Burn After Reading

Fresh off of winning several awards including Best Picture for last year’s No Country for Old Men, the writer/director duo Joel and Ethan Coen–best known as The Coen Brothers–created this new film. It contains all of the best ingredients that have made their work so successful. We have yet another set of screwball characters starring in a dark comedy full of unexpected twists and turns. The result might not reach the heights of the Coens’ best films, but it is one of their funniest. It all starts when CIA operative Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) is “invited to leave” the organization, due to a drinking problem. He angrily quits in an obscene tirade against his superiors. When his wife Katie (Tilda Swinton) learns about this, she decides to file for divorce and continue carrying on an affair behind his back. She copies financial information and files that might contain highly classified CIA intel from her husband’s computer, transferring them to a CD.

Before you know it, this disk winds up in the locker room of a gym, where the dim-witted personal trainer Chad (Brad Pitt) and his co-worker Linda (Frances McDormand) find it. She feels like it’s her lucky day, because she has been wanting money for breast enhancements but doesn’t have enough to cover the procedure. Despite disapproval from her good-hearted manager Ted (Richard Jenkins), who secretly harbors affection for Linda and insists that she does not need to change her body, she concocts a scheme and ropes Chad into helping her blackmail Cox. Pitt is the standout here, and his clueless behavior leads to easily the most hilarious scenes here. A confrontation with Malkovich in person is particularly funny, because Pitt is convinced that he has dirt on him.

Meanwhile, George Clooney plays Harry, a sex fiend who is currently entangled in an affair with Katie. She is just one of the many women in his casual womanizing lifestyle. Clooney and McDormand have been frequent collaborators with the Coens, starring in almost every one of their features. In this case, the directors encouraged their leads to embrace their inner knucklehead. It works a treat, especially considering how they excel at this. This tactic is nothing new: the men in their films are usually dumb. Clooney has proven that he is very good at it, and (as mentioned) Pitt is delightful in his role. McDormand is shallow and manipulative, but also excellent. The stars here wind up crossing paths sometimes, providing both humorous and even shocking encounters. The marketing has made no secret that Pitt and Malkovich meet, but I will not reveal who else encounter each other, whether by accident or design.

This is another well-made effort from the Coen Brothers, but it is only good. Burn After Reading could have been truly great. Unfortunately, in the final minutes, we see just how little the film (and by extension, its creators) really care about the characters. This decision feels not just apathetic, but even callously mean-spirited. It leaves us with a sour taste at the end of an otherwise effectively funny and frenetic exercise.

Rated R for pervasive language, some sexual content and violence.

1 hour, 35 minutes