Burn After Reading

Burn After Reading: The Coen Brothers get "spook-y"

The films of Joel and Ethan Coen are primarily inside jokes.

They will occasionally deliver a flat out masterpiece (Miller’s Crossing, Raising Arizona), a definitive gem of genre (The Man Who Wasn’t There, Blood Simple, The Big Lebowski) or an outright clunker (The Ladykillers). Their strength lies, however, in the knowing nods and winks to film junkies and fanatics who savor the brother’s love for cinema and its many self-referential quirks.

Their latest, Burn After Reading, is more of a lark on the O Brother Where Art Thou? and Hudsucker Proxy side of the aisle. A modern day, dark screwball comedy imbued with the Preston Sturges spirit and adorned with the cynicism of our ever-increasing loss of privacy and sense of paranoia. Burn After Reading is the nervous titter to the realities of the Patriot Act, FISA and George Bush’s rendered America.

John Malkovich plays a long serving CIA agent who is being demoted for erratic behavior and a drinking problem.

“My drinking problem?!” he barks incredulously at his accuser, “You’re a Mormon. Compared to you we all have a drinking problem.”

He quits in a huff and begins writing his memoirs, which he continually (and humorously) mispronounces as “mem-wuhs”.

Meanwhile, his icy wife (Tilda Swinton) is having an affair with a Treasury Agent (George Clooney). While copying her husband’s financial records for impending divorce proceedings she downloads his “mem-wuhs” onto a disk which she gives to her attorney. The attorney’s secretary loses the disk at her gym, “Hardbodies”.

And there is where the lunacy begins.

The disk is read by a dimwitted gym trainer (Brad Pitt) who shares what he believes to be “top secret” information with his fellow gym employee (Frances McDormand). McDormand is an unmarried internet dater with body image issues. She needs money for a slew of cosmetic surgeries she has planned to “turn her life around”. Pitt is a pliable dullard who seems to like the intrigue of it all. Together they plan to blackmail Malkovich.

The intricate plot manages to rope in a wide range of peripheral characters including Clooney’s wife (a children’s author), the manager of “Hardbodies” (Richard Jenkins), the head of the CIA (J.K. Simmons) and various members of the Russian Embassy.

The characters are all false people, uncomfortable in their own skin. All of them, except Pitt, are perfidious, self-serving wannabes whose limitations and flaws are glaring to all but themselves.

Clooney is a serial philanderer who fakes food allergies, has an obsessive appreciation for flooring and when not building his sex machine, exhibits extreme flashes of paranoia.

Swinton is a bloodless manipulator, interested more in creating and destroying relationships than actually being in them.

McDormand lacks any ability to self-actualize which careens her off into dating sites, cosmetic surgery estimates and continual bouts of low self-esteem.

Malkovich is duplicitous by career; an egomaniacal, vengeful alcoholic, perceiving conspiracies both personal and professional. He is a persecution complex run amok, with a hatchet.

Jenkins is a fallen Greek Orthodox Priest now resigned to managing a strip-mall gym and spouting empty retail maxims.

Pitt is the only genuine character of the bunch. He’s that preening jerk in biker shorts at the gym with the double digit IQ. He exists within a constant haze which surrounds his well coiffed head, particularly disinterested in anything of substance.

But he never comes off as cocky like those actual assholes at your gym. Sure, he’s an absolute tool, but he’s got a heart. Amongst the rest of these reptiles, that makes him positively human.

And Pitt nails it. He should get a supporting Oscar nod for this. As Zappa used to say, “He had his thumb on it.” It’s vaguely a reprisal of his Johnny Suede character and it’s dead-on hilarious.

The Coens have their thumbs on it as well. Burn After Reading contains all the worthwhile elements of their previous thriller/comedies; a parade of swindles, revenge, sudden vicious violence, people in way over their heads and cruel, cruel Fortuna.

It’s nowhere near Fargo, but its fun-loving tongue is firmly placed in its cheek.

Perhaps the film’s ending reflects its trivially political nature best. Two CIA men are reflecting on the case, assessing the cost of the wreckage (both human and financial), their decisions to let it “play out” and wrapping up the loose ends. They decide they have learned a lesson. To never repeat whatever it was they did in this case even though they are unclear what it was they did.

Sounds alot like the Bush Administration to me.