Screwball Nihilism: Burn After Reading Review

It seems whenever the brothers Joel and Ethan Coen release a full-fledged work of film noir, they often return with a screwball comedy. After Blood Simple they came out with Raising Arizona. Then, after Fargo came The Big Lebowski. They followed The Man Who Wasn’t There with Intolerable Cruelty. And now, after their Oscar-winning adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men, they bring us Burn After Reading. While the humor moves to the front in their comedies, they are often just as philosophically bleak as their more serious films. Likewise, their dramas always contain a certain amount of humor. The people of the Coen brothers’ films are selfish, often stupid, and get themselves into situations beyond their capacity. Life in their films is random yet intertwined, violent, and ironic.

Their comedies also serve as farces of different film genres. For example, The Big Lebowski sends up the Los Angeles private eye story. Now Burn After Reading skewers the spy thriller, beginning with a satellite view of the Washington, D.C. area as the credits come across the screen in electronic type. It is a character-driven comedy, so it takes time for the humor to build. Initially, there are not many laughs, but by the film’s end, the theater laughed at almost every other line. Burn After Reading stars John Malkovich as Osbourne Cox, a Balkans expert in the CIA who has been “reassigned” (read, fired) because of his temper and drinking problems. He tells his wife Katie (Tilda Swinton) that he quit his career and he wants to begin writing his memoirs. Katie secretly begins divorce proceedings against Osbourne while having an affair with the serial and married philanderer Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney). Seemingly unrelated, we meet Linda Litzke (Francis McDormand) who is in search of love via internet dating and personal improvement via several costly plastic surgeries. When her co-worker at the Hardbodies gym Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) finds a compact disc containing special information that belongs to Osbourne, Linda sees an opportunity to extort him for the money she needs for her surgeries. If that doesn’t work out, she’ll resort to committing treason to get the cash. Linda’s dating service eventually hooks her up with Harry and thus the relationships in the film become more complex. Because this is a Coen brothers film, no one is bright enough or capable enough to carry out their plans. Everyone is equally earnest and that commitment to fulfilling bad ideas leads to everyone getting in over their head. Burn After Reading is a Coen brothers comedy, so be prepared for lots of profanity and some very shocking violence. The plot is difficult to explain, but not to watch, unless you’re one of the CIA operatives charged with keeping tabs on the story’s events. The point of the film is not to examine causes and effects. Rather, the viewer should allow the Coens to work their magic, resting assured that everything and everyone will cross paths, or more accurately, everything will crash into everything else. And meaninglessness will win over meaning.

Fascinating and Flawed: In Cold Blood Review

The slaying of four members of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas in November 1959 and the subsequent investigation and trial attracted the attention of author Truman Capote. He painstakingly researched the case and conducted dozens of interviews. In the process Capote nearly created a new genre of literature, the non-fiction novel, in which a true story is told using the techniques of fiction writing. In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences is the result of Capote’s efforts.

From the outset, the reader knows of the Clutters’ murders as well as the capture, conviction, and execution of the killers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. Early on, Capote introduces the readers to Herbert Clutter, a wealthy and well-respected farmer in Kansas, and his family. Capote quickly sketches a biography of each of the victims: Herb, his wife Bonnie, and their two teenage children, Nancy and Kenyon. Herb and Bonnie had two older children, Eveanna and Beverly, who lived out of the house, and thus were not targeted in the murder. Capote builds tension by keeping two questions in front of the reader. First, what really occurred in the Clutter’s house during the morning of the homicides? And second, given the seeming randomness of the murders and the distinct lack of clues or motive, how were Smith and Hickock were ever captured or convicted?

Running to Stand Still: Rabbit, Run Review

John Updike is one of our most celebrated and honored living American writers. I recently engaged his writing for the first time by reading the first novel of his series following Harold “Rabbit” Angstrom, Rabbit, Run. Since the 1950’s, Updike has returned to Rabbit at the end of each decade to tell a new story about him and about America too. It is easy to see Updike’s influence on American fiction and prose. According to Wikipedia, Rabbit, Run was one of the first novels written in the present tense. Updike’s language brims with energy and some of today’s best writers, like Michael Chabon and Jonathan Franzen, follow in his footsteps. The reader feels a drive to finish the current sentence as quickly as possible to get to the next one. In fact, it was hard for this 21st century reader to grasp how revolutionary Rabbit, Run was because so many of today’s books read like an Updike book. Only when I compared the narrative style to other novels I’ve read from the 1950’s or 1960’s could I appreciate Updike’s contribution to language. But Rabbit, Run is not just a watershed in prose. Thematically, the novel skewers the 1950’s suburban American dream about as thoroughly as F. Scott Fitzgerald debunked the American dream of the jazz age in The Great Gatsby. We can quickly find the thread running from Rabbit, Run to The Graduate, to American Beauty, to Franzen’s The Corrections.

On the first page we meet Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a 26-year old former high school basketball star. He’s now married to his high school girlfriend Janice. They have a son, Nelson, with another child on the way. Rabbit desperately misses the glory days of his youth as he believes he is in a failed marriage to a stupid woman and is completely dissatisfied with his job selling vegetable peelers. One day, as he goes to pick up his son from his in-laws, Rabbit decides to leave his life altogether. He takes the car and drives south from the Mount Judge suburb of Brewer, Pennsylvania. He quickly aborts his escape and returns to the town, but not to his family. Instead, Rabbit seeks out his former basketball coach Marty Tothero who introduces him to Ruth Leonard, a sometime prostitute, and they begin a three-month affair.

The Joker, the Problem of Evil, and Unanswered Questions

Over on Out of Ur, Skye Jethani has written an interesting reflection on Christopher Nolan’s second Batman film, The Dark Knight. He relates the film’s lack of an origin story for the Joker to the way the Bible discusses evil’s origin. Jethani says:

I wonder if the lack of a back-story for evil in the Bible is related to Nolan and Goyer’s rationale for ignoring the Joker’s back-story? Without an explanation or origin, God is emphasizing the utter meaninglessness and anarchy of evil. It cannot be understood; it cannot be rationalized. To do otherwise would be to legitimize its place in his creation or to create sympathy for an enemy that deserves none….

Answers to all of our questions about the origin of evil are not found in the Scriptures, which means that God, the Writer and Director of this cosmic drama, did not deem them necessary for the story he wanted to tell. Are we satisfied with that, or must we continue to contrive answers for ourselves? My guess is that Christians would find themselves in less trouble theologically, culturally, and politically if we stuck with the questions God has chosen to answer, and immersed ourselves in the story he has chosen to tell.

As a Christian who has listened to, read, and even made several attempts to explain why evil exists and who hasn’t been fully convinced by any of them, I like the direction Jethani takes. The Bible doesn’t seem to occupy itself with answering why evil exists or even asking the question. Instead, the Bible takes evil’s presence as a given and focuses on God dealing with it. This lack of an origin story may not be the most comforting message in my questioning, but it does redirect my focus to look for God’s redemptive work in the world rather than fixating on the evil’s existence.