The closest the Coen brothers came to an action movie: “Tony Scott done by incompetents”
Throughout their career as Hollywood’s most idiosyncratic, impossible to replicate directorial duo, the Coen brothers have put their own spin on many established genres. They’ve made Coen-esque thrillers, Coen-esque screwball comedies, Coen-esque westerns, Coen-esque rom-coms, and Coen-esque noirs. Intriguingly, one genre they haven’t touched is the action movie, but if the wry pair are to be believed, they came pretty damn close on one of their most popular films.
Putting your finger on what “Coen-esque” means is extremely difficult, as it’s almost impossible to define. However, the brothers’ storytelling vibe and filmmaking tone are immediately evident when you see it, and even more apparent when you see someone else (badly) attempting to emulate it. One key to identifying what sets a Coen movie apart from anything else, though, is that the brothers tend to make pastiches of the genres they work within, all while ensuring the films still work as examples of that genre.
Miller’s Crossing, for example, is both an off-kilter spin on old-timey gangster movies and an old-timey gangster movie that delivers everything an audience could expect from it. It somehow comments on the tropes of the genre while following the path these tropes have always laid out. Similarly, The Big Lebowski is the brothers’ tribute to Raymond Chandler’s hardboiled detective novels, and it works perfectly as a ridiculously complex mystery that can scarcely be unravelled.
However, it is Coen-esque because the main character isn’t a hard-drinking private investigator, but a laid-back stoner who just wants to get his rug back.
How Burn After Reading became the Coen Brothers’ accidental spy thriller
So, when it came time for the brothers to make a movie about classified CIA documents that end up in the wild and the clandestine efforts of the spy agency to retrieve them, it only made sense that they’d do what they always do. On one hand, that setup sounds like it has the makings of a thrilling action movie about secret agents running all over Washington to ensure the documents don’t fall into the wrong hands, and fittingly, the Coens did want the film to ape the style of one of the best action directors of all time in certain scenes.
“We would always say, ‘What would Tony Scott do?’ when trying to figure out a scene,” Ethan told The Times in 2008. “How much to shake the camera,” his brother Joel interjected by way of illustration, before Ethan added, “It’s a Tony Scott movie done by incompetents.”
The movie the brothers were talking about was, of course, Burn After Reading, their hilarious comedy starring John Malkovich as a drunken ex-CIA analyst whose harmless memoirs are mistaken for top-secret documents by dim-witted gym employees Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand. The film takes the setup of a classic Scott thriller and laces it with Coen-esque chicanery. In essence, it’s not actually about anything important; everyone involved is an idiot, and every character repeatedly makes the worst possible decision, leading to death and destruction.
“It’s a bunch of idiots trying to ape his style,” Joel chuckled about he and Ethan’s attempts to inject some Scott-isms into their action movie that doesn’t actually feature any action. “We don’t have any explosions or people running away from snipers. I mean, we took all the fun stuff out of it.” Hilariously, the brothers even skewered their movie’s version of Washington, DC, by filming in Brooklyn, New York, and purposely ensuring their interpretation of the city was defined by cinematic artifice.
“We wanted it to be about Washington in quotation marks,” Joel nodded, before his brother chimed in, “A kind of ‘movie Washington,’ where people make important decisions and high-stakes things happen.” Then, with a sly grin, he confirmed their version of the nation’s capital was “a Tony Scott Washington”.
