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Those fence-sitting auteurists who thought that the perfect, apocalyptic No Country For Old Men represented the sublime moment where the Coen brothers finally evolved into something more than technically proficient pranksters will undoubtedly be deeply frustrated that, with Burn After Reading, they are again up to their usual larking about. But this is part of the game; they clearly take much pleasure in frustrating those who look for seriousness and consistency in art, and more power to them. For the rest of us weasels, Burn After Reading is a very funny diversion, like watching termites dance inanely in a bureaucratic vacuum. It is their best comedy since the kinda-flawed but kinda-indelible O Brother Where Art Thou? of eight years previous, the gulf between the two occupied by the annoying and unmemorable Intolerable Cruelty (the slack middle chapter in what they call the “Idiot Trilogy,” a trio of opportunities for George Clooney to act goofy, started by O Brother and now completed by this film) and the amusing, but lazy and desperate The Ladykillers.

The first fifteen minutes give one the impression that No Country For Old Men is still flowing in their veins. It seems muted and chilly for a farce, this sense augmented by Emmanuel Luzbeki’s photography. Luzbeki, one of the best cinematographers working today who helped birth the best films of 2005 and 2006 (The New World and Children of Men, respectively), produces images of an earthy yet bleached naturalism, which seems an unusual aesthetic choice for comedy, until it seems like a brilliant choice when the gears of the plot get going, and the aesthetic work begins to work in wry synchronicity with its satirization of modern Clooney-starring political thrillers of the Michael Clayton and Syriana variety.

The whole thing works, but its only real contribution to the Coen oeuvre is the addition of Brad Pitt’s hysterical Chad to their sizable pantheon of classic fools and grotesques. The rest of the characters witlessly embroiled in the snarky-go-nowhere plot rightly called a "clusterfuck" in the closing moments by the lone voice of reason, are petty, stupid, and venal, trapped permanently in a prism of misanthropic irony. Chad is trapped, too, but he at least makes a real spectacle of himself before the Coens let him go and the humor goes from broad to black. Everybody else is still stuck in there, and we spend the rest of the time laughing at them. It’s kind of inhumane, but humanity seems to deserve it.

- Jesse Furgurson

Have hack craftsmen ever fetishized a city more unduly than Washington DC? With so many Tom Clancys and Michael Bays so eager to exploit the city's landmarks for cheap iconography, the very notion of a spy thriller, however loose and comedic, set in and around the nation's capital conjures up an indigestible mental stew of overblown imagery, swirling cameras and hushed, portentous dialogue. Burn After Reading begins on exactly that note, with crunching martial music providing the beat for a satellite's-eye-view shot that swoops down from the heavens and into the secret recesses of the CIA.

Then, after we've been primed for an orgasm of magic-hour lighting and quasi-patriotic spectacle, we cut to one of Langley's many dreary, fluorescent offices, where a career desk jockey has his life's work cut short by a polite little middle manager in hilarious, petty, pathetic fashion. This is, after all a Coen Bros. movie.

That desk jockey (John Malkovich) attempts to sum his now-directionless life up in a memoir, to the furious condescension of his domineering, reptilian wife (Tilda Swinton). When Swinton's divorce lawyer's secretary loses a disc with Malkovich's writings and financial statistics on it, it's recovered by a pair of enterprising gym employees (Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt) who attempt to blackmail the ex-analyst in order to finance McDormand's myriad plastic surgeries. Completing the circle of bottom-drawer intrigue is George Clooney as a twitchy, philanderous US Marshall who beds both Swinton and McDormand and thus is entangled in a web that he percieves even more dimly than the rest of the characters.

If all of this petty scheming sounds ridiculous, that's because it's supposed to. Luckily, after their mammoth success with No Country For Old Men, the Coens haven't forgotten that they've always been better at making their points through deft verbal comedy than through dry introspection. That skill is flaunted all throughout Burn, from Malkovich's overpronounciation of the word "memoir" to the limited vocabulary Pitt brings to the world of international intrigue. (Pitt has at least one line that earns its place on the Parnassus of great, clueless Coen dialogue.)

That doesn't mean that Burn is all frivolity, though. The comedy is just a vehicle for the Coens to explore the nuances of their favorite chords, of charactera trying to make sense of a random, senseless world through the realization of their small-time ambitions - Malkovich has his memoirs, McDormand her plastic surgery, Clooney an elaborate, hand-crafted sex machine for his wife. In the end, most of the ambitions remain unrealized and the lives of most of the cast are completely shattered - indeed, the Coens seem to make a special point of killing off their most sympathetic characters in spectacularly brutal, pointless fashion.

