Burn After Reading - Review

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Length: 96 min

Rated: R

Distributor: Focus Features

Release Date: 2008-09-12

Starring: George Clooney, John Malkovich, Frances McDormand, Bradd Pitt, Tilda Swinton

Directed by Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

Produced by Tim Bevan, Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, Eric Fellner

Written by Joel Cohen, Ethan Coen

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Reviewed by Josh Tyler : 2008-09-10 20:39:56

After years wasted on painfully average comedic fare, the Coen brothers wowed everyone last year with their gritty Texas thriller No Country For Old Men, and the world stood up to pronounce the brothers rejuvenated. Now it’s 2008, and the Coen brothers are back again. Unfortunately, our predictions of rehabilitation for Hollywood’s most talented directing duo may have been premature. Yes they’re back, but it’s the Coens of The Ladykillers and Intolerable Cruelty who have reared their heads. It’s the Coens who make those marginally interesting yet ultimately disappointing comedies which everyone watches and then soon forgets. I suppose we should consider ourselves lucky that they didn’t dress George Clooney up like Colonel Sanders.

Burn After Reading is put together with an all-star ensemble cast, though there’s no real starring role here. Screen time is split fairly equally between George Clooney, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich, and Francis McDormand; with Tilda Swinton, Richard Jenkins, and J.K. Simmons thrown in at intervals for good measure. As for what exactly this big ensemble is doing… I couldn’t tell you. The movie’s plot is a big, pointless thing thrown together with silly, mawkish coincidences. Malkovich is an ex-CIA agent in the middle of a divorce. Pitt and McDormand are wacky personal trainers at a local gym, who find Malkovich’s financial records on the floor of their locker room and mistake them for CIA intelligence. Clooney is the guy screwing Malkovich’s wife, and for that matter any other woman he can find on the internet to lure into his sex dungeon whenever his own wife is out of town.

Individually, every actor involved gets a fantastic, quirky, outright weird persona to play around with. Pitt and Clooney especially seem to be having a ball with their parts; Pitt a dimwitted idiot, Clooney a fetishistic sex addict who seems to be held together primarily by an assortment of amusing nervous tics and the overwhelming need to go for a quick run. Their scenes are fantastically entertaining, sometimes even outright funny. Put together though, it never adds up to anything. There’s no real point to any of what’s going on in Burn After Reading. It’s not that it’s confusing; it’s just that it’s not really going anywhere.

Burn After Reading is at best, a meandering farce carried much too far. Yes there’s a lot of talk of spying in Burn After Reading and yes it has its share of violence, murder, and shooting; but it has more in common with the obscure (but hilarious) Peter Bogdanovich comedy Noises Off than it does with better Coens work like Fargo or No Country For Old Men.

More than anything, Burn feels like the Coen brothers trying to re-create the lightning in a bottle magic of The Big Lebowski by taking a scattershot approach to comedy writing. Lebowski was a fairly broad farce, it’s true. But it’s anchored by one man, a man with a vision, the man for his time and place. Burn After Reading is what The Big Lebowski might have been with Jeff Bridges erased from the equation, leaving the script to follow the ultimately unfulfilling journeys of supporting characters like Walter, Theodore, Maude, Bunny, and Da Jesus. It’s an entire movie full of Walters, and as much as I love Sobchak he’s just not as compelling without The Dude there takin’ er easy for all us sinners.

There’s a good hour or so of chuckling to be had in Burn After Reading, it’s not as if it’s a disaster. Hell, it’s probably worth watching just to see the thing that George Clooney’s character is building in his basement. You’d never guess, not in your wildest dreams. It’s simply the overall plot that lacks any real direction. Maybe Joel and Ethan thought they were making some sort of biting satire, and simply took on too broad a target. If they’re satirizing anything, it must be stupid people, which is, in its own way, kind of stupid. Dumb people are not intelligent. Thanks boys, for that scathing message. Still even at their most inane, Joel and Ethan Coen have managed something that is at the least, more entertaining than most of the other comedic dreck lurking around in the theater. It may have no clear reason to exist, but Burn After Reading’s characters are so completely over the top and its cast is so committed to the script’s disconnected, slapstick insanity, that as long as you’re not looking for anything more than surface level silliness you’ll probably walk out laughing.

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vm0d Says:
September 12th, 2008 at 03:34
rate up for an excellent analysis of this movie. :]

Sean Hunt Says:
September 12th, 2008 at 18:56
Its funny your applauding No Country for Old Men...a very violent disjointed, poorly constructed composition with no depth. Men really loved this movie for some reason...it left me feeling empty and disappointed. Maybe most men in the USA are empty and shallow so they are attracted to a thrill that makes them feel something even if it is negative. Without the violence what would hold NO Country for old men together; the twisted coincidences with the Dorothy Hamil haircut serial killer?

Jeremy Foote Says:
September 13th, 2008 at 15:22
I saw this movie last night and I really enjoyed it. I found it took a while to get going but once it did. Brad Pitt was funny too watch. Some of my personal favorite scenes were between the senior analyst and the CIA director. One of my favorite moments was funny and surprising at the same time, Kind had the same tone with the scene from Boondock Saints with the cat and Rocco. Also you were right my wife and I did leave the theatre laughing.

Greg Says:
September 13th, 2008 at 15:22
i'm guessing sean is either a girl or a guy who's girlfriend was watching when he wrote that comment. what a tool.

nice review, i agree.

movie buff Says:
September 20th, 2008 at 15:18
Brad Pitt can be so funny, as long as he's not taking himself too seriously... in any case, it's about time someone made good use of his habitually spastic arm movements

Wes Says:
September 21st, 2008 at 14:32
American culture amazes me; it amazes me that someone could be writing reviews on a website and totally miss the point of a movie. To say a movie riddled with unfaithful relationships, deciet, depression, low self-esteems and vanity could be passed off as something with 'no direction', 'worth seeing for the thing george clooney is building in the basement' or 'surface level silliness'. Burn after reading had heavy themes, and if you were to conceited to listen to them maybe you should look for a new hobby.

To Josh Tyler: You missed the point. If you left the theatre thinking it was silly then you don't have a clue and you did not open your eyes or ears during the film. If you had you would have seen a very telling picture of the world you and I live in, a world so consumed with ourselves that we can't see people, we just see what we can get out of them or use them for. You almost had it when you said it may have been biting satire; but again you missed it; you may be the satire.

I love the line in the final scene when J.K. Simmons says "what have we learned here; absolutely nothing", because he was absolutely right. There were crowds of people leaving theatres all around the country who learned absolutely nothing. People that would rather pat each other on the back and talk about clooney's sex toy and brad pitt's spastic dance moves than real issues that drive the way we think and act.

Thanks for taking an 'intelligent' angle on this one Josh.

Emily Says:
September 24th, 2008 at 14:48
I really appreciated this review. You hit on all of the points that I wanted to hear. I found this movie to be at it's most benign, extremely boring. At its worst, I found it to be almost repulsively cruel in its jabs at the less intelligent. I feel like this movie was made by pretentious people for pretentious people.

Although I loved or hated each one of the characters, they were each missing an ineffable piece that would have made them worth caring about. I would not follow any of those characters anywhere and I most certainly would never want to see another movie with any of them in it.

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