AudioShocker

I realize that this post is, maybe, three weeks late to be as topical as it could be, but let’s look all the way back, for a moment, to the month of September and the Coen brother’s most recent film, Burn After Reading. I saw this on its opening weekend and wasn’t disappointed. Wasn’t blown away, but was generally quite entertained by it. I had been nervous leading up to it because of the movie’s trailers, which seemed to be advertising the film as essentially just an ensemble-casted yarn. But this is, in fact, what interests me about the Coen brothers in the first place: they seem to be able to make films with ensemble casts that are not, in fact, ensemble cast movies.

To clarify, by “ensemble cast movie” I mean any variety of film that is recognized, first and foremost, for its breadth of cast before anything else—be it (to keep my points of reference generally contemporary) the not-underrated-but-not-terrible-either Rat Race or the ensemble cast movie for the ages of The Royal Tenenbaums (or the later, terrible, Wes Anderson movies). So how can I separate many of the Coen brother’s star-studded rosters from the category? In a couple of ways:

1) Characters vs. stars-playing-characters. Are the main characters beings unto themselves, or obvious place-holders for the type of character most likely to be played by actor/actress X? With the Coen brother’s being generally well-known for their characters, here is perhaps a key as to why I don’t see their movies as being ensemble-y; for instance (though The Big Lebowski doesn’t necessarily figure into this conversation) Jeff Bridges (one of the great actors of his generation) is so completely The Dude that one forgets he is a star in many other movies as well—if anything, I have trouble forgetting that Jeff Bridges isn’t The Dude in other movies. Ensemble movies, therefore, are more actor-forward, such as Bill Murray playing Bill-Murray-as-a-hack-shrink in Royal Tenebaums, or any number of famous people just stuck into roles just north of cameos to get them on the cast list.

2) Ensemble vs. stable. Many of America’s best-known quirky independent directors work with the same stable of actors film after film. This is how P.T. Anderson avoids the ensemble tag for his movies up to There Will Be Blood (which is really only about 1, maybe 2 actors, let alone an entire cast) – his jumble of stars aren’t an ensemble, there his stable full of ringers. This may actually be the key to the Coen brothers as well – they’ve been making movies long enough and with enough of the same stars reappearing that their stable happens to look like an ensemble just by the sheer A-list-ness of the Coens’ favorite actors/actresses. So why then, doesn’t Wes Anderson get the same status with his regulars? Because his regulars, the Wilson brothers aside (and Murray would get special treatment, except that his acting style (or lack of acting) is so Murray-centric that he’ll always be “Bill Murray as…” rather than an embodied character), were initially conceived as ensemble-role playing people (though it may be the case that when you write as many rich, spoiled, white characters as Wes Anderson, you wind up with movie stars best suited for all those roles).

So, then, what is it that makes or doesn’t make Burn After Reading an ensemble cast movie? My answer: Brad Pitt makes it an ensemble cast. Why? Because when Brad Pitt’s character gets shot in the head by George Clooney’s character halfway through the movie, it is Brad Pitt being shot in the head, not the character he is playing. Not that this is a bad thing—there can be good ensemble cast movies. It’s just interesting to me that the Coen brothers finally seem to have made one, despite themselves. I get the sense that they realized it themselves, and also realized what an annoying presence Brad Pitt had become in the film, so went ahead and just shot him in the head. If anything, Burn After Reading would’ve sucked if Brad Pitt hadn’t been shot. I suppose the test would be to start plugging other actors into Brad Pitt’s role and seeing if the movie still feels the same way. But why imagine that when it’s Brad Pitt being shot in the head? That’s great enough on its own.

In fact, I think it’s too bad he hasn’t been shot in the head in more movies (I guess he does in Fight Club, huh?). I can think of several examples where editing in the scene of Pitt getting shot at a strategic point and then editing him out of the remainder of the movie would be great. For instance, Babel—the movie that helped remind us all that the whole world revolves around rich, beautiful white people—shoot Brad Pitt in the head just after his first scene and spare us an entire film’s worth of his over-acted distraughtness. Or any of the Ocean’s movies. See? It’s fun! Now you try!