Burn After Reading: A Review

It shouldn’t be a surprise that the brothers who gave us O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Fargo, and The Big Lebowski know how to put on a farce. And from the opening moments of Burn After Reading we know that’s what we’re getting. Things just feel different after the Coen Brothers’ Oscar-winning turn at No Country for Old Men.

Apparently, the brothers wrote the scripts for Burn and No Country at the same time, alternating days on each. It explains a lot, as Burn brings us over-the-top comedy in the same way that No Country gave us gut-wrenching looks at a dark world. It is as if the former was the constant cleansing they needed from writing the latter. And yet, the worldviews that the two films seem to express just don’t seem that far apart.

Burn After Reading initially introduces us to Osborne Cox, played by John Malkovich, a frustrated middle-aged CIA analyst who quits his job rather than being transferred by his higher-ups. A self-proclaimed genius surrounded by lesser mortals, he decides to devote himself to writing his memoirs of his time in the CIA. His wife, played by Tilda Swinton, is less than excited about the idea. But then again, she’s less than excited about Osborne himself, taking up with their family friend Harry Pfarrer, a hyper-active, endorphin-addicted sex junkie played broadly by George Clooney.

Alongside this love triangle and its complications, we also get to know Linda Litzke, as Francis McDormand gives us an echo of her turn in Fargo, as a gym employee frustrated by her insurance’s refusal to pay for extensive elective plastic surgery. She sees her opportunity when her co-worker Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt), discovers a disc left by a gym patron that looks to be “spy stuff.” Thinking that they would get a reward for turning it over, they call the owner of the disc, who turns out to be Osborne. Rather than locating good espionage material, they have found a copy of his memoirs. And so the chase is on.

This is a comedy of errors where nobody is innocent, and nobody has it together. The CIA is keeping close tabs on the situation, as Litzke tries to sell the information to the Russians after failing to get money out of Cox. They show remarkable prowess at gathering information, as the CIA higher-ups get wonderfully detailed reports of everything that’s happening, but nobody, including them, can seem to make sense of why this is happening or what information Litzke actually has. Long on resources but short on intelligence, the CIA is no better off here than anyone else.

I’ll leave the plot to your own experience, because this is one that is worth seeing for the adults that can handle it, but I’m interested in the film’s connections with No Country. Last year’s Oscar winner looked at a world that was spinning out of control, and saw decent men who try to fight for good causes feeling lost and powerless in the face of incomprehensible evil. In that film, you had three central characters - a good guy, a bad guy, and one that sat in the middle.

Here, there is no clear distinction among the characters. Everybody in this film is radically self-involved, or arrogant, or broken by their addictions, and bent on pursuing their own interests at all times even in the face of great tragedy that befalls their supposed friends and lovers. The characters are richly drawn and richly acted, and so they are a delight to watch on screen, but they would be decidedly abhorrent people to actually know. But even in their caricature, they are reminiscent of everyday people, and shine a light on the basic flaws that we all share.

In a particular insightful comment on the entire movie, the CIA head asks as he hears the story, “So what did we learn from this?” His underling shrugs and says, “Um... I don’t know.” “I don’t know either.” That’s it. Nothing learned. Nothing gained. Just weathering another story unfolding involve radically self-involved people, pursuing their own selfish ends to the destruction of others around them.

In a sense, Burn offers an even bleaker view of the universe than No Country, though wrapped in hilarious packaging. It is perhaps possible to dismiss the evil of No Country because of our temptation to identify with the good guy who ultimately just escapes from dealing with it, rather than identifying with the middle guy who gets taken down by this evil. Here, the film gently prods us to see ourselves in this middle light, with the same capacity for selfishness and evil as anyone else we encounter. What neither film conceives us is a way out, an escape valve for this kind of doomed story.

Burn After Reading may offer a useful reminder to a Christian audience who can be tempted to forget the diagnosis before offering a prescription. I find myself resonating with their diagnosis, which increases my desire to share the prescription. And that’s more than worth a few laughs along the way.