Wow, the Coen’s are really swinging for the fences with the profanity and the grisly celebrity deaths in Burn After Reading. One of the strange byproducts of their comedy style is that they are among the few filmmakers that can put the f-word in nearly every single line in the entire movie and still keep it funny. I have a theory that it remains funny because, given the sheer weirdness of their stories, when one character after another repeatedly exclaims, “What the f—-?” we’re quite often pondering the same question.
Burn After Reading is an actor’s film, which is one of my recent favorite styles. Some movies are powered by special effects or violence or action or nudity or basic, unfiltered star power, but the actor’s film is something entirely different. It’s a film where every role is played by a well-known actor and their performances are so taylor-made and so spot-on that they almost overshadow the story itself. Some of the better recent examples are movies like Closer and Sideways. Here, it’s like the Coen’s took a series of actors that they wanted to put in a movie and built a story around characters that would fit each of them perfectly.
The movie is centered around a tiny, accidental occurrence that starts a massive sandstorm of chaos for a handful of very, very different people. John Malkovich plays a CIA official named Osborne Cox who is suffering from some kind of mysterious professional persecution when one day his secretary leaves a CD of his work files at the gym, where it is discovered by the janitor and incredulously analyzed by the peculiar staff.
Chad and Linda enjoy a life-altering moment.
Brad Pitt is Chad Feldheimer, a gum-chewing, mentally dim personal trainer at Hardbodies Gym, who “masterminds” a scheme to blackmail Osborne Cox for the lost CD, which he believes to be full of top secret national security information. Like the Coen’s with the whole movie, Pitt has a blast with the character, almost as if the whole thing is just a good time for him. Francis MacDormand plays Linda Litzke, one of Chad’s co-workers who is struggling with her body and her social life. Due in no small part to her own staggering insecurities, she has been effectively squeezed out of society in terms of romance. In a surprising moment of frankness, she visits a plastic surgeon inquiring about several cosmetic procedures. “I’d get laughed out of Hollywood with this body!” She exclaims.
George Clooney plays Harry Pfarrer who, like Linda, is desperately looking for love and screwing up left and right. He’s in an adulterous relationship with Tilda Swinton’s Katie Cox who, you might notice, shares a last name with the CIA official with the lost data CD. She’s a vicious, overbearing wench, but also one of the only characters in the movie who understands their surroundings.
Okay, so let me see if I can remember this right. Osborne and Katie Cox are married, but Katie is having an affair with Harry, who is obedient of her demands but a little overwhelmed. Harry meets Linda soon before she and Chad come across the CD and hit it off pretty well (he brings her into his basement and shows her a device of his own creation, and when she is thrilled at the sight of it, we know they’re perfect for each other), neither realizing how powerfully the shady elements of their lives are about to collide. As David Rasche’s CIA agent notes, “Everyone seems to be sleeping with everyone else.” Oh, what a tangled web we weave…
Harry - "What the f---?!?"
If you’re confused, don’t worry, you’re supposed to be. The plot of Burn After Reading is a distant backdrop to the sheer pleasure of watching these wacky characters bounce off each other. Most notably, the dialogue in the movie is one of it’s best qualities. This might sound belittling, but for those of you who don’t know, believable dialogue is one of the most difficult things to accomplish in filmmaking (or writing). It’s amazing how something that looks flawless on paper just doesn’t come out right on the screen, and equally amazing how often the discrepancy is ignored and thrown into the final cut. Not in this movie, man. Simple conversation is done so perfectly here that it takes a few minutes to realize that the content is total insanity.
In true Coen brothers form, the movie blends genres so effectively that it’s difficult to say if it’s a comedy that plays like an espionage thriller (and gets a little too violent once or twice) or a Hitchcockian political thriller that just happens to be hilarious. If it’s about anything, it’s about what would happen if your typical, low-IQ paranoiac really was being followed by the CIA or assassins or top secret government spies or whatever.
It’s such a weird combination of highly trained government operatives, overbearing wives, and average morons that it’s difficult to believe it’s all written for the screen. The Coen brothers are some of the only people working in Hollywood these days talented to come up with some fiction that must surely be stranger than truth.
And by the way, this guy's 45 years old. What the hell.