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Burn After Reading
USA 2008
Starring : George Clooney, Frances McDormand
Directors : Ethan Coen & Joel Coen
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THE Coens have always been connoisseurs of irony - the bitterer, the betterer - and so they probably appreciate the fact that, of their three outings as co-directors (the first ten pictures, from 1984's Blood Simple to 2003's Intolerable Cruelty, were credited solely to Joel), the most award-garlanded and critically-lauded has also been the least satisfactory. The status of No Country For Old Men started to ebb the nanosecond it was named Best Picture at the Oscars (the brothers also nabbed twin Best Director statuettes), and posterity will surely recognise 2004's woefully underrated Ladykillers remake and now Burn After Reading as much more praiseworthy achievements.
Then again, august bodies like the Academy are always keener to award ostentatiously serious/tragic work like No Country, even if it's actually much harder to pull off the lighter, more straightforwardly comic genre which Burn After Reading so unashamedly occupies. This is a neo-screwball farce with darkish geo-political undertones, executed with intelligence, flair and genuine wit - resulting in one of the year's most enjoyable, most jauntily larkish releases. 
The plot is a daft/deft gavotte revolving around a misplaced disc which contains the (absurdly self-aggrandising) memoirs of whisky-supping, ex-CIA analyst Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich). Said McGuffin inadvertently finds its way into the maladroit hands of a pair of DC-area gym employees - Linda (McDormand) and hyperactive dim-bulb Chad (Brad Pitt - never better, and eminently Oscar-worthy), who embark on a clumsy form of blackmail.
This causes all manner of complications for Harry (Clooney), the satyr-like Federal Marshal who's having a fling with Linda and has also been canoodling with Cox's uber-arch wife (Tilda Swinton). Complications rapidly ensue, with results that are always amusing and occasionally downright hilarious: this is that rare film which is as just much fun for the viewer to watch as it seems to have been for cast and crew to make.
Though its aggressively flip, take-no-prisoners cynicism may not please everyone, Burn After Reading has a puckish brio which barrels us along through situations which are objectively ridiculous but which, in this context, seem to make perfect, if slightly skewed sense. Grace-notes1 and delicious dialogue come thick and fast in a film which may not, in the day's coldest light, add up to anything resembling a hill of beans, but is perhaps the most purely satisfying thing the Coens have put their name(s) to since Blood Simple.
Neil Young
7th October, 2008
written for the current issue of Tribune magazine
BURN AFTER READING : [8/10] : USA 2008 : Ethan COEN & Joen COEN : 96m (BBFC)
seen 4th October 2008, Vue Leicester (press show - CinemaDays event)
1 For me, one of the most inexplicably delightful of these involves the series of children's books authored by Harry's wife Sandy (Elizabeth Marvel.) Only briefly glimpsed, they include Oliver, the Cat Who Lives Under the Rotunda (the dome of DC's Capitol) and Point Of Order, Oliver! ("in which a sergeant-at-arms falls asleep allowing a cat to create chaos during a filibuster").
The antics of Oliver are evidently intended as a parallel to Burn After Reading itself, which also is concerned with the smaller, dafter players in the Washington machine, scampering through the supposedly august corridors of power. And so plausible are the Oliver books that we'll hopefully hear much more of this particular feline - there hasn't been a more plausible literary-fiction-within-cinematic-fiction since another G.Clooney enterprise, Michael Clayton, with its Realm and Conquest sub-sub-sub-plot.
Several critics have expressed the view that, no matter how amusing Burn After Reading may be, the joke is ultimately on us - as these nincompoops and cynics, or rather their real-world equivalents, have their hands on or near the actual levers of power. A terrifying prospect. One can read the film in this way - this would make it a cockeyed cousin of Bong Joon-Ho's Korean policier from 2003, Memories of Murder, in which the quasi-Keystone escapades of the cops take on a sinister aspect when we remember that during the mid-eighties period the film is set South Korea was still effectively a police state.
But such sobering subtexts don't need to apply to Burn After Reading in order for it to be taken seriously, or for the Coens' achievement to be properly appreciated. Like the contraption which Harry painstakingly constructs in his garage - and whose unveiling is one of the picture's comic peaks - this is an intricate mechanism, expertly calibrated and no less admirable for serving no higher purpose than providing instant gratification.
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