In Burn After Reading, a template worth preserving

By Steven Zeitchik

Is the successful wide opening of the Coen. Bros -- and their first No. 1 finish in history -- a sign that they've moved closer than ever to the mainstream or that the mainstream has moved closer than ever to them?

Or just that it really helps to have Brad Pitt and George Clooney in one of your movies?

Angels on pins, but what is knowable is that their $19 million haul this weekend -- a breakout which, since we're already down on our Favre-enhanced football team today, we will gloat about a little and say we did call -- is impressive from several angles. Before 2004 the Coens had never broken the $5,000 per-screen mark when they opened wide, falling short with "Intolerable Cruelty" and "The Big Lebowski". Now they've done it with two wide-openers in a row, "The Ladykillers" and "Burn."

The numbers are also the latest sign of how nicely this decade has treated the Coens. They'd never gone over the $30 million mark until "O Brother Where Art Thou" did it in 2000. Now they're poised to do it for the sixth time in seven tries.

Their success with this film -- which for all its marketable elements flouts not only traditional notions of spy movies but of spy spoofs; if you can send up a sendup, they've done it -- shows a kind of inversion of the usual one-for-us-one-for-them model. Instead of taking a commercial movie and leveraging with a studio to make a passion project, the Coens took their success with a passion project ("No Country") and leveraged it with audiences to win commercial success.

(The opening, incidentally, also again shows how Focus can go right from a festival into an opening, which they did shrewdly this winter with "In Bruges" after Sundance. And if it catches the $50 million of "Atonement," "Burn" could actually be the biggest success for the Universal division since its "Brokeback" windfall three years ago.)

The question is how big the total box-office on "Burn" can be. The movie is getting in before the fall crush, and the next few weeks look relatively clear among the males who generally go to their movies and the females who go see Brad Pitt. The biggest competition over the next two weekends probably comes from the romantic comedy "My Best Friend's Girl" (for the latter audience) and Spike Lee's military saga "Miracle at St. Anna" (for the former). Exactly.

Then again, the bar is high. The Coens have been on an upward trajectory with their last few films; since the modest take of 2004's "Intolerable Cruelty," which earned $35 million, every one of their movies had earned more than the last, culminating in their biggest-ever take last year with the $74 million-earning "No Country."

Without awards attention to give it legs, "Burn" probably won't hit that, fading in October as the Oscar heavyweights come out to play. But the pic is nonetheless a sign that auteurs, specialty divisions and box office can co-exist -- and also a sign that when stars like Pitt go comedic instead of dramatic with their passion projects, the box office will reward them.

Which means that as happy as Paramount, Kathleen Kennedy and the rest of the "Benjamin Button" people are that Pitt is flexing some box-office muscle, the news this weekend probably won't completely reverse any aging process just yet.

Comments

[Brenda]

The movie is getting in before the fall crush, and the next few weeks look relatively clear among the males who generally go to their movies and the females who go see Brad Pitt.

Was that last part really necessary? Do female viewers really have to be bribed into seeing an art film by Oscar-winning auteurs with eye candy?

[seth]

the women was garbage from the get-go. that's no surprise.

BAR's marketing was suspect as well. They took Travers negative review completely out of context to make it look like he was behind the film.

http://www.gelfmagazine.com/archives/the_coens_emotionfree_uneven_thriller.php

[Dan]

"Do female viewers really have to be bribed into seeing an art film by Oscar-winning auteurs with eye candy?"

No more than male viewers have to be bribed with eye candy as well. Let's not forget that any movie star has a certain audience that's going to show up for anything they're in provided it's "mainstream" enough.

[Laura Reyna]

I think it's a mistake to assume women go to movies to see sexy men while men go to see sexy women.

A lot of viewers of both genders go to movies to see members of their own gender whom they can either relate to, or fantasize being.

Women like Angie b/c they can fantasize BEING Angie.

Men (that's STRAIGHT men) like Brad b/c they can fantisize BEING Brad. Same with Clooney. These male stars have a lot of male fans.

And most of this "fantasizing" isn't even done on a conscious level, IMO.

There's an old HW adage that says movie stars are actors who appeal to both sexes. I think that's correct.

[Candace]

Has anyone out there noticed that this is also a sexual farce, even more than a spy comedy? All of the women make out, and all of the men lose. What does that tell us about us, that we do not even notice this theme? I have just read a number of reviews, and can't find any reference to the sexual theme of the plot.