Like a Coen brothers “Best Of,” Burn After Reading unites Coen alumni George Clooney, Frances McDormand, J.K. Simmons, and Richard Jenkins with some new, if familiar, faces (Tilda Swinton and Brad Pitt), and then stirs them into a trademark genre-bender with all the elements of a film noir, a whodunit, a dating movie, and an elaborately convoluted spy mystery.
Malkovitch plays Osbourne Cox, a dour CIA analyst who quits rather than accept a demotion over his apparent drinking problem. His opposite, Harry Pfarrer (Clooney), is a Treasury agent and happy-go-lucky womanizer who happens to be sleeping with Cox’s frosty wife, Katie (Swinton, fresh off an Oscar win in Clooney’s Michael Clayton).
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Burn After Reading Directed by Joel & Ethan Coen. Starring George Clooney, John Malkovich, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, and Brad Pitt. |
Into the mix come Hardbodies Gym employees Linda Litzke (McDormand), another squeeze of Clooney’s, and Chad Feldheimer (Pitt), who stumble upon Cox’s unfinished memoir and attempt to blackmail him with it on the assumption that its contents are highly classified.
The only character to get the same bird’s eye view we are treated to is an unnamed, highly skeptical CIA director (Simmons), who reappears periodically to receive a report on the Byzantine goings-on and remind us just how ridiculous they are. The rest of them are rats caught in the maze, so to speak, variously entrapped by their own greedy, adulterous, or simply foolish proclivities.
Simply put, this is a stellar cast without a weak link in the bunch. (The only complaint one could level against the members is that they are all playing to type, with Swinton as an ice queen, Clooney as a charismatic ladies’ man, Pitt as a reckless goofball, and Simmons as the no-nonsense authority figure.)
Their material, a stark about-face from the Coens’ earnest, blood-soaked Oscar magnet No Country For Old Men, is solid, reminiscent of Intolerable Cruelty with healthy doses of Fargo and The Big Lebowski thrown in. That is, while Burn After Reading is hardly a guilty pleasure, it is more of a cinematic confection than a hard-hitting, thought-provoking story in the style of No Country for Old Men.
Even weighed down by a sluggish second act, Burn After Reading clocks in at a mere 96 minutes, allowing itself no time to become boring. As with most Coen brothers’ films, the enjoyment factor is largely dependent upon one’s knowledge of cinematic convention, which the Coens made a name for themselves by toying with. Cineastes will have a ball, but casual filmgoers may find themselves nonplussed, wondering what their neighbours are laughing at (an ironic musical cue, perhaps, or a cleverly placed Vladimir Putin portrait).
For the pleasure of watching its cast alone, Burn After Reading is well worth a trip to the theatre. But the deft, often amusing, attention to detail and the exuberantly complicated plot (picture the intersecting storylines of Paul Haggis’s Crash on crack) make this a worthy entry in the Coen canon. It’s no Fargo, but Burn After Reading stands proudly on its own merits.