The Coen Brothers' "Burn After Reading"
With John Malkovich, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Frances McDormand
Sep 22, 2008
In the first scene of Burn After Reading, long-time CIA analyst Osbourne Cox (a scenery-chewing, gloriously middle-aged John Malkovich) is being fired for political reasons. And his day is about to get worse, although he doesn't know it: His cold, domineering wife Katie (an irony-free, acid-tongued Tilda Swinton) refuses to either listen or sympathize with his problems; she is more concerned about the cheeses for their dinner party that evening. And it's no wonder: Her lover, Treasury agent Harry Pfarrer (pop-eyed serial womanizer George Clooney, in fine form) will be there, with his own clueless spouse in tow.
We soon learn that Mrs. Cox is planning to leave her hapless husband, who has begun to work on his memoirs (a word which Osbourne pronounces properly, of course) and embrace his inner alcoholic. In order to carry out her plan while retaining a financial advantage, Katie's oily attorney advises her to copy Osbourne's financials onto a disk, which she does.
It is at this point that the characters begin to spiral into Coen-Land, where outsized characters from all walks of life improbably meet and change each others' lives forever. This particular film is so well-designed that the plot and characters maintain both believability and unpredictability - a balance that many of their more recent films have failed to maintain.
Intelligence Is Relative
While Osbourne Cox is clearly a smart and capable analyst, he will prove to be no match for possibly the stupidest blackmailers ever: Linda Litske (whose desperation is beautifully portrayed by Frances McDormand) and Chad Feldheimer (a hilariously idiotic Brad Pitt, whose vacant, open-mouthed struggles for coherent thought, alone, are worth the price of admission). The janitor at their place of employment, a gym called "Hardbodies," somehow finds the disk containing Osbourne's financials - and, perhaps accidentally, his memoirs.
Unfortunately for Cox, Litske and Pitt are just savvy enough to realize that it contains high-level intelligence, and attempt to blackmail Cox to get it back. Chad is just in it for kicks and to help out his pal, Linda, who feels that she cannot move any further in life until she gets extensive plastic surgery, which she has been unable to pay for through any legitimate means.
Stupid Is As Stupid Does
The Coen brothers' film skewers every aspect of American society: our shallow obsession with looks; our need to create impersonal bureaucracies; our inability to stay married and/or faithful to our partners; and our lack of understanding that the world around us contains anything but ourselves. Yet nothing is so mercilessly mocked as our current intelligence agencies. Mired in political struggles and incompetence, they are completely clueless as to how to deal with the real crisis that faces them in the form of Osbourne's ill-advised memoirs.
Multi-Level Laughter
In the end, this movie works on every comic level, from belly laughs to satire. If you are looking for an entertaining, thought-provoking dark comedy, it would be hard to do better than Burn After Reading.
