The Coen brothers' return to comedy after the darkness of No Country for Old Men provided the Venice Film Festival with an upbeat opening night, reports Colleen Barry
KEY POINTS:
The Coen brothers wrote their dark comedy Burn After Reading with stars George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand in mind. It's not necessarily a compliment.
The movie is, simply put, a tale about idiots and what happens when their worlds collide.
Pitt and McDormand are a pair of hapless gym employees who get in way over their heads when the memoirs of a failed CIA analyst, played by John Malkovich, fall into their hands and they try to peddle them as classified intelligence secrets. Clooney plays a hypochondriac philanderer having an affair with the CIA analyst's disappointed wife, played by Tilda Swinton.
"Looking at the parts we are playing, I'm very concerned about what you think of us," Clooney said.
It's Clooney's third film with the Coen brothers - completing what he called "his trilogy of idiots", after O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Intolerable Cruelty.
Pitt said he had waited a long time to work with the Coen brothers. "Like George ... I'm not sure if I should be flattered or insulted. I'm still a bit unsure."
Asked if the film was a love letter from her husband, Joel Coen, McDormand quipped: "Have you seen the film? And you call that a love letter?"
The film's opening shots are of McDormand's Linda Litzke having her behind, belly and arms scrutinised by a plastic surgeon in her attempt to stave off middle age.
"We started writing the movie as kind of an exercise, thinking of what kind of parts these actors might play, what kind of story they might inhabit," Ethan Coen said.
Burn Without Reading is set within a spy story for no other reason than "we hadn't done one before", Joel Coen said. "It could have been a dog movie or a space movie. We just kind of landed on a spy movie."
McDormand's and Pitt's characters have no business playing spies and appear driven by a combination of naivete, greed and the kind of trite wisdom and oversimplified worldview that can be gleaned from the self-help shelf of the corner bookstore and daytime TV.
The film - part comedy, part satire of Washington DC's government community - got a number of laughs during the press screening before the gala opening. At one point, Pitt's Chad Feldheimer shows up for an extortion date chewing gum, wearing a bike helmet and calling himself "Mr Black". When the blackmailing fails, Pitt and McDormand head off to a monumental Russian embassy - where else? - to make a deal, meeting a diplomat sitting below an oversized photograph of former Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The stars said there was no room for ad-libbing in the tightly written script, which weaves stories together.
"It's really a funny script. I didn't feel any need to wander off the script," said Pitt. Of his iPod-loving, spandex-wearing character, Pitt says: "He doesn't consider any other possibility than what he thinks will happen. I pretty much ran with that."
Swinton plays an angry wife unable to shake her disappointment at being married to a failed spy and lush who watches for the clock to tick 5pm to begin cocktail hour and tap out the memoirs in an alcoholic haze.
"There's something really, really funny in terms of my character being so angry all the time," Swinton said.
Clooney said the movie - though poking fun at the world of intelligence - had no political intent. Speaking of politics, wouldn't Clooney, who is planning a fundraiser for Barack Obama, rather have been at the Democratic Convention in Denver instead of in Venice?
"I'm sort of happy to be here. It is one of my favourite places," Clooney said. "The stars of the convention should be the people who are being elected."
Burn Without Reading is playing out of competition for the Golden Lion, which will be awarded on the festival's closing night on September 6.
LOWDOWN
What: Burn After Reading, the new film from the Coen Brothers starring George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand, and Tilda Swinton among others.
When: Opens in cinemas on October 16
- AP
