Screwball Nihilism: Burn After Reading Review

It seems whenever the brothers Joel and Ethan Coen release a full-fledged work of film noir, they often return with a screwball comedy. After Blood Simple they came out with Raising Arizona. Then, after Fargo came The Big Lebowski. They followed The Man Who Wasn’t There with Intolerable Cruelty. And now, after their Oscar-winning adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men, they bring us Burn After Reading. While the humor moves to the front in their comedies, they are often just as philosophically bleak as their more serious films. Likewise, their dramas always contain a certain amount of humor. The people of the Coen brothers’ films are selfish, often stupid, and get themselves into situations beyond their capacity. Life in their films is random yet intertwined, violent, and ironic.

Their comedies also serve as farces of different film genres. For example, The Big Lebowski sends up the Los Angeles private eye story. Now Burn After Reading skewers the spy thriller, beginning with a satellite view of the Washington, D.C. area as the credits come across the screen in electronic type. It is a character-driven comedy, so it takes time for the humor to build. Initially, there are not many laughs, but by the film’s end, the theater laughed at almost every other line. Burn After Reading stars John Malkovich as Osbourne Cox, a Balkans expert in the CIA who has been “reassigned” (read, fired) because of his temper and drinking problems. He tells his wife Katie (Tilda Swinton) that he quit his career and he wants to begin writing his memoirs. Katie secretly begins divorce proceedings against Osbourne while having an affair with the serial and married philanderer Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney). Seemingly unrelated, we meet Linda Litzke (Francis McDormand) who is in search of love via internet dating and personal improvement via several costly plastic surgeries. When her co-worker at the Hardbodies gym Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) finds a compact disc containing special information that belongs to Osbourne, Linda sees an opportunity to extort him for the money she needs for her surgeries. If that doesn’t work out, she’ll resort to committing treason to get the cash. Linda’s dating service eventually hooks her up with Harry and thus the relationships in the film become more complex. Because this is a Coen brothers film, no one is bright enough or capable enough to carry out their plans. Everyone is equally earnest and that commitment to fulfilling bad ideas leads to everyone getting in over their head. Burn After Reading is a Coen brothers comedy, so be prepared for lots of profanity and some very shocking violence. The plot is difficult to explain, but not to watch, unless you’re one of the CIA operatives charged with keeping tabs on the story’s events. The point of the film is not to examine causes and effects. Rather, the viewer should allow the Coens to work their magic, resting assured that everything and everyone will cross paths, or more accurately, everything will crash into everything else. And meaninglessness will win over meaning.