The Coen brothers have made another comedy — yay or yikes, depending on your taste. Their comedies — The Hudsucker Proxy, Raising Arizona, The Ladykillers — feel like experiments in construction, rather than entertainment, and have as many haters as fans.
Their latest, Burn After Reading, is a comedy in the vein of Raising Arizona and The Ladykillers, where everyone is slimy and somewhat dim-witted, acting with an amped-up style straight out of a ’50s screwball comedy. And while it feels like a slighter effort, coming right after the masterful No Country for Old Men, it’s much, much better than the recent Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers, two “comedies” that barely passed as such, dragged down by wildly uneven acting and dull plot machinations.
Burn After Reading opens with Osborne (John Malkovich), an information analyst for the CIA, getting demoted to a lesser position due to his drinking. He decides to quit the CIA instead and devote his time to writing a memoir, much to the chagrin of his wife Katie (Tilda Swinton). Katie, meanwhile, is carrying on an affair with Harry (George Clooney), a goofy U.S. Treasury official. She has plans to divorce Osborne and makes a disc of his financial statements to take to her lawyer. Instead, she accidentally makes a copy of his memoirs, which end up forgotten in a changing room at a local fitness centre, called Hardbodies.
Two employees, Linda (Frances McDormand) and Chad (Brad Pitt) find the CD, mistake it for government secrets and decide to blackmail Osborne into giving them a huge payout to get back the “sensitive” government documents.
Once the pieces are set, the gags start coming. And for the most part they work, relying on the awe-inspiring selfish stupidity of the characters, who must act shady and duplicitous throughout for the plot to work. The Coens also aggressively rattle expectations with a couple of brutally violent scenes.
The cast is uniformly good — Brad Pitt’s bouncy airhead fitness trainer is captivating; Malkovich’s foul-mouthed, disgruntled ex-CIA toadie is hilarious; and Swinton always looks icy and evil, but it works. Only Clooney and McDormand’s characters fall flat, unfortunately, with uninspired, googly-eyed bizarre acting.
It’s no Fargo, but as crime caper flicks go, Burn After Reading is sure to please fans of the Coens’ caustic, dark brand of comedy.
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