Film Review-- "Burn After Reading"

How do you follow up one of the most acclaimed movies of the decade? Go batshit insane, apparently. Burn After Reading offers very little in terms of cohesion, logic, or rationality, but by plunging off the deep end, the Coens offer a sense of the absurd entropy that describes human interaction. There's a quote that goes something like "never attribute malice to what is really incompetence." To me, the biggest argument against conspiracy theories is that it's near impossible for large groups of people to coordinate and have it not be a giant disaster. In two pivotal scenes (it's hard for a scene to not be pivotal if JK Simons is in it), Burn After Reading, two high-up CIA officials admit they don't know what's going on and that they haven't learned anything from their experiences. It's a hard pill to swallow-- we search for meaning in things, how we can improve, but sometimes we can't. Burn After Reading accepts that, and although its portrayals of idiots and violence can be alienating, the absurdism of the various characters concoct a farce that hits melancholy.

The plot starts out simple enough, but convolutes in typical Coen fashion. Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) quits his job as a CIA analyst. His wife Katie (Tilda Swinton) wants a divorce, and when a personal CD with his financial records is found by gym employees Chad (Brad Pitt, who steals the film as an arrogant airhead) and Linda (Frances McDormand, fantastic as always), they assume it's top secret information. They try to extort Cox, hoping to get money for Linda's cosmetic surgeries. In all of this, Katie has an affair with Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney, who's both charming and crazy), a paranoid Treasury employee who thinks he's being followed at every turn. As characters get mixed up and turned around, the plot culminates in violence. This is what I think turned people off to Burn After Reading-- in what starts out as such a silly film, the contrast is too alienating. To me, it was a testament to the immediacy of guns and emotion-- things are done very quickly that can never be undone. All of the characters have a tremendous lack of foresight, and it all comes out to bite them in the ass. This is hard to pull off, but Burn After Reading manages to do it without making the viewer feel they've wasted their time.

While the action and emotion do fall flat occasionally-- particularly towards the beginning-- Burn After Reading never fails to entertain, and it such a silly movie, that's all I can really ask for.

Final Grade: B+