Director: Joel and Ethan Coen
Starring: George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Francis McDormand, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton, Richard Jenkins
Running Time: 96 minutes (plus trailers)
Fresh off the heels of their enormous success at the Academy Awards with No Country for Old Men (which won Best Picture and Best Director), the critically acclaimed Coen Brothers return with this very amusing though somewhat uneven tale of espionage and extortion. Like many of the duo’s best films (which include Raising Arizona, Fargo & The Big Lebowski) Burn After Reading follows an assortment of quirky, bizarre and often downright idiotic characters who inevitably ruin their lives and the lives of others in a bungling attempt to make easy money. The selfish greedy imbeciles featured in this film include foul mouthed CIA analyst Osbourne Cox (Malkovich), paranoid, exercise obsessed treasury agent Harry Pfarrer (Clooney) and a pair of greedy, idiotic gym employees named Linda and Chad (McDormand and Pitt.) The story is fairly simple; Linda and Chad find a CD in the locker room of their gym which contains what they believe to be extremely sensitive government “sh*t”, and they attempt to blackmail Cox. Things are made more complicated by Pfarrer, who forms a relationship with the lovelorn Linda whilst at the same time having an affair with Cox’s frosty wife (Swinton.) As the film progresses, character paths cross and things go horribly, bloodily wrong.
The film is very funny, the highlights being the hilariously dispassionate meetings between two very confused agents in CIA headquarters (played by David Rasche and J.K. Simmons) who are observing events as they unfold, as well as Brad Pitt’s performance, hollywoods number one leading man perfectly cast as the lovable idiot Chad. However, it is not all fun and games; the film has some very dark dramatic elements, a few surprisingly graphic bursts of violence, and it also is extremely slow getting started. Personally, I didn’t think that the transitions from comedy to thriller to comedy worked, and someone expecting a straight up comedy may be bored by the early scenes involving Cox. Nevertheless, there are plenty of hilarious moments (you will never guess what George Clooney is building in his basement), and the acting, from an A-list cast, is excellent without exception. I would definitely recommend this film to anyone who likes a good black comedy.
Rating: 7/10
