takes to drink after being unfairly shunted out of his job. We do not know if he really was thinking about writing before or just says this to calm his wife down. He acts in a rather grandiose manner, dictating his memoirs on a Dictaphone, but all we hear is halting clichés and his correcting Harry about the terms “lactose intolerant” and “acid reflux” (or later correcting Chad's misreading of “report” for “rapport”), which could be annoying but arguably he is just trying to be precise. Chad and Linda assume they have captured some great secrets but as the CIA boss (J. K. Simmons) points out, closing the file, Ozzie is “not a biggie.” He may seem confident in facing down the blackmailers but this is only in comparison to their clueless bungling, especially by Chad.

Ozzie seems a little cut adrift from the narrative, once he has set it in motion. His wheelchair-bound father appears in only a single scene, on the yacht, wordlessly acting as a sounding board for his son to pour his
feelings out about the CIA, which “seems like it's all bureaucracy and no mission.” It is ironic that Ozzie, the most active in the intelligence services, is one of the most open characters, whereas his wife is advised by her lawyer that “she can be a spy too.” His resolution to write something that he describes to his father as “pretty explosive” only leads to drinking and watching daytime TV in his dressing gown. It is perhaps intended that his character undergoes a gradual mental descent through the course of the film, reflected in his clothing, so that by the end he marches from the yacht to his house still in his dressing gown and clutching the ax. However, he disappears for the central part of the film, appearing only briefly for the ransom meeting or seen performing aerobics while on the yacht. Although it is an ensemble piece, many of the scenes involve only one or two characters, often couples who are not really communicating effectively, so it can take quite a while to come back to Ozzie; but his loss from the screen robs the narrative of a more mature, grown-up voice, even if it is a scary voice, as when he yells down the phone at a bank employee about the apparent loss of his money.

As a spy caper, it has little of substance other than the initial setup and bungled attempt at demanding a ransom. The film opens and closes at Langley, but the CIA scenes seem little more than bookends, opening the file on Ozzie so to speak by sacking him and literally closing it at the end with his body lying in a hospital somewhere, comatose and unable to explain the narrative we have witnessed. Generically, it is really a family drama and perhaps closer to a film like
The Squid and the Whale
(Noah Baumbach, 2005); and as in Baumbach's film, it is not easy to find likeable characters. Katie, Sandy, and especially Harry are all exposed as adulterous. Harry seems able to compartmentalize his life so that random sexual encounters with unnamed women seem to happen at almost any point in the narrative. His promises of fidelity and emotional attachment are much the same to Katie (his mistress) as to Sandy (his wife). The scene where he rams a car and wrestles his observer to the ground questions the nature of the narrative we have been watching. He, and possibly we, had thought he was at the center of a spy conspiracy (he demands both of the man and later of Linda, “Who do you work for?”), but the real network of relationships we have here is familial and emotionally bleak (his watcher is a private detective, gathering evidence for a divorce). The man who Harry grabs tells him bluntly, “Grow up man, it happens to everybody.”

The figure of Chad is believable in the ease with which he gets himself trapped in Ozzie's house, but the act of hiding in a closet and the Coens' use of his point of view from the partially open door underlines the
generic problem here. In the film up to this point, if he is discovered, the worst that is likely is some social embarrassment. This is not
Halloween
(John Carpenter, 1980) and Chad is not in the position of Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis), frantic with fear at the likelihood of a bloody death from an unkillable monster. Although he has spoken of his job and his gun, there is nothing about Harry that would lead us to expect the reaction of shooting Chad point blank in the face. Harry's reaction, stumbling backward down the stairs, fumbling for a knife, and returning to check the body, underlines what a shock this is for the character himself. This one act puts the narrative beyond the realm of comedy, in which generally there is disruption of equilibrium but in which all disorder can be, more or less, righted by the close. Here, this single act renders such a structural path impossible.
Pulp Fiction
and
Out of Sight
both feature accidental deaths of minor characters by pistol shots to the head, which provoke a moment of absurd laughter. Tarantino uses a bump in the road; Soderbergh, a trip on a stair; but here, not only is the act deliberate but the character removed is engaging in his incompetence. As played by Pitt, Chad is a ridiculous character, hardly deserving of such a brutal death.

There can be few other examples in film history where the camera cuts away from a climactic action (Ozzie cutting down Terry with an ax), the final plot strands summarized rather than shown, and the film just ends, with the camera pulling up and away as at the beginning. It means the last we see of Ozzie is in a burst of anger that must have consequences for him, and Harry running off in a park (supposedly then picked up on a flight due for Venezuela but allowed to leave). As the narrative strands are cut unexpectedly, we have to think back to the last time we saw characters who disappear from the narrative, like Katie examining a boy in her surgery and Sandy apparently indulging in an affair in Seattle. More damaging, the final shot of Linda, arguably the film's most empathetic character, is being thrown out of the Russian embassy, again with no consequence shown or hinted at other than the complete failure of her plan. The agreement by the CIA to fund her operations seems peremptory. The plot also relies on the statistically unlikely chance that in the whole of Washington, Harry and Linda form a relationship over the Internet, thus bringing the two main plot strands together at Ozzie's house. The irony of Linda seeking comfort for the disappearance of her fiend Chad from the very man who shot him, thinking he was some kind of burglar (while both men were in the house of a shared acquaintance, Ozzie), is comic but hard to accept as believable.

The film portrays human nature as strange and ultimately inexplicable, reflected in the irony that both Katie and Sandy describe each other to a
third party on separate occasions as “a stuck-up bitch.” The framing device of dropping in and pulling out of human affairs like a satellite eavesdropping on human affairs, apparently at random, might fit with the surveillance culture of the CIA but makes the Coens seem a little cold and distant in their view of humankind, almost as an alien species. Humans seem bound up in various levels of absurdity, some comic, some tragic. Ultimately, Linda and Chad pin their hopes and Chad loses his life horrifically for something, which the Russians describe as “drivel” (misheard and repeated by Linda as “dribble”).

