Straight to DVD

Burn After Reading

As I've noted before, Whitney and I maintain, even postkids, a group of directors whose movies we try to see no matter what. Joel and Ethan Coen have long been on that list. As they made their way into the filmmaking, we've noticed the duo establishing a certain pattern: They've followed every one of their films that has garnered establishment praise with one that's far less mainstream (and, generally, successful). Think Barton Fink, then The Hudsucker Proxy. Or Fargo, then The Big Lebowski.

So it was not a huge shock to see the Coens follow No Country for Old Men with something of a head-scratcher: A Washington spy thriller-comedy. True to type, Burn After Reading was much anticipated and then not so well received—especially given its cast, laden with the likes of George Clooney and Brad Pitt. Still, that didn't discourage us; while the brothers aren't infallible even in our book (think The Ladykillers), some of their originally unpopular movies, including Lebowski, are favorites. So this one made our queue pretty easily.

Burn After Reading inverts Hitchcock's classic spy-thriller methodology: Rather than minimizing its role and importance, this movie is almost about the MacGuffin—in this case, a computer disc containing a memoir written by Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), a disgruntled career CIA analyst who's just been fired by the bureau for alcoholism and lackluster performance. In fact, Cox has little of any interest to tell, certainly nothing in the way of valuable secrets. But when that disc is accidentally lost at a D.C. gym, the boneheaded trainers who find it, Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) and Chad Feldheimer (Pitt) assume the manuscript is top-secret and cheerfully contact Cox to return it, assuming there'll be a reward involved.

Unfortunately, their idiotic way of doing so makes Cox think he's being blackmailed. His angry and aggressive response convinces Litzke and Feldheimer that they have something truly valuable, and soon they are blackmailing him, as well as offering the disc to the Russian embassy (just in case). Everything follows from this massive misunderstanding: The two trainers, in way over their heads, aren't smart enough to even realize that fact until it's too late. Things don't go much better for Cox, who devolves quickly from natty D.C. insider to disheveled, violent drunk after his icy doctor wife (Tilda Swinton) files for divorce and kicks him out of the house. (She's been having an affair with Clooney's character, a security expert who appears to be simultaneously sleeping with half the city—including, eventually, Litzke.)

The movie starts out quite light and funny in tone, and the initial confrontations between angry moron Cox and happy morons Litzke and Feldheimer are genuinely hysterical. But there's a sudden dark shift about halfway through, with bloody consequences for several characters. That shouldn't be a complete surprise, of course—these are the Coens, after all, who have pulled off such abruptness many times before. The real problem with Burn After Reading is something the pair has often been accused of, but which has rarely bothered me before: You don't care about any of the characters. None of them are especially likable, and while most do make you laugh, let's just say you're not laughing with them. (Even the magnetic Clooney seems to be actively tamping down his charisma.)

In much of the Coens' other work, plot or character development—or even the sheer beauty of their imagery, as in The Man Who Wasn't There—has gotten them past unsympathetic characters, at least in my book. Here, though, we know from the start that the plot is meaningless—it's all a great fuss over nothing. And the film's imitation of Bourne-ish visual styles, while spot-on from the opening credits to the final CIA wrap-up scene, doesn't given the Coens or Mexican cinematographer (Children of Men) much opportunity for aesthetic accomplishment.

None of that is to say that this is a bad, dull, or even unpleasant movie—actually, we laughed all the way through it. The performances are top-notch; Malkovich's over-the-top vitriol is particularly funny, as is Pitt's impressive turn as perhaps the stupidest man ever born. (J. K. Simmons is also his usual brilliant self as the flummoxed CIA chief trying to make heads or tails of the Cox affair.) And as always with the Coens, every detail is executed perfectly throughout, from the characters' clothes—and Pitt's exquisitely awful hair—to Carter Burwell's music.

But Burn After Reading isn't light enough to be enjoyable just as fluff, yet has no particular serious point to make, either. While many a great spy movie has been made about the pointlessness of what people are killing and dying for, that's not what the Coens are after here. At one point near the end, Simmons's character is forced to just shrug the whole mess off, saying, "No biggie." It seems like that's how the film's creators feel about it, too. In the end, so did we.