In their 90s prime, Joel and Ethan Coen very famously made the Oscar winning masterpiece Fargo and the once-shunned but now cultishly adored farce Big Lebowski consecutively. In what seems to be the new millennium equivalent, they follow up the triumphant No Country for Old Men with the manic goof-fest Burn After Reading. Well, back then they still had something to prove. And consequently, people took Lebowski as a disconcerting retreat from seriousness rather than an escalation of comic prowess. Now, however, critics and fans alike worship the Coens for their absurd wit and tightly wound narratives. The consequence being that this time around, everyone is in on the joke. Knowing the brothers are American masters only makes the brainlessness of Burn After Reading all the more tasty. Numskulls can sometimes translate their lowbrow charm to screen and earn a quick laugh but masters can forge a low IQ and still come away with something brilliant. What the Coens do in Burn After Reading is not a commercial cash-in hack job, but simply an opportunity taken to wash their hands of more solemn metaphor. In fact, for those who found the meditative and sometimes non-commercial No Country for Old Men pretentious, this may even look to be the better film. Their powers of story telling and arresting imagery have gone nowhere. The material has just been made lighter and the brothers have got the tongues in cheek to match it. The essential story centers on a freshly fired employee of the CIA (John Malkovich) trapped in a loveless marriage with a woman (Tilda Swinton) who is having an affair with another married man (George Clooney). Matters are complicated when some of Malkovich's personal info ends up in the hands of truly stupid employees at a fitness chain called Hard Bodies. The doltish personal trainer Chad (Brad Pitt) thinks he has stumbled on to government secrets whereas he really has nothing but scraps from a proposed memoir and some financial information. He shares this find with his surgery obsessed co-worker Linda (Frances McDormand) who sees the event as an opportunity for lucrative blackmail that might earn her enough cash to pay for her much desired face lift and tummy tuck. Overseeing the lot is their very mild-mannered boss (Richard Jenkins), in desperate love with Linda, who of course notices nothing. The eagle eye to the whole debacle though is J.K. Simmons in a minute but wonderful comic turn as the CIA operative trying to keep tabs on the increasingly elaborate and incomprehensibly stupid actions of everyone involved.
Government apathy and American obsessions with sex and physical perfection - the moronic nature of the entire modern age, in fact - are merely fodder for this low scrutiny satire. No agenda is set specifically but the general implication of the material - namely that we're all raving, needy, thoughtless Starbucks patrons bouncing around like pinballs - rings out loud and clear. And when the books is closed on the primary narrative (by film's end a near afterthought) there is a resounding sensation that nothing has been solved, and even more embarrassingly, there was really no problem at all.
Burn After Reading certainly feels like perhaps one of the most loose, fast-paced, and ultimately uneven films in the Coens' filmography, but it's so filled with pizazz and unstoppable energy that nothing else seems to matter (and nothing here really does). As with the film's characters, who run around foolishly with nowhere really to go, the film itself zings about so frenetically that you almost never realize it's heading nowhere. It's a 90 minute delight that passes before you at such a sprint, there's hardly even time to catch your breath.
What you most remember about the ride in the moments that follow are the performances, so magnetic and exciting and yet built on little more than high-adrenaline and the air in the room. So perfectly comic is Brad Pitt's mindless Chad that he literally makes the empty time spent waiting in a car funny. Pitt's every little twitch and sneer are laughable for reasons logic can't describe. So too are Clooney and McDormand as two ravenously needy lovers with no future. The two most polar opposite of all these performances shine the brightest though: Malkovich in a truly spastic foul-mouthed 90 minute rage and Richard Jenkins, all sad eyes and honest words, as the film's one and only gentle soul. The two are so disparate that there could be no other plausible end than for them to square off in the final frames.
Grade: B+
