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Friday, September 12, 2008
Laugh while watching ‘Burn After Reading’
A number of writers have called Burn After Reading a “minor” work by the Coen brothers, but I have a real problem with that word when a film makes me laugh as much as this one did.
Sure, anything that follows the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men is going to pale in comparison, but the Coens know this. Anyone who’s followed them over the years can see that just as they sometimes knock a movie out of the park with a stunner like No Country or Fargo, they often make a terminally weird lark. And this is one of their best larks.
And out of all of their flat-out comedies, Burn After Reading might be the most surprising. Just when I thought I knew where the movie was going, the Coens pulled the rug out from under me. Then, when my head stopped spinning, they pulled the rug out again. I would normally say that the less you know about this movie going in, the better off you’ll be coming out, but I could tell you the entire plot right now, and I wouldn’t spoil it because you wouldn’t believe me. It’s that off the wall.
Burn After Reading opens at CIA headquarters. A longtime agent, Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) gets drop-kicked from the agency. He writes his memoirs, part of which fall into the hands of two people who work at a gym (Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt). They cook up a scheme so harebrained it makes the baby theft in Raising Arizona look like the work of master criminals: They try to blackmail Osborne into paying them for the memoirs, lest they spill his secrets to the Russian embassy.
And it only gets stranger from there.
I haven’t even mentioned what McDormand needs the money for, nor should I try to explain George Clooney’s character, an ex Secret Service agent who’s trying to sire both McDormand and Osborne’s wife, played by Tilda Swinton. I can only declare that I hadn’t seen a screwball comedy crossed with a paranoid thriller before, but I have now.
As is typical for a Coens movie, one of its best assets is its cast. It’s fun to see Swinton take her “ice queen” routine and use it for comic effect. Malkovich gives a hilariously profane performance that’s even better than his self-deprecating turn in Being John Malkovich. Clooney has a ball undermining his suave image with his “I’m willing to look like a doofus” performance, but Pitt pulls out all the stops with his “I’m willing to look like an even bigger doofus” performance. Meanwhile McDormand just chugs along, as if to blithely say, “I can be just as funny as these guys, if not even funnier.”
Burn After Reading starts a little slow perhaps, and the Coens delight maybe a bit too much in leaving certain story threads hanging, but I still got the sense that was all part of the joke. And it’s one of the best Coen jokes this side of Raising Arizona or O Brother Where Art Thou.
Burn After Reading doesn’t mean a thing, and maybe in that sense it’s “minor.” But as a good time at the movies, it’s major.
GRADE: A-
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