Amazon.co.uk Review
After the dark brilliance of
No Country for Old Men, Burn After Reading may seem like a trifle, but few filmmakers elevate the trivial to art quite like Joel and Ethan Coen. Inspired by Stansfield Turner's
Burn Before Reading, the comically convoluted plot clicks into gear when the CIA gives analyst Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) the boot. Little does Cox know his wife, Katie (Tilda Swinton, riffing on her Michael Clayton character), is seeing married federal marshal Harry (George Clooney, Swinton's Clayton co-star, playing off his Syriana role). To get back at the Agency, Cox works on his memoirs. Through a twist of fate, fitness club workers Linda (Frances McDormand) and Chad (Brad Pitt in a pompadour that recalls Johnny Suede) find the disc and try to wrangle a "Samaratin tax" out of the surly alcoholic. An avid Internet dater, Linda plans to use the money for plastic surgery, oblivious that her manager, Ted (
The Visitor's Richard Jenkins), likes her just the way she is. Though it sounds like a Beltway remake of
The Big Lebowski, the Coen entry it most closely resembles, this time the brothers concentrate their energies on the myriad insecurities endemic to the mid-life crisis--with the exception of Chad, who's too dense to share such concerns, leading to the funniest performance of Pitt's career. If
Lebowski represented the Coen's unique approach to film noir,
Burn sees them putting their irresistibly absurdist stamp on paranoid thrillers from
Enemy of the State to
The Bourne Identity. --
Kathleen C. Fennessy
Synopsis
The Coen Brothers re-team with George Clooney for this blackly comic film set in the world of a former spy. John Malkovich, Frances McDormand, Brad Pitt, and Tilda Swinton are along for the sure-to-be wild ride filled with the Coens' trademark humour. With their overtly comedic follow-up
Burn After Reading, the Coen Brothers return from the dark, dank recesses of the human psyche they traversed in their Oscar-winning
No Country For Old Men. For those unfamiliar with the landscape of modern movie psychoanalysis, this puts the fraternal filmmakers square in the cruel, misanthropic, and farcical realm of their 1990s-era body of work, somewhere between the tragicomic crime thriller of
Fargo and the disconnected noir-homage anti-storytelling of
The Big Lebowski, with 2007's
No Country retroactively adding new nihilism-tinged dimensions of smart scepticism to the proceedings. In a more linear trajectory,
Burn After Reading also stands as the third entry, after
Blood Simple and
Fargo, in what could be an unofficial Tragedy of Human Idiocy trilogy, wherein characters make the most outlandishly moronic moves to devastating consequences simply by adhering to true human behaviour. Indeed, Carter Burwell's emotionally weighty score, which washes over biting scenes of explosive, anesthetizing belly laughs, is very reminiscent of his
Fargo work.
Burn After Reading is ostensibly structured and propelled by a spy-thriller plotline involving a classified CD lost by a disgraced CIA spook and found by two simple gym employees. The CIA superior who learns of the film's events (always second-hand and sometimes along with the viewer) doesn't know what to make of it, and why would he? This is the first Coen film in almost 20 years not shot by cinematographer Roger Deakins, yet the ‘new’ guy, Emmanuel Lubezki (
Children of Men), has created as visceral and emotionally fraught a high-definition cartoon as any since
Barton Fink.
DVD features English and Spanish language soundtracks.
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