Don’t Burn After Viewing

By Broadside Staff Writer Ross Bonaime

When it comes to the Coen brothers and their catalogue of films, they seem to fit in two categories: the comedies, such as O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers; and the mystery/thrillers Miller’s Crossing, The Man Who Wasn’t There and No Country For Old Men. However, their greatest films are able to combine the two into one cohesive whole like with their films Fargo, The Big Lebowski and Raising Arizona. The Coens’ latest film Burn After Reading also tries to mesh these genres and pulls it off decently enough to consider it amongst the Coens’ best.

Burn After Reading seems almost as if it takes characters from two completely different Coen brothers’ movies: the serious CIA types and a group of wacky, gym employees. John Malkovich plays Osborne Cox, a former CIA agent who decides to write his memoirs. When the disk containing Cox’s memoirs is lost at Hardbodies Gym and found by two clueless employees, Linda Litzke and Chad Feldheimer, executed excellently by Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt, respectively, they decide to try and profit from their findings and attempt to blackmail Cox. Not to make this situation too simple, a current agent, Harry Pfarer, played by George Clooney, is having an affair with Cox’s wife, Katie, played by Clooney’s nemesis in the movie Michael Clayton, Tilda Swinton. Pfarer also becomes romantically involved with Litzke and becomes a convoluted mess for the poor people involved in what should have been a simple blackmail case.

Clooney is able to finally be funny again for the first time since he first worked with the Coens in O Brother. While his character seems straightforward at first, he has an underlying oddness about himself, yet does not play Pfarer as a caricature. Malkovich and Swinton as the Coxes are also able to pull off being straight-laced and serious so that it comes off hilarious at times. Also, other Coen movie mainstays, Richard Jenkins, who starred in this year’s The Visitor and on TV’s Six Feet Under and J.K. Simmons of the Spider-Man series and Juno, have little screen time, but make the scenes they are in a joy. However, the real stars here are McDormand and Pitt. McDormand has never been so ridiculous, not even in her Oscar-winning role in Fargo. McDormand knows how to play Litzke perfectly: silly and a little crazy, but lovable and lonely, though Pitt steals the show in every scene he is in. With his hair frosted and an iPod always set to workout music, Pitt has never been so ridiculous and sidesplitting. Pitt has shown he has comedic talent in the Ocean’s Eleven series and Snatch, but never before has he gone for it as he does here. The cast pulls off being silly or serious when the scene calls for it remarkably well.

After the Coens won the Oscar for Best Picture for No Country For Old Men earlier this year, they had a lot to live up to. Plus, with their already excellent list of black comedies, and the fact that they didn’t use their usual cinematographer Roger Deakins, it is hard to believe that lightning would be able to strike yet again. Surprisingly though, with its ensemble cast, Carter Burwell’s fitting score, and the Coens great directing and writing, Burn After Reading could possibly be considered in the pantheon of classic Coen films.