Burn After Reading
Review by Josh Hurst | posted 9/12/2008
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"So what did we learn?" "Well I dunno!"
That exchange occurs in the final few seconds of the Coen Brothers' latest adventure, Burn After Reading, and though it makes perfect sense in the context of the story, it's hard not to think that it's also a commentary on the Coens themselves, and the unusual predicament in which they've found themselves.
After over two decades of being renegade filmmakers, playing by their own rules and no one else's, Joel and Ethan have finally, officially, become part of the Hollywood establishment—winning an armload of Oscars will do that to you, after all. But of course, the Coens have a subversive streak in them yet; after all, they won Best Picture for a movie—No Country for Old Men—that engaged in heady philosophical musings, only to end with an abrupt and abstract finale that left most moviegoers (and critics) a bit baffled.
John Malkovich as Osborne Cox
Now they've followed that movie, in all its morbid seriousness and theological inquiry, with a movie that's every bit as silly and irreverent as No Country was harsh and philosophical. So what have we learned? The Coens aren't telling, and in fact, it seems as though they resent the question.
But this kind of willful difficulty—this act of sticking a big stick right in the eye of their critics and admirers alike—isn't new for the Coens. Anyone who's followed them even casually knows that they've always had a penchant for the very serious and the very silly—sometimes within the same movie, as with Fargo—and that they attack even their most frivolous comedies with the same focus and level of craft that they bring to their genre pics and their art films. Coen fans also know that that the brothers' comedies often come directly after they achieve critical success with their dramas—and given their love for cinematic mischief, that's probably not a coincidence.
Brad Pitt as Chad Feldheimer
They followed their Cannes darling Barton Fink with the zany The Hudsucker Proxy, the Oscar recognition for Fargo yielded the stoner classic The Big Lebowski, and the willfully difficult, demanding The Man Who Wasn't There was quickly followed by the lightweight Intolerable Cruelty and a flimsy remake of The Ladykillers. That's just the way the Coens work—they play by nobody's rules but their own, they refuse to be put into a box, and it seems as though they're almost incapable of following a movie as serious as No Country with anything that isn't completely silly and absurd—which Burn After Reading is, in spades.
But thankfully, this is good Coen silliness, not forgettable Coen silliness (a la Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers). Burn After Reading may not be quite as eccentric as Raising Arizona, but it comes close, and it's certainly got enough of the beloved Coen wit and imagination to make it feel like an essential addition to their catalog of movies—in its own way, every bit as essential as No Country for Old Men.
George Clooney as Harry Pfarrer
Burn is one of their more outlandish and silly farces—a glorious send-up of CIA paranoia in particular, and the foibles of human greed and foolishness more generally. John Malkovich stars as Osborne Cox, a recently fired spy who decided to dedicate his newfound free time to writing his memoirs. Trouble is, he's a little careless with his top-secret documents, which end up in the hands of two bumbling, buffoonish gym employees, Chad (Brad Pitt) and Linda (Frances McDormand, wife of Joel Coen). Ever ambitious—and, in Linda's case, desperate to afford some plastic surgery so she can win a man—the two take to blackmailing Agent Cox, which, as he exasperatedly but rightly points out, puts them in way over their heads.
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