Following last year’s hugely successful western-gothic “No Country for Old Men,” the Coen Brothers deliver an incestuous, modern spy comedy full of their trademark mishaps and teeth-cutting dialogue. The film’s A-list cast and quick-paced, hectic narrative offers another solid, original entry in the Coen brothers’ filmography.
The film is a modern sex-farce-in-the-intelligence-community-thriller. However, instead of the deadly sophistication of “3 Days of the Condor” or the sleek danger of “Day of the Jackal,” “Burn After Reading” follows the mostly uneventful lives of a group of people all trying to be something they’re not, in a story where the stakes are set purposefully low.
An out-of-work CIA agent (John Malkovich) takes to writing his memoir to fill the time as his wife (Tilda Swinton) sleeps with a lecherous officer of the law (George Clooney). A few bizarre twists of fate later, two unapologetically naïve trainers (Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand) from “Hardbodies Gym” find themselves attempting to sell the intelligence secrets to the Russian embassy. From there the bodies start falling, most of the characters get laid and Malkovich drinks himself into a literary stupor in a mostly successful comedy about misunderstandings and the sheer force of human ineptness.
In “Burn After Reading,” the Coen Brothers return to their less serious late 90s style of “Fargo” and “The Big Lebowski” and each character pours over with his or her unusual personalities and problems. At the same time, the film often relies strongly on characters’ unmotivated actions and chance mishaps, offering a looser story than is typical of the brothers.
Photographed by the brilliant Emmanuel Lubezki (“Children of Men,” “The New World”), “Burn After Reading” plays out its eccentric story in a gorgeous, straightforward, cinematic manner. The story is told matter-of-factly and most of the pleasure taken from the film is found in the way the Coen Brothers partition out information between the flawed parties as tensions rise. Their sense of timing and structure allows them to shock, confuse and entertain the audience as they walk us through two and a half hours in which almost everything goes wrong. But the film isn’t all laughs, as characters start dropping off with an almost Shakespearian suddenness and frequency.
An entertaining and well-made film, “Burn After Reading” is just light enough on style and story to keep it from the top tier of the Coen Brothers’ extremely large output. However, the spot-on performances and lively script definitely make this film worth checking out.
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