Bill Hader names his favourite Coen brothers movie: “Crying laughing”
Saturday Night Live has produced an impressive list of stars, but Bill Hader deserves special mention.
He might not be as successful at the box office as Eddie Murphy or Adam Sandler, and he might not have won an Oscar (yet) like Robert Downey Jr, but he has quietly become one of the show’s most illustrious alumni. Since leaving SNL in 2013 after nearly a decade, he’s demonstrated that he can do dramatic work, including in the HBO series Barry, for which he won two Emmy Awards, and the 2014 movie The Skeleton Twins, which co-starred fellow SNL alum Kristen Wiig.
Hader’s comedic style is hard to pin down because he excels at morphing into character like a chameleon. He isn’t like Bill Murray or Adam Sandler, who always seemed to play variations of the same bit. He is a specialist at uncannily perfect impersonations, but he has also shown his ability to be a credible rom-com star. In the film Trainwreck, he plays an orthopaedic surgeon who falls for Amy Schumer’s character, and he makes the case for being a typecast as a heartthrob.
Throughout his career, Hader has been happy to admit that he’s a bit of a nerd when it comes to cinema. This is pretty evident in his wildly underrated comedy series Documentary Now!, which he makes alongside former SNL castmates Fred Armisen and Seth Meyers, and which features a series of absurdly specific parodies of various documentaries. He’s often told the story about how he took a girl to see Barton Fink on their first date when he was barely 14. Not surprisingly, she never answered his calls after that.
The Coen brothers are his favourites. In addition to Barton Fink, he has a soft spot for one of their lesser-appreciated comedies, 2008’s Burn After Reading. It features one of the filmmakers’ starriest casts, including George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, and John Malkovich. As usual, the Coens seem to relish the opportunity to mock them mercilessly.
The twisty plot follows a fired CIA agent, played by Malkovich, whose unfinished memoir falls into the hands of two employees at a local gym, Pitt and McDormand. Believing the document to be full of valuable state secrets, they try to sell it to the Russians. Meanwhile, Malkovich’s wife, played by Swinton, is carrying on an affair with Clooney’s vapid, paranoid US Marshal, both of whom get caught up in the escalating drama.
The primary incentive for watching the film is seeing two of the biggest movie stars in the world, Pitt and Clooney, make utter fools of themselves. Pitt is a dim-witted prima donna with an Elvis-style bouffant who thinks he’s outsmarting the CIA. His delivery of the line “I thought you might be worried about the security of your shit” rivals anything from The Big Lebowski, and his character’s penchant for wild dancing leads to some of the greatest work of the actor’s career.
Clooney plays a smaller, albeit more embarrassing, role. His character is a crass, overconfident philanderer whose lurid vocabulary is highlighted by Swinton’s performance as an uptight English woman. As if that weren’t enough, JK Simmons and the eternally brilliant David Rasche have flawless comedic chemistry as higher-ups at the CIA who are trying to untangle the debacle.
“The actual CIA guys trying to piece together what’s happening is one of the funniest things,” Hader commented. “I’m like, crying laughing during that”.
He also pointed out that the film, like all Coen brothers’ movies, has more to it than meets the eye. “It’s about middle-aged people trying to make their lives exciting, and they’re just kind of hopeless,” he said, adding, “But to do it [as] a spy thriller is really funny.”
