Burn After Reading (2008)
Mike Zoss Productions / Working Title Films
d. Joel Coen; pr. Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner; scr. Joel & Ethan Coen; ph. Emmanuel Lubezki; m. Carter Burwell; ed. Joel & Ethan Coen (as Roderick Jaynes); cast. Frances McDormand, John Malkovich, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Tilda Swinton, Richard Jenkins (96 mins)
The Coen Brothers, Joel and Ethan, are amongst the finest of modern American filmmakers.
Although they have always impressed the critics, it was not until the hit Fargo that they made an impression upon the Megaplex cinema-going mainstream audience, following it up with a string of popular comedies that culminated in the Academy Award winning 2007 drama No Country for Old Men. After that downbeat film, the Coens are back in comedic mode with Burn After Reading, an often hilarious and always thought-provokingly ironic look at the failed aspirations of ordinary dreamers longing for something better than life currently has to offer them.
Re-united for the third time with star George Clooney in the final instalment in the so-called “idiot” trilogy – after O Brother Where Art Thou? and Intolerable Cruelty – Burn After Reading follows a cross-section of characters who disparate existences come colliding together with fatal consequences.
John Malkovich is a low level CIA operative who is fired for a drinking problem. He decides to write his memoirs, much to his stern wife Tilda Swinton’s amusement, but the disc containing them is lost. Gym instructors Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt find the disc and decide to blackmail Malkovich, who is thrown out of the house by Swinton as her lover (Clooney) moves in, balancing his affair with Swinton with his courtship of McDormand. McDormand and Pitt try to blackmail Malkovich but when this fails contact the Russian Embassy, much to the befuddlement of the CIA chief following this peculiar series of exchanges.
Tragedy and comedy are often intertwined in Coen Bros movies as they approach farce. Repeatedly, their characters either long to be what they are not (as in The Man Who Wasn’t There) or make elaborate plans which come crashing down in circumstances increasingly beyond their ability to control (as in Fargo). It is the absurdity of mounting adverse circumstance that propels the narrative in Burn after Reading, the snowball effect of big plans set in motion by small people with little idea of the consequences of their actions in erecting their ambitious metaphorical houses of cards. These consequences can be deadly but are always funny in the manner of a true comedy of despair – focused on failure, collapse and the ineptitude of the best laid plans. The CIA plot here makes the film a kind of parody of the intelligence thriller of which Spy Game cultivated an image of Pitt as the suave and savvy operator that he sends up here with glee.
While No Country for Old Men had a fatalistic and inescapably grim determinism, Burn after Reading presents a gallery of comedic grotesques –
from Malkovich’s arrogant drunk to Pitt’s male bimbo alongside McDormand’s middle-aged single woman longing for youthful looks as a new start to life. These characters all begin thinking they are on top of their circumstances, but find themselves increasingly unable to deal with the loss of their perceived control. The film’s humour emerges thus from the discrepancy between their sense of themselves as achievers and their woeful, quirky ineptitude and, in Malkovich’s case, misanthropic resentment. The characters are all ambitious beyond their station and their ability to master their circumstances is severely tested in consistently amusing plot twists and developments.
There’s a sense of desperation, eccentricity and quiet despair in the Coen films, perhaps noteworthy in that most of them have been played for laughs despite the solemnity of the thematic under-currents running through them. Yet, although the film lampoons its characters and their attendant social structures (offering a cross-section of American class society), it has a fondness for its schemers, particularly McDormand, despite their often simple-mindedness. With sudden eruptions of violence always comedic, Burn after Reading emerges as one of the Coen’s finest comedies and a vast improvement over Intolerable Cruelty. Mannered, distinctive characterizations combine for a laugh out loud look at a peculiar situation in which everything that can go wrong inevitably will, leaving its characters desperately struggling to make sense of matters beyond their grasp.