The narrative by this stage, like Linda, needs “a can-do person”; but it seems that momentum, like Harry, is just defeated. Attempts by Harry to infuse a sense of nostalgia into his relationship with Linda, noting that they are sitting on the bench “where we first met,” are at odds with his serial infidelity and the basic problem that their relationship has not existed nor developed enough for such a comment to hold weight. His glimpsing of figures apparently watching him is consistent with his earlier paranoia (with the nice gag of placing her earlier disastrous date on another bench so at least one person really is looking at them), but his haring off away from her and out of the narrative undermines any attempts to take his character seriously.
Burn after Reading
certainly made its budget back ($37 million) many times over (in terms of global revenue), but perhaps in large part this may be due to the strong trailer-like element in the film, allowing promotional material to focus on its quirky strengths as well as name checking the A-list cast.

Clooney termed his roles for the Coen Brothers, from
O Brother
to
Intolerable Cruelty
to here, as “my trilogy of idiots.”
⁷
Miles and Harry have the benefit of relative wealth and status; Everett has neither, having lost what status he had, and is first seen escaping from a penal system, whose agents are allowed to shoot him on sight. The idiocy in
O Brother
is partly explained by educational opportunity, in
Intolerable Cruelty
by the corrupting power of money and the operation of matrimonial law, but in
Burn after Reading
, there seems no real reason for supposedly intelligent individuals (with the exception of Chad) to act so stupidly.

In a sense, all three of Clooney's Coen-directed characters are undergoing some form of midlife crisis, but whereas Miles and Harry take this as the green light for promiscuity, Everett has already made the decision about what is important in life (his wife and family) and the course of
O Brother
follows his pursuit of that goal. For Harry, marriage is a convention he is free to ignore, for Miles its ridiculous nature is the basis of his whole profession, but for Everett it is the one thing to which he holds true. As Miles notes (perhaps with a rueful element of Clooney's own
views on the subject), “that's the problem with the institution of marriage: it's based on compromise.” Everett is willing to compromise; Miles and Harry cannot. Even though annoyed at being declared dead in an accident, Everett still has a respectful view of his wife (trying to win her back by picking a fight he knows he cannot win). Miles's view of marriage is the epitome of cynicism, replying to Rex that Marilyn has him “between a rock and a hard place” with “That's her job.” Harry's cynicism is in action, and the vows of marriage are meaningless to him, even though he professes affection to both Sandy and Katie in much the same overblown romantic terms (“I'm crazy about you” and “I adore you”) and calls them both “baby.”

All three are flawed, and vain certainly. Like Massey, Everett is a lawyer, albeit an unsuccessful one, but apart from the opening ruse of the search for some treasure, Everett does act for the good of his fellow man. By contrast, Miles and Harry are completely selfish, with few, if any, redeeming qualities, perhaps reflecting a shift in indie filmmaking through the mid-1990s onward toward a more dysfunctional view of family and human relationships generally.

In
O Brother
, although played against the background of real social tensions, no one is genuinely hurt (Tommy's and Pete's lynchings are both interrupted). In
Intolerable Cruelty
and
Burn after Reading
however, Wheezy Jo and Chad respectively really do get shot in the head. There is a sliding scale in the graphic nature of the violence too from Joe's ridiculous confusion of an asthma inhaler for a pistol to the point-blank shooting of Chad directly in the face. This latter example is particularly shocking as it is prefaced by the smiling face of Brad Pitt. It seems almost sacrilegious in cinematic terms to reduce in a split second a face associated with male beauty to a motionless corpse.

Comparing the three Coen films, there is an increase in moral vagueness, random violence, sexual deviance (from Rex's train games, reminiscent of Nic Roeg's
Track 29
[1980], to Gus Pitch's voyeuristic camera shows for his friends to Harry's bizarre chair contraption), increasingly sexualized language (from
Intolerable Cruelty
's unsubtle use of “ass” to Ozzie's ubiquitous “What the fuck” in
Burn after Reading
), and an increasingly diffuse narrative structure, which struggles to reconcile disparate elements to the point where
Burn after Reading
just gives up at the end. Harry and Ozzie might be disillusioned with their work but they also indulge in womanizing and self-important gestures respectively, which undermines the dramatic impact of their suffering. Linda is an empathetic representation of the dwindling options facing older women (perhaps particularly in the film industry) but there is a built-in limit as to how far her
narrative can go: she is not an experienced spy and what she is peddling has no value. Once Chad is brutally removed from the narrative, the film cannot reclaim its comic territory. When the Coens threaded bluegrass through the entire plot of
O Brother
, they wrote about something they knew and loved. We do not really get the same sense of emotional attachment to practitioners of matrimonial law or the peculiarities of what might happen when the CIA collides with Internet dating and gym workers.

Neither then nor now, nor ever in the future, can photos tell you what is happening inside buildings or in the heads of the men who occupy them.

—Bob Baer in
See No Evil
⁸

Like
Confessions
, this film reflects Clooney's interest in the more unlikely projects of the U.S. intelligence services (here, the notion of psychic spying) and uses a similar subjective, and possibly unreliable, narrative viewpoint. An intertitle proclaims, “More of this is true than you would believe,” leaving the question open as to exactly how much that might be. A psychic, Gus Lacey (Stephen Root), who claims to have been trained in remote viewing, shows journalist Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) a video in which he apparently kills his hamster by thought alone.