"Changeling" and "Burn After Reading"
Here are two movies I recently watched by directors I became obsessed with in college. Very different approaches to storytelling. The Coen Brothers are putting on a post-modern vaudeville show with an odd, almost architectural plot, while Clint focusses on reducing a story to it’s essence.
While watching Burn After Reading I was thinking what amazing writers these guys are, how hard it would be to write something like that. Impossible. They always get into scenes in an interesting way. The way the characters’ motivations are revealed, the plot twists—it’s all so specific and fresh. It’s easy to watch and admire what they do.
But too often it’s not that moving and in the end, pretty meaningless. Burn After Reading was a solid middle film of theirs. Way better than something like Oh, Brother Where Art Thou? or Intolerable Cruelty, but nowhere near Lebowski or Miller’s Crossing. Weird how uneven these guys are as filmmakers.
Changeling was kind of the opposite. Each line of dialog, shot, plot twist feels necessary to move a meaningful story forward. It’s not a movie where you gain a lot of insight into your own life because it’s more of a straight-up good versus bad story, but it’s still very moving. There were a couple times where one of the characters would stand up for this woman in trouble, out of a sense of justice. I realized I wish I had more help like that in my life. Maybe that’s the true purpose of movies, to put us in contact with elusive, sometimes powerful parts of ourselves. In doing so maybe they can help us change for the better. I’d love to have lunch with Clint Eastwood and talk to him about all of this.