But the brutality never overwhelms the tone of the film, as it threatened to do in No Country. That's thanks partially to the work of veteran DP Emmanuel Lubezki, who provides the Coens a natualistic break from the abstracts of Roger Deakins; and the cast does a terrific job of keeping their characters charming, evwn at their most ruthless and venal. But the shiny object that keeps the Coens' eyea away from No Country's abyss is Carter Buwell's thumping martial music.

That music, and the DC locations that seems hopelessly intertwined with it, add a layer of absurdity to all the petty intrigues on display - the characters are like ants crawling through the corridors of power. It turns Burn into a savage response to every interminable work where ill-defined, idealistic cliches that are supposed to represent DC's finest wrestle over mammothly important issues; here, fully-defined, recognizable people grope their way towards the kind of goals that are shared by the bulk of the populace the capital is supposed to represent. In the final scene, befuddled employees of the supposedly-omniscient CIA pick through the personal wreckage that's been laid on their doorstep and admit that they haven't the slighest clue as to what sparked all the carnage. It provides one of the film's biggest laughs, but it's a bitter one.

- Chris Anderson



Everything you need to know about Joel & Ethan Coen's spy spoof Burn After Reading can be divined from the song that plays over the closing credits - a live version of "CIA Man" by The Fugs. If you've not heard it, it's a crude and primitive thing, vulgar to a fault, yet the crudity is purposeful, born from a snarling intelligence and a desire to say what needs to be said as bluntly as possible. It's also really, really funny.

That's Burn After Reading at its essence. It's a film filled with breezy, easy laughs and dumb-guy humor. It's also a film that casts a most cynically critical eye upon the intelligence-gathering offices in Washington, male-female sexual interaction and humanity in general. This is the Coens once again barreling forward in farcical overdrive, plumes of misanthropy trailing behind them. The laughs are many, the violence is quick and brutal, the loopy satirical edge is honed to split a hair and the plot is satisfying in its U-turns and sudden reversals.

It's a rather tangled affair, set in motion by a domino chain of self-unawareness. The first domino falls when veteran CIA analyst Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich) is unceremoniously fired for being an alcoholic. Cox, essayed by Malkovich as a delightful study in unchecked and unearned arrogance, can't see why anyone would consider him a drunk, not even after his first act upon going home is to cut up limes for his rocks glass. Much to the consternation of his wife Katie (Tilda Swinton), he decides he's going to pass the time dictating a memoir blowing the lid off the things he learned as an agent. A draft of this memoir gets stored on a CD along with some financial records, and this disk lands in the hands of the staff at Hardbodies Gym. Dim-bulb trainer Chad (Brad Pitt) and plastic-surgery obsessed Linda (Frances McDormand) see this disk as a moneymaking opportunity; their bungling attempts to cash in on this compact MacGuffin will eventually ensnare in the plot their boss Ted (Richard Jenkins), Cox and wife, sex-obsessed Treasury agent Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney), the Russian Embassy and an ever-exasperated CIA bigwig (J.K. Simmons).

Simmons's role makes the plot feel a bit ramshackle - he's in two scenes and delivers dialogue that sums up what we've seen while telling us how it will be resolved. Yet I keep flashing back to Pitt hilariously intoning, "Appearances can be deceiving," and I realize the the freewheeling sloppiness of it all is more or less deliberate. Much like The Big Lebowski, the Coens are spinning a shaggy dog story, where the point is to see how the scenes and the personalities of the characters ricochet off of each other and where that takes us. And like The Big Lebowski, the drift ends up pulling us towards the inevitable. The identity of the man shadowing Clooney, the Russian Embassy's reaction to the disc of secrets, the ultimate fate of lovelorn sad sack Ted... all of these things couldn't have resolved any other way, even as the Coens are slyly trying to get us to believe that anything can happen. The characters' very natures map out their fates even before they've started marching towards them.

