It's nice to see the Coen brothers being funny again, even if it is their typical dark humor.
"Burn After Reading" is in the comedic style of their previous works "Raising Arizona" and "Fargo."
While it isn't immediately obvious, the film is actually told after the fact, in a discussion about the events between two CIA agents in Langley, Va. Some of the best jokes in the film are told in this perspective. It probably had to be this way, because the events in question are so gruesome that it wouldn't actually be funny if it were in real time.
The entire film revolves around two characters, and their lives constantly intertwine in the interactions with the rest of the cast. John Malkovich as Osborne Cox is - well, he's John Malkovich, and any attempt to distill the gravitas that he can bring to a character into anything less than a Ph.D. thesis paper is an exercise in futility and an insult to the proper use of language. Anyone who has seen him in anything previously gets the idea.
George Clooney - an actor who normally isn't quite in Malkovich's class - shines once again under the direction of the Coen brothers. Something about the kind of movies that the Coens write really brings out the talent in Clooney. His performance as Harry Pfarrer is, without a doubt, his best since his first Coen role as Ulysses Everett McGill in "O, Brother Where Art Thou?"
Those two really bring the movie in, but the rest of the cast is not a bunch of amateurs, either. Tilda Swinton's Katie Cox is sexy in an ice-queen sort of way, and Brad Pitt plays the perfect health-freak moron as Chad Feldheimer. On the other hand, Frances McDormand was actually sort of creepy. Not miscast, but it's completely believable that her character's prime motivation would be plastic surgery. Honestly, she and Clooney weren't really that great a fit, but Clooney managed to pull it off in spite of her.
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The plot of the film is hilarious, but it requires the viewer to pay close attention. Get up to go to the bathroom, and you'll probably miss something important. This is definitely not a movie to start watching halfway through on a Sunday afternoon, because it won't make any sense.
That is one of the big issues with Coen films - they aren't bad by any means, and even the word overrated is undeserved. The problem - or rather, the best thing about them - is that in an age when Hollywood panders to the very lowest of common denominators, the Coen brothers do the exact opposite. They actually expect that their audience have a brain that functions. Unkind as it may be, anyone who thinks that "The Nutty Professor" was the height of hilarity probably isn't going to enjoy "Burn After Reading" very much. Anyone who loved "The Big Lebowski," on the other hand, has probably already seen this movie.
Burn After Reading
A-
In theaters now
