George Clooney

by Mark Browning

  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 repre
sentation 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.

  The Men Who Stare at Goats (Grant Heslov, 2009)

  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.

  Clooney’s performance as Sergeant Lyn Cassady is sound enough, giving him some opportunity to indulge in some physical comedy and deliver some good one-liners, but his part as written does not really allow us to engage in and therefore care about him. Lyn first appears as a shadowy presence, in the dead space of the shot, apparently reading a newspaper but listening to Bob spin delusional lies to his ex-wife from a Kuwait hotel of what dangers he is in covering the war. As in Confessions, a delusional male, given to making up stories of exciting adventures, is drawn to a shadowy figure in U.S. intelligence, who may be a product of a fevered male imagination.

  Heslov does a competent but unspectacular job of directing his first film. A bigger weakness is Peter Straughan’s script. The narrative structure is basically that of a road movie, punctuated by flashbacks to provide Lyn’s backstory. However, the surface narrative in the desert lacks both a goal and a motive, making it hard to care about what happens to Lyn and Bob. They experience a series of events, but arguably these might happen in any order and we are left to wait for the next flashback with its succession of examples of the craziness of the notion of psychic spies. The plot includes a couple of very unlikely consequences: not just Bob sitting right next to the very man that Lacey spoke about, but at the end Bob and Lyn stumble upon a secret base, housing former New Earth Army personnel and a warehouse of goats used for aggressive applications of psychic forces.

  A number of features, which in isolation might make an effective comedy or satire, in combination seem to fight against one another: the absurd situations (from Hopwood’s opening running into a wall), the juxtaposition of lighthearted music with serious visuals (“Alright” by Supergrass accompanies the title sequence as Bob prepares to go to war, or Boston’s “More Than a Feeling” to help Lyn’s remote viewing), but most damaging of all is the language. The steady stream of quips and one-liners makes deep emotional engagement difficult. As Lyn becomes more serious and appears broken in the final phase of the film, he retells the experience of killing a goat by staring, for which he feels cursed, but Bob’s only reaction is to describe it as “the silence of the goats.”

  From the outset, the New Earth Army and their capabilities are described using the specific language of Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977). Those with psychic powers are “Jedi Warriors” battling the powers of evil. As Bob says of Lyn’s extraordinary abilities, “The Force truly was strong with this one.” A further layer of self-awareness is added by the casting of Ewan McGregor, the face of a young Obi-Wan Kenobi in the first three films of the trilogy. Thus when Bob is watching TV and we hear a presenter talk of a farm boy who would grow up to be involved in the battle of good and evil, the subsequent cut to a shot of George Bush, rather than Luke Skywalker, is an effective visual gag. When Lyn and Bob struggle across the desert, it is hard not to be reminded of similar treks with the Droids; and Lyn tries the technique used by Obi-Wan Kenobi to evade stormtrooper patrols by making them repeat his suggestions, but his attempt at repeating “You don’t want us” to his captors has no effect at all.

  Lyn is a laughable figure. His ridiculous martial arts stance when he first challenges Bob, his “sparkly eyes technique,” which appears to involve little more than staring, and the so-called “Echmeyer Technique,” a diving attack using flailing knives, rendered absurd by him being unarmed when he dives on an Iraqi captor, all undermine his status. He talks of abilities like invisibility but does not demonstrate that, and claims a high level of intuition before driving the wrong way at a crossroads and hitting a roadside bomb. Lyn casts himself as a cursed figure, having received the “Dim Mak” or mark of death from Larry (Kevin Spacey), but a shift into a more morose and inward-looking phase of his character is undercut by the language used to describe it (“like the poem where the guy kills a seagull”). Supposedly, he has cancer (motivating the shot of him injecting an unexplained drug) but he attributes this disease to Larry’s malign influence.

  One of the few clear demonstrations of Lyn’s ability is “cloudbursting,” causing clouds to disperse, which appears to work, but when he takes his eyes off the road, he and Bob crash into a boulder. He claims to be on a mission but Bob just declares, “You’re an idiot.” Lyn is able to predict coin tosses but his combat skills, supposedly based on psychic powers, involve throwing Bob to the ground and then claiming “I barely moved.” He lectures Bob on not giving into fear with gnomic utterances that are revealed to derive from Oprah. It is the death of a goat, apparently caused by Bob’s stare, that is the clearest suggestion of substantial psychic powers. He is asked to help locate a kidnapped NATO general, and his subsequent honoring by the group, being awarded a symbolic feather, suggests his help is useful. However, later Lyn feels unworthy and returns the feather, and Bill (Jeff Bridges) admits to Bob “None of it was real” and that the feather came from a turkey. Beyond Lyn, it is also unclear what abilities the group has. We see a blindfolded driver in a jeep plowing through cones, forcing soldiers to dive out of the way, and later, asked where General Noriega is, another member of the group replies, “Ask Angela Lansbury.”

  Bridges does what he can with his character of Bill Janko but he is little more than a hippy cliché given some good one-liners, allowing him to rerun elements of the Dude from The Big Lebowski (Coen brothers, 1998). He is court-martialed and stands to object “That’s a lie” about misusing funds but has to qualify his second objection when accused of using money for drugs and a prostitute (“Well, the hooker thing is definitely a lie”). Kevin Spacey as Larry Hooper also has little to do here. He appears, overtly described by Bob’s voice-over as “a serpent” entering the Eden-like existence of Bill’s New Earth Army. Larry is closer to a playground bully, predicting disaster at a colleague’s wedding and faking possession by a spirit. He is more interested in aggressive applications of the program. We never learn why, making his character closer to Spacey’s incarnation as cartoonish Lex Luthor in Superman Returns (Bryan Singer, 2006).

  There are also overtones of Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994) here. Personal developments (Bob’s wife leaving him) and events in American history, like Vietnam and especially the 1960s/1970s drug counterculture (hot-tub sex, drug use, and even colonic irrigation), seem to whip past with little sense of their significance. Like Gump’s mother, Bob tells Lyn to “find out what your destiny is,” and the course of both narratives follows a central character on a personal quest. Bob admits later that he joins Lyn on his mission in Iraq because he was really looking for “something to believe in.” Earlier Bob states, “Sometimes there’s a need … Sometimes people are calling out for something” even if “they don’t know it
themselves,” reminiscent of the runners who follow Gump, jogging across America, thinking they have found a messiah. Whereas Gump is freed from his braces by dancing like Elvis, Lyn as a boy is told not to dance to the Swinging Blue Jeans’ “Hippy Hippy Shake” by his father who does not want him to “look queer.” Lyn is liberated under the encouragement of Bill, some hallucinogenic drugs, and Billy Idol’s “Dancing with Myself” to engage in more uninhibited dancing.

  There are glimpses of a darker vision with the kidnapping of Bob and Lyn, in the insensitive, aggressive capitalism of Blackwater-style contractor Todd Nixon (Robert Patrick), and most clearly in the abusive techniques being pursued by Larry, experimenting on a raw recruit, to the point where the man runs onto a parade ground, naked with a gun, and shoots himself. However, even a detainee undergoing sleep-depriving light patterns, reminiscent of abuses, either alleged or proven, at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, it is still described by Lyn in the same Star Wars phraseology, saying he has seen “the Dark Side.” The film tells us nothing about the conflict itself. The sole Iraqi given a name, Mahmud (Waleed Zuaiter), is nearly run over by Lyn, has his house robbed, his wife vanishes, and is prepared to give Bob and Lyn his car, even though he is still repeatedly called Mohammed by everyone.