Their natures are also what makes this a successful comedy. Humor is strongest when it comes from the intrinsic rather than the extrinsic, and the Coens make Burn After Reading an object lesson in proving that. Both the humor and the narrative are driven by the towering level of self-delusion demonstrated by each character. Osbourne doesn't see he's a drunk and a failure, Chad thinks he's a lot more clever than he is, Linda can perceive neither her own attractiveness nor the torch her boss carries for her, Harry hasn't done the job he thinks he has in keeping his various dalliances apart, and so on. If comedy, as Chaplin said, is tragedy in long-shot, what we have here is a series of bleakly funny tragedies that only seem bleaker when you see how whimsical they are. And yet... and yet...

Say what you will about the misanthropic stance from where the Coens get their cutting comedy, they still create characters that feel real enough to exist even as they're essentially cartoons. The character details in which the script is so rich provide much of its life, from the small running gags (i.e. Malkovich's perfectly pretentious accenting of the word "memoir") to the gut-busting setpiece punchlines. The biggest, most unexpected joke comes when Clooney, a rainbow of randiness just barely concealing raging paranoia and inadequacy, reveals to a smitten McDormand the nature of the device he's been building in his basement ("Did it for only a hundred dollars, too"); the most consistent laughs, though, come from the invaluable Pitt, sending up his golden-boy looks with a knowingly clueless turn as a man for whom oblivion is a state of mind. The scene where the contents of the disc are discovered is made priceless by Pitt's constant mantra-like repetition of the word "shit." And then, of course, there's, "Appearances can be deceiving." I wish I could describe his ridiculous facial expression when saying this in an attempt to intimidate the short-fused Malkovich, but nothing I could say would capture it - it must be seen to be appreciated.

To understand where Burn After Reading is coming from, it might help to have seen David Lynch's Blue Velvet. Near the end of that magnificent fever dream of a film, Kyle MacLachlan resolves all of his problems with a closet, a walkie-talkie and a single bullet. A crucial scene partway into Burn After Reading takes that template and inverts it; where Lynch's film has the hero finally taking steps to destroy the monster he might some day be, thereby allowing himself a return to the small-town life he leads, the Coens use a similar encounter to mark the point in the story where everything begins, inexorably, to split apart. Yet the aim may well be the same - though the endings of both films show a falling-back to the way they were at the story's opening, neither pretend that said backtrack is anything other than a facsimile papering over chaos. It's in that last scene that the satiric cynicism of Burn After Reading stings the most: Order is restored, everyone gets more or less what they deserve, everything and everyone remains demonstrably corrupted and self-involved, the powers that be throw up their hands and admit the pointlessness of the whole affair. The laughter comes, but it sticks in the throat a bit. Fuckin' A, man. Cue The Fugs.

- Steve Carlson

You would think that after the dark, brooding, cataclysmically bleak endeavor that was No Country for Old Men, the Coen Brothers would have decided to lighten up, go in for a massage, and come out with a pleasing breezy comedy. Well, it appears that they have indeed come out with a comedy, yet it is neither pleasing nor breezy. In fact, it more or less plays out like a preposterous version of their previous blood-soaked foray, supplanting the mythical coin-tossing tournaments with a complicated tragedy of errors, where every character dangerously and humorously misunderstands the situation.

To describe the plot would be to remove the luster from the experience. Part of the fun of this film is watching how silly everything becomes. Nearly every single conflict is caused by a mistake. Characters act based on wild assumptions, some are led astray by their own ignorance, others get too caught up in the exciting mock-spy entertainment of it all, and yet others are besotted by misplaced paranoia. In general, these are all despicable human beings, notable for the extremes of their shallowness, superficiality, insecurity, stupidity, and self-aggrandizement.

Alas, there is none of that balance we found in Fargo: that deft mix of broad comedy and tangible drama. Amidst a landscape of people both brutal and asinine, we always had Marge. She was our human center. And no matter how many scenes we had of conceited individuals ruining their own lives, or idiotic common folk nodding their heads off until the end of time, there were always those touches of sublimity. Recall that lovely scene when Marge meets her old school-mate Mike Yanagita. There was so much truth in that moment – about loneliness, about awkwardness, about relationships, about deceit, and about our inability to connect with others. Burn After Reading does not have such complexity of mood, f eeling, and characterization. It is a high-energy farce and nearly all the actors are playing straight caricatures. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, except that such narrow purposes require pitch-perfect performances. If you only have a single narrative objective, it is important to achieve it as spectacularly as possible.

