405 - Burn After Reading review

“Burn After Reading,” the latest film from the Coen Brothers, is a dark comedy and spy farce that unfolds like a chemical reaction, its plot elements combining, mixing, then igniting briefly before fizzing out. It features one of those eclectic sets of characters that populate the Coen’s films, with one thing they all have in common other than the plot threads being that they are all insufferable idiots. It’s the sort of nihilistic storytelling that could plunge into repugnancy at any moment, but the auteurs at the helm are too shrewd to allow that to happen.

After a credits sequence that’s unusually blunt for a Coen Brothers film, we’re gradually introduced to a cast of characters that get entangled in a web of intrigue where the stakes are staggeringly trivial. When the inconsequential events actually cross the desks of important men (a Russian diplomat, a high-ranking CIA officer), they have difficulty mustering a shrug.

It begins with Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), a low-level CIA analyst who is terminated for alcoholism, or perhaps just because he’s so unpopular with his colleagues. In a breathless fit, Cox decides to strike back at the CIA by writing a candid memoir, the sort that would blather on endlessly about all of the nothing he knows about. Cox’s wife Katie (Tilda Swinton) prepares to leave him for Treasury agent Harry (George Clooney), downloading the contents of their computer to disc for her divorce attorney to look at. Wouldn’t you know it, the disc makes its way to the floor of a chain gym locker room, found by Chad (Brad Pitt), a blockhead personal trainer, and Linda (Frances McDormand), a chirpy sad sack coworker.

The Coens have yet to make a single film where a thirst for money doesn’t produce grim results, and this is no different. Linda, desperate for an elaborate series of plastic surgeries that would perhaps make her a half a point prettier, cooks up a scheme for her and Chad to sell the memoirs back to Cox for an exorbitant fee. Neither is smart enough to understand that they’re looking at the worthless life story of an insignificant CIA employee, not valuable intelligence, and Cox’s enraged and pretentious reaction does little to help them figure it out.

That’s about all I can say without turning this into an impossibly dense synopsis, so I’ll skip to the performances, which are all pitch perfect and consistently funny. Malkovich is an impossibly good actor, his aristocratic voice and know-it-all delivery working strangely well with either powerful or pathetic characters. He’s one of the few working that can take virtually any line issued to him and make it sound as if written by a genius. Pitt plays the sort of role that he might have looked ideal for pre-fame, throwing cheery enthusiasm into his moronic trainer that at first feels excessive until you see how far it carries the character. McDormand’s performance is perhaps the bravest, crafting the film’s least sympathetic character out of its most pathetic player. Through her empty-headed manipulations, two men hilariously learn a great thing about America, which is that leaving a house alive that you’ve broken into is not your birthright. And Clooney seems perfectly willing to mock his screen image with his philandering G-man, a hapless skirt-chaser who builds his wife a present that’s so startlingly bizarre that it qualifies as a non-sequitur.

That “Burn After Reading” doesn’t appear to mean much signals to me that it in fact means something. The films ends on a note that the Coens have become increasingly fond of over the years, where a surviving character surveys the mess left behind and wonders why things worked out the way they did. “Report back to me when this makes sense,” says a CIA boss, but in this film he could have just as validly said “report back to me when this matters.” Surely, not everything does, and that knowledge is priceless.


3.5 out of 5