‘Burn After Reading’: Coen brothers goof off, but ‘Burn’ unsettling
Published 10:53 am Thursday, September 11, 2008
If “No Country for Old Men” represented a career peak for the filmmaking team of Joel and Ethan Coen, who have the Oscars to prove it, then “Burn After Reading” — a dark spy comedy — is a cooling-off.
Lately, some Coen brothers fans — well, me, anyway — have come to dread the idea that they are working on a new comedy. But banish all memories of the high-pitched style of “Intolerable Cruelty” and “The Ladykillers,” because “Burn After Reading” has more going on.
The film is a case study in how to make something out of almost nothing. In Washington, D.C., a longtime CIA operative named Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), embittered with his recent re-assignment, commits some of his top-secret memories to a computer disc.
The disc falls into the possession of two imbecilic health club employees, Chad (Brad Pitt) and Linda (Frances McDormand). Linda obsesses about how happy she’ll be with major cosmetic surgery, and these two bunglers imagine they’ll blackmail Cox for the return of his disc.
Meanwhile, Cox’s shrewish wife Katie (Tilda Swinton, freshly Oscared for “Michael Clayton”) is having an affair with Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney), a Treasury agent and apparent sex addict.
These people scurry through the streets of D.C., tripping over their own worst intentions. All roads lead back to CIA headquarters, with a side trip to the Russian embassy.
You might experience a nagging feeling during this movie, which is that absolutely nothing seems to be happening. This feeling is all but confirmed in the final sequences, when two CIA men (J.K. Freeman and David Rasche) sort through the plot.
The Coens leave key events offscreen (as they did in “No Country for Old Men”), and they keep their characters deliberately less-than-likable. Even McDormand, who provided the warm heart of the Coens’ frosty “Fargo,” is mostly the object of pity here. Only Richard Jenkins (“The Visitor”), as Linda’s worshipper, summons up real sympathy.
But that’s not the point; everybody’s a caricature in this world. And yet even with the goofy one-liners, bad costuming, and Brad Pitt’s dance skills (he’s pretty funny), there’s something almost subliminally unsettling about the movie.
Maybe it’s Carter Burwell’s oddly dramatic music, or the way people vanish after being introduced as potentially significant, or how lonely everyone is. “Burn After Reading” is mostly a goof, but at this point the Coens might be too good to simply let it go at that.