This is not quite what happens. Only John Malkovich and Frances McDormand provide turns of consistent quality. His character, a former CIA agent mired in self-importance, presents a shell of incredulous disapproval towards a world that is slowly breaking down his emotional skeleton. Whether it is the ineptitude of strangers, or the unappreciative dismissal of his superiors, he is distraught by the mismatch that exists between him and his surroundings. Meanwhile, she is Linda, a scatterbrained nobody who risks her life, and that of her friend, in order to scrounge up enough money to pay for her plastic surgery. The lengths she traverses in the name of physical improvement arguably sabotage her attempts at romantic success.

There is unevenness when we consider some of the other players. George Clooney is a twitchy mountain of odd mannerisms and theatrics, his grotesqueness constantly perambulating between subtlety and bluntness. Tilda Swinton gives us a variation on her character from Michael Clayton, boldly transitioning from confident frigidity to slightly insecure frigidity, depending on the sequence. And Brad Pitt is a one-joke dummy. This trio hampers the movie with an avenue for leakage. The steam of the comedy escapes through the cracks they create. Despite the fact that they sporadically produce laughter, the general picture that they construct is incomplete and harsh. Pitt and Clooney, in particular, over-do their parts to a fault. Yes, caricatures are excessive by definition. Nevertheless, there needs to be a kind of comic subtlety and layering that is missing here.

As a satire of everyday banality, ruthlessness, and stupidity, this is a mild retread of territory that the Coen Brothers have already covered. All auteurs have what we might call ‘recurring themes.’ But, in this case, we are still talking about a diminished version of what we have already seen. This, perhaps above all else, subjugates the movie to the level of pointlessness. Burn After Reading gambles on the strength of its caricatures, partially fails on that end, and ultimately leaves us with a gleefully nihilistic close. For those audience members who have embraced neither the surface circus nor the tragedy underneath – and I count myself in their ranks – the finale is dismayingly ineffective. It is depressing without being truly saddening and it is ridiculous without being really funny. It is an anti-climactic trick. We furrow our brows as the magician scampers away off-stage, his footsteps tapping on the creaking floor

- Guido Pelligrini

It took twenty years, and about a dozen terrific pictures, but the Coen brothers have finally gotten into the mainstream spotlight; the wide release and rather large box office take (their largest to date) for Burn After Reading" is strong evidence of that. Perhaps now their films won't be dumped into obscurity, appearing on DVD a few months after their lamentably brief release. But it's clear that, even after winning the Oscar last year for No Country for Old Men, the Coens are not crossing the line into the mainstream, and Burn After Reading is vintage Coens from beginning to end.

I won't bother describing the serpentine plot, as this is a film where the less you know the better. The real ingenious part of "Burn After Reading" is how the main catalyst for this story is a CD-ROM that really doesn't contain any type of important information. Nobody outside of Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt really have any reason to care about its contents. And this is why the real meat of the film is that nearly every character in this film is a complete idiot, leading to one of the most frustratedly brilliant third acts in the recent memory (aside from the nearly perfect third act of In Bruges from earlier this year.) And our ending is just as sudden as the one for No Country for Old Men, but still hits the most satisfactory note. We don't get big finales for all of the characters here, and the last scene begins without the audience knowing that this is the end, and it really hits the nail on the head, capturing how insignificant this story is in the grand scheme of things, and it also features J.K. Simmons in one of his most memorable roles, despite the fact that he's only in two scenes throughout.

I really don't think we have to worry about the Coens falling into the mainstream after all of the attention they've gotten. They really do stick to their roots, and allow the average audience to get enjoyment out of it. This isn't the strongly over the top comedy the ads seem to make it out to be, but those who enjoy black comedy will get strong entertainment out of it. The Coens also keep their typical angles and styles, their quick edits during conversations, and an abundance of low angles - we are always looking up at their characters. And lastly, their classic man at the desk image, of a man of rather high stature being seen behind a desk, prominent on their throne of glory.

They did stray away from their usual cinematographer, Roger Deakins; he is missed, but the film looks as crisp and clear as ever. It is always amusing watching a Coen Brothers film in a packed theatre, to catch audience reaction. It's very rare that the entire theatre erupts into laughter at the same time - rather we have scattered reactions, which really do show how many different crowds their brand of humor relates to. Burn After Reading is not their best film, but it is very funny, very entertaining, and a great antidote to the powerful, dark No Country for Old Men.

- Eric Mattina



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