Burn After Reading

Starring  George Clooney, Frances McDormand, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton, Brad Pitt, Richard Jenkins, J.K. Simmons

Directed by Joel & Ethan Coen

The day the Coen Brothers start caring about Hollywood or catering to mainstream audience expectations is the day they will become irrelevant as filmmakers. I am happy to report, then, that their latest oddball comedy-thriller-drama-farce, Burn After Reading, is as gloriously strange as their previous cinematic outings.

Earlier this year, the Coen Brothers took home three Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay for their masterpiece No Country for Old Men. But handing out Oscars to these guys is only likely to embarrass them, rendering their follow-up project to be something off-kilter and winningly Oscar-unfriendly. After winning the Best Original Screenplay Oscar in 1996 for Fargo, they rebelled by writing and directing the hilarious The Big Lebowski. They followed their acclaimed Blood Simple with the bizarre Raising Arizona. And so on. It’s honestly refreshing to see filmmakers that refuse to sell out – the Coens may represent the last of the original auteurs left in American cinema.

The plot for Burn After Reading, if the film really has one, involves an assortment of bumbling idiots in Washington DC: Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) is a CIA analyst who is fired by his superiors after his alcoholism becomes a liability. On the verge of madness in typical Malkovich fashion, Cox decides to write his memoirs, much to the indifference of his cold wife Katie (Tilda Swinton). Katie, meanwhile, is having an affair with former secret service loon Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney).

In another deranged area of Washington, Hardbodies Fitness Center employee Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) is desperate for money to pay for her major cosmetic surgery. When she and dimwit coworker Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) come across a disc containing Cox’s memoirs, they figure their precious discovery will lead to a reward from the former CIA analyst. Wrong – Cox goes berserk at the moronic behavior of the two gym employees, leading Linda and Chad to hand over their useless and valueless disc to the Russian Embassy in retaliation.

What results is a high-wired dark comedy full of inane behavior and inept morons, leading to interweaving stories that play as a sort of goofball mock-version of Crash. Along the way, the Coens also manage to satire fitness freaks and clueless government top dogs.

The cast is excellent. McDormand has done outstanding work for the Coens in a number of films (she is married to Joel Coen, though), as has Clooney (he brought brilliant idiocy to O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Intolerable Cruelty). Everyone else is spot-on, as well – notably Pitt and Malkovich, both incredibly over-the-top and goofy. In addition, two key supporting actors – Richard Jenkins and J.K. Simmons – are responsible for some of the funniest moments of the movie.

Some Coen pictures are powerful and staggering, mixing dark humor with a haunting morality tale (think Fargo and No Country for Old Men). The others are hilariously off-kilter tragicomedies that work because of their irreverent nature. Burn After Reading proudly sits on the latter slate.

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