acceptance

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"Burn After Reading" A Skeleton key into a Dark World
by David Giarrizzo

Joel and Ethan Coen pushed the envelope and blew away audiences all over with their deeply disturbing indie film “No Country for Old Men.” They remain more true to form with a dark comedy of errors like “Burn After Reading, a well orchestrated symphony of happenstances that will have you laughing one moment and gasping in shock the next. A typical Coen-style farce, a comedy peopled with knuckle heads and spattered with bloodstains, a film with profanely witty dialogue and so much plot, you almost need to take notes in the dark. This sprawling, fitfully hilarious mess of miscommunication and murder doesn''t stand up to Fargo *or* Blood Simple (still the Coens'' most perfect film), but it''s a chance to watch some top-notch actors jump their rails and head into terra bizarro.The Coen brothers have carved out a career that’s all over the map in regards to tone, content, and the general seriousness of their stories. Writing, producing, directing, and even editing as a team, they’ve been responsible for the Texas noir of Blood Simple and the sublime silliness of Raising Arizona; they’re responsible for No Country for Old Men, one of the greatest dramas of the past decade, and The Big Lebowski, arguably the greatest cult film of all time. If there’s a through-line that could be used to pin down their films, it’s a sense of almost phenomenal confidence in their voice and what they’re trying to do within a given story. That confidence comes through loud and clear in Burn After Reading, a gleefully absurd, consistently funny, and thoroughly entertaining film that touches on the Coens’ trademark wit, rhythm, and inevitable bursts of violence. Whether it will hold up and come to find a place in the brothers’ pantheon of greatness is something only time will tell, but it’s a strong and often hilarious dark comedy that lives up to the Coen name. Like most of the Coens’ comedies, “Burn After Reading” is something of a shaggy send up of an established genre and conventions, in this case the espionage flick. The film opens and closes with a Google Maps view of the Earth that has already become a cinematic cliché, a godly perspective that rapidly narrows in on the headquarters for the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Va.

CIA agent Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) loses his job after dedicating his life to the agency. Now, he is reduced to a memoirs writing house husband to his wife Katie (Tilda Swinton) who is having an affair with a ladies man from the Treasury Dept. named Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney) whom she plans on leaving her husband for. Things get even crazier when Cox is divorced by his wife as she collects all his data on their home computer. A careless employee at the lawyers office inadvertantly leaves behind in a gym locker room a CD containing Cox's finacial data and his memoirs. He is blackmailed by two dimwitted gym employees and thats when the chaos ensuses. As Donald H. Rumsfeld once said, “Stuff happens.”

While the film is excellently written, I also applaud the well-done peppered scenes of violence that brings it out of the fourth wall into circumstance.. Of course “No Country for Old Men” had some extremely violent moments in it, but I found moments in “Burn After Reading” that were just as comparable (to which I applaud the marketing behind this film since we are lead to believe that this film is just all laughs… not so). I think it is easy to say that this is the most commercial the Coens have gone before, and it works, mainly due to both the direction and the amazing cast.

I say direction because this movie has so many twists and turns amongst all the different story lines, that they could’ve been in a Robert Altman film and would be lost in the hands of a lesser directors. The brothers Coen are like two halves of a super brain, known to finish sentences for one another. However, never will you get confused in this movie, which is amazing for something with such a complex narrative and so many characters. Then, in terms of acting, the entire cast was brilliant; my favorite being John Malkovich, a method actor from the start. .. Big Daddy Brad Pitt, as a nitwit gym rat with a Pepe Le Pew two-tone hair-stack, twitches across the screen or the camera nuzzles one of the other knuckle heads so beloved by the Coens.Chad’s a buffoon (the hard body as soft brain, like a truffle?), and Mr. Pitt has been charged with delivering a caricature rather than a character, but because the actor loves playing sidemen and conveys such natural, irrepressible (irresistible) sweetness, he’s also one of the film’s saving graces. Mr. Pitt’s Chad is the wing man to Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand, Joel Coen’s wife), who has some vague job at the gym where the two sort of work

. There’s a screenwriting maxim that one should always craft a story that’s about the most important thing that has ever happened or will ever happen to your characters, and maybe it’s just that I always fall so madly in love with the Coens -- again -- with their every film that it seems to me now that only their films appear to bear that maxim in mind. Linda, for one: pretty much the only thing she wants out of life is to get some plastic surgery to “repair” the perceived flaws of her body, which must, of course, be the only things keeping her love life on the back burner. And the Coens and McDorman play that with all the urgency and fervor of an Austen heroine, making it funny and sad at the same time. When you discover what Harry is building in his basement... well, you’ll see that this is a man desperate to share his passions: he’s not selfish, and he’s far from thoughtless. He’s just clueless, but pleasantly so.The film does have a few flaws, however, and I did feel like something was missing to push it to the final plateau of greatness, and that is that the film is over before you even know it. The movie is about 97 minutes long, which is about the standard running time movie-goers can handle in this day and age, yet, I wanted to see so much more.

The Coens have had their share of misfires, but they've presented a consistent portrayal of the human race. Whether or not you agree with that picture, you'll find "Burn After Reading" a skeleton key to their dark vision.