Emily FinlayBurn After Reading….or watching
December 8th 2008 14:05
While I appreciate a good satyr, I don’t appreciate satyr that leaves me open mouthed and feeling dumb. Following their Grammy award winning film, No Country for Old men, and their impressive list of cult classics including the Big Lebowski, Fargo and O’ Brother Where Art Though, I was thoroughly frustrated with the film’s inane plot littered with moronic characters. That or perhaps the film was just too clever for my simple mind.
The twists unfolds somewhat like a modern Shakespearean tragedy, except for the important fact that none of the characters, though flawed, are likeable enough to allow an audience to sympathise with them. Though supported by big Hollywood names, including heavyweights Pitt and Clooney who try to show that they are more than just charming, pretty faces, Pitt’s portrayal of a clueless meathead and Clooney’s as a seedy philanderer are overly exaggerated. John Malkovich plays a spitting, temperamental and profanity shouting ex-CIA analyst with his cold English wife played by (a perfectly casted) Tilda Swinton. And of course, it was due time that Mrs Joel Coen or should I say Frances McDormand be cast in a Coen brothers movie, with her character, I found, the most unlikeable and irritable of all. Don’t get me wrong, the performances are hilarious and entertaining but I couldn’t help feeling that the attempt by the Coens to be clever masked a certain degree of smugness and arrogance that left me dumbfounded and unsatisfied. By re-casting the same group of elite A-list actors, instead of risking fresh new faces, the Coen brothers prove that Hollywood continues to be rife with cronyism and nepotism.
The twists unfolds somewhat like a modern Shakespearean tragedy, except for the important fact that none of the characters, though flawed, are likeable enough to allow an audience to sympathise with them. Though supported by big Hollywood names, including heavyweights Pitt and Clooney who try to show that they are more than just charming, pretty faces, Pitt’s portrayal of a clueless meathead and Clooney’s as a seedy philanderer are overly exaggerated. John Malkovich plays a spitting, temperamental and profanity shouting ex-CIA analyst with his cold English wife played by (a perfectly casted) Tilda Swinton. And of course, it was due time that Mrs Joel Coen or should I say Frances McDormand be cast in a Coen brothers movie, with her character, I found, the most unlikeable and irritable of all. Don’t get me wrong, the performances are hilarious and entertaining but I couldn’t help feeling that the attempt by the Coens to be clever masked a certain degree of smugness and arrogance that left me dumbfounded and unsatisfied. By re-casting the same group of elite A-list actors, instead of risking fresh new faces, the Coen brothers prove that Hollywood continues to be rife with cronyism and nepotism.
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