After a pair of ill-judged adaptations of other people's ideas, the Coens seem to have settled more or less back on track with another of their black comedies. Here, we get something like a butterfly effect of a story on human ineptitude as a stellar cast of characters, each imbued with a single clearly-defined flaw, end up doing each other over in paranoid encounters across Washington, all believing they're somehow caught up in an espionage intrigue. Meanwhile, the CIA watches in bafflement.So, there's George Clooney as a philanderer, Tilda Swinton as an icy bitch, John Malkovich as an irascible former G-man who's lost his way badly, Frances McDormand as a dippy fitness instructor obsessed with her fading looks and Brad Pitt as her lunkhead friend. The casting itself is wonderful, and the interest of the whole relies a lot on this.
However, unlike in the Coens' last, the searingly dark No Country for Old Men, there's no consistency of tone: it falls between the two stools of relationship-based comedy and thriller, and so requires constant readjustment of viewer response from scene to scene. It's not a painful process by any means, and there's plenty here to entertain, but one hopes that the Coens will take a look at what their knitting is and not hedge their bets next time round.
6/10
No comments:
Post a Comment