‘Burn After Reading’ or “An all-star cast doesn’t equal an all-star movie.” (Review)
The new Coen Brother’s film, ‘Burn After Reading’ is a return to their signature style of filmmaking, and it’s arguable whether that is a good career move or not. After their success last year with their excellent Adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel, ‘No Country for Old men’, they stepped up their quality of filmmaking by doing a film so unlike anything they’ve ever done before. Typically the Coen’s make films that are dark, nihilist comedies with eccentric characters and stories that don’t really serve a purpose, as well as serving as a venue to showcase their nonsensical characters and how they interact with one another on screen.
The Coen brothers are working with a marvelous cast in ‘Burn After Reading’. George Clooney, Frances McDormand, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton and J.K. Simmons are all fun watch in this film. Unfortunately this Coen Bros. venture feels more like something along the lines ‘Ladykillers’ or ‘Intolerable Cruelty’, rather than their better efforts like ‘Fargo’, ‘Raising Arizona’ or ‘The Big Lebowski’. This great cavalcade of talent isn’t given great scenes of genius dialogue to showcase their superb level of comedic skills.
‘Burn After Reading’ is a comedy, but it’s far from anything at laugh-out-loud level. This is not to say it isn’t very funny. It is. However; it’s not the laugh-out-loud experience I had expected it to be. There is acting talent here in surplus but the full potential of the cast is never put to use. At times there actually are too many quirky characters on screen and being referenced that keeping track of them all can be tedious. There are some wonderful moments in this movie, particularly between dimwitted but well-meaning Hard Bodies gym workers, Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) and Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt). Their plot to blackmail Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), a deadpan and emotionally unstable former government agent, creates some of the strongest moments of the entire film. However, once Pitt’s character, the most enjoyable on-screen presence, exits the film, it starts to lose its momentum.
George Clooney plays a married womanizer who finds time in his life to casually online date while his wife is otherwise occupied. His character is an overly paranoid one, since he previously worked for the government and knows how their subterfuge plays out. Clooney’s character’s sense of paranoia grows as the film progresses and eventually plays out in one of the movies best scenes. Clooney’s character’s abnormal personality trait is that he is always jogging. There are countless scenes where he jogs, is about to jog, just getting finished jogging or complains about not being about to jog. It’s comical and a nice visual. Tilda Swinton plays her typical archetype of the coldhearted white-collar businesswoman; this shouldn’t come as any surprise since it’s Tilda Swinton who typically plays the emotionally deadened businesswoman. It might be typecasting at this point, but she is so deliciously good in those type of roles.
The spy genre isn’t something that Coen Brothers have tackled until now. ‘Burn After Reading’ is a spy film, which isn’t directly influential on the story, but more of a backdrop set-up in order to get all of these oddball characters interacting with each other. J.K Simmons plays a highly entertaining role as a CIA supervisor who is being briefed on all of the interactions between the main characters; he’s endlessly trying to piece together some sense of what is happening but can’t. This comes across as a tip off to the viewers that there really isn’t much to make sense of and that the Coen Brothers are clued into the loose narrative, which explains why the film ends abruptly.
Once the credits in ‘Burn After Reading’ rolled and I left the theater I was left with an empty feeling. It was good as a comedy but many elements of it felt incomplete. The story came across as wanting to be smarter than it was. The violence that occurs on screen fit the typical Coen Brother’s formula, but it feels abrupt in this instance and changes the tone of the film for the worse. The gallery of oddball characters is entertaining, but everyone is underdeveloped. There were a lot of elements that comprise this movie that I enjoyed but the movie seemed to think it ended without question, while in actuality left many dangling plot threads and unfinished storylines. ‘Burn After Reading’ was a fulfilling movie-going experience. It’s not the great film I think many where hoping it would be. It’s a good film. Its fair share of faults and isn’t a particularly memorable addition to the Coen’s impressive film catalog.
Dan Hacker
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