Burn After Reading (R) ***
By Rene Rodriguez, The Miami Herald
Filmmaking brothers Joel and Ethan Coen have always liked to sprinkle a dash of misanthropy into their comedies, taking more than a little delight in the dire dilemmas of their protagonists, mired in circumstances usually of their own idiotic making.
But in such movies as The Big Lebowski, Fargo and Raising Arizona, there was never any doubt that the Coens loved their fools, no matter how deserving they were of a cosmic smackdown. Part of what makes their latest comedy, Burn After Reading, such a discomfiting watch is that this time, even the Coens seem to wash their hands of the people running around on the screen. Everyone in the movie is a buffoon or a dolt. No one is redeemable. The humor comes at the expense of the characters: You’re always laughing at them, never with them. The Coens have never seemed this disdainful, this mocking, of their fellow man.
A cartoonish spoof of espionage thrillers, Burn After Reading comes on so goofily that you don’t notice the pessimistic undertone right away. Set in Washington, D.C., the movie opens in CIA headquarters, where longtime analyst Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) is told he’s being demoted over a ”drinking problem.” Indignant over the accusation, Cox tells his doctor wife Katie (Tilda Swinton) he has decided to quit his job and write a tell-all memoir about his years in the agency.
The news only makes Katie proceed with her plan to divorce Osborne and run away with her adulterous lover Harry (George Clooney), a U.S. marshal who is also planning to split from his wife (Elizabeth Marvel). Then two health club employees, Linda (Frances McDormand) and Chad (Brad Pitt), find a computer disk containing part of Osborne’s memoirs, along with information on his personal finances.
Believing the disk contains classified information, the pair decide to blackmail Osborne for $50,000 so the lonelyheart Linda can pay for the plastic surgery she so desperately craves. Pitt, sporting a frosted pompadour that makes him look like he’s wearing a skunk on his head, seizes the opportunity to go Looney-Tunes broad: Chad, who is always performing little aerobic dance routines to his iPod and chugging smoothies like a baby chugs on his milk bottle, is a gigantic, world-class idiot. But he’s also the movie’s most endearing character, because for all his boneheadedness, there’s no duplicity to him. Intelligence is crooked, but stupidity is honest.
No one else in the movie is quite that transparent. The insecure Linda manipulates everyone around her in order to get closer to the surgeries she’s obsessing over. Osborne, played with Shakespearean indignation by Malkovich (listen to the way he pronounces “memoir”), is the sort of loquacious man who is constantly incensed by other people because he feels so superior to them. Osborne’s scenes opposite the gym bunny Chad — one a telephone conversation, the other inside a car — are hilarious masterpieces of volcanic exasperation.
As his wife Katie, Swinton is so ice-cold that you can’t imagine anyone ever marrying her, much less having an affair with her (it’d be like kissing an iceberg; your lips would stick to her). Even Clooney, who usually plays the audience surrogate, turns out to be much less reliable than he initially appears. He’s paranoid, a weakling and a coward as well as a weirdo perv. The most ”normal” people in Burn After Reading are the two CIA agents (David Rasche and JK Simmons) we meet once the farcical plot has developed a body count. But all they are interested in doing is sweeping the mess under the proverbial carpet, not bothering to investigate what exactly is going on here.
In Burn After Reading, the human animal acts only in selfish, treacherous ways, and the Coens rain down woe on anyone who does something out of friendship or — God forbid — love. The brothers won a trunkful of Oscars for the downbeat drama No Country for Old Men, but Burn After Reading makes even that picture seem positively optimistic by comparison. It’s a comedy whose laughs are all coated in arsenic.
Cast: George Clooney, Frances McDormand, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton, Richard Jenkins, David Rasche, JK Simmons, Elizabeth Marvel
Writers-directors-producers: Joel and Ethan Coen
A Focus Features release. Running time: 91 minutes. Vulgar language, violence, gore, sexual situations, adult themes. Playing at area theaters.
This story was originally published September 11, 2008 at 3:09 AM.