As a follow-up to last year’s Best Picture-winning No Country for Old Men, the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading is earning lukewarm reviews. Many who discuss it find themselves divided between a disappointed ambivalence and unsatisfied frustration. While there are laughs aplenty, one emerges from the film not quite sure as to what they’ve just borne witness to and, ironically, this is perhaps the Coens’ biggest joke of all.
To be clear, the movie itself is an absolute delight. The quirky producing/writing/directing siblings hit a lot of the right notes as they orchestrate a farce of pure idiocy. Likewise, the A-list cast they brought on board seem only too willing to dive into a cartoon world of absurd caricatures and even more absurd situations.
Keeping with their genre-defying reputation, the Coen brothers here reveal a film that is difficult to classify. Widely labeled as a satirical take on the spy genre and intelligence community, Burn After Reading could be described as a post-modern, anti-spy thriller/comedy or comedy/thriller—however you choose to look at it. It has no real hero, no real stakes and is of no real consequence. Yet, it is coloured by Carter Burwell’s rhythmic, bass pounding score that conveys the urgency and gravitas of a Jason Bourne movie, setting up a hilarious juxtaposition with the ridiculousness of that which unfolds on screen.
Burn After Reading weaves a plot so convoluted that its intricacies can scarcely be recounted in the space allotted here. To be brief, however, the story unfolds in Washington D.C. when a recently dismissed CIA analyst Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) decides to write a tell-all memoir until a pair of half-witted personal trainers (s McDormand and Brad Pitt) stumble across all of his sensitive “numbers, and numbers, and shit, and numbers.” The trainers, Linda and Chad, seek to profit from their accidentally acquired information by blackmailing the ex-spook. All the while, Linda is sleeping with the sleazebag ex-U.S. Marshal (George Clooney) who is in turn sleeping with Cox’s ice-queen wife (Tilda Swinton).
Needless to say, plots intertwine and fates are inevitably—and, at times, gruesomely—met. The fitness world of obsessive self-improvement crashes with the spy world of serious self-righteousness in what is less a lampooning of the intelligence community than it is an indictment of the self-important absurdity that fuels Western life. Here, everyone is oblivious, with no communication between the morons who make up society’s greater “league of morons.” Of course, this “league of morons” is us, and we the ignorant masses deserve to be parodied sometimes. It’s healthy and if it makes us re-examine things, even for a moment, it can be effective.
Seen with sympathy, these morons are the heart of the picture. They are so earnest in their idiocy that we cannot help but love them for their inane quirkiness. For all the murky contrivances of plot, these dim saps are a joy to behold. One can tell how much unabashed fun each of the actors are having with their cartoonish extremes.
McDormand, Clooney and Malkovich turn in finely tuned caricatures that are more than enough to carry the load. That said, Brad Pitt lights up the screen as the lovable part-Neanderthal, part-personal trainer Chad. Sporting spandex and a skunked coif, Pitt plays his pretty boy label to parodic perfection: A goofy adolescent constantly sucking electrolytes from his Gatorade bottle, completely unaware and unconcerned with anything outside his domain of free-weights and Schwinn bicycles.
That the film really lacks a point is its point. In likely the best two scenes in the film, JK Simmons steals the show as the head of the CIA who, when briefed about the characters’ messes, echoes our reaction to everything that transpires: not knowing what the hell is going on, and in the end, not caring. It’s absurd, it’s ridiculous, but what’s more, it’s genuinely hilarious.
See next issue for the final part of the Journal’s exclusive TIFF coverage: a festival wrap-up and more reviews from such film premieres as Nich and Nora’s Infinite Playlist and Steven Soderbergh’s Che.
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