I remember the first time I heard of Burn After Reading. It was courtesy of an opening feature trailer for a DVD I watched when I was about ten years old. At the time, I can remember being both scared and fascinated by the trailer’s thumping musical number–‘Grounds For Divorce’ by Elbow–the fast-paced compilation of action scenes, and emphatic listing of high-profile starring actors.
I wouldn’t end up watching the full movie for years after, but it was a first taste that has since stuck in my memory with the same electric impact as those legendary anti-piracy ads that would flash messages like “you wouldn’t steal a television… you wouldn’t steal a car…” After all, you wouldn’t miss a Coen Brothers movie.
What is most interesting about Burn After Reading, the twenty-third movie released by Joel and Ethan Coen, is that it is the follow-up to their (arguably) career-defining triumph, the four-time Academy Award winner No Country For Old Men. This merits particular interest because, unlike No Country, Burn After Reading is a strikingly nihilistic movie, with no resounding moral thesis at its centre. Even in the Coens’ kookier early dark comedies, such as Barton Fink and The Big Lebowski, there is an underlying sense of moral cogency. Fink explores Hollywood’s exploitation of creativity, and Lebowski the culture clash of the ‘60s and ‘70s. No Country For Old Men, meanwhile, concerns itself with the human states of greed, guilt, and ultimately hopefulness. In Burn After Reading, however, the Coens curiously elect to switch tact, instead creating a character-driven black comedy with pure laugh-out-loud nonsense at its core.
Because of its meandering, largely amoral nature, Burn After Reading is a tricky movie to summarise. The gist of the plot is that two gym employees, Linda (Frances McDormand) and Chad (Brad Pitt), get their hands on computer data from the files of ex-CIA analyst Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich). What they believe to be a million-dollar blackmail opportunity is, unbeknownst to them, just a draft of Cox’s pretentious memoirs. What follows is a highly entertaining and often ludicrous ensemble piece in which the lives and deaths of a host of characters intersect, resulting in paranoia, hilarity, and destruction.
A core element of Burn After Reading’s appeal definitely lies in its ability to exaggerate and parody the public perceptions of its star-studded cast. Pitt is at his comic best as the air-headed, perpetually gum-chewing Chad. George Clooney is the naïve, hopeless ladies’ man, and Tilda Swinton is the cold and unsympathetic wife of the short-tempered Cox. McDormand, who is married to Joel Coen and has starred in a number of the brothers’ films, including Blood Simple, Fargo, and Raising Arizona, also shines as the dissatisfied and plastic surgery-obsessed Linda.
So much of what transpires is absurd, and nowhere is Burn After Reading’s departure from the stylistic tragedy of No Country For Old Men more evident than in its overtly blasé attitude to death. The sheer speed at which this movie hits its audience with clichés, different storylines, and tropes makes the characters seem more like caricatures than objects of empathy. Everyone is cheating on each other, two characters are headed to the Russian embassy with what they think is top secret information, and another one is crafting some kind of dildo bike in his basement.
But for all its zaniness, this is not a film that is confused about what it’s trying to say. Rather, it is a playful cinematic ploy; a foray into meaningless territory where the Coen Brothers afford all the room in the world to go big on red herrings, bumbling, infuriating characters, and a stuffed-to-the-brim cinematic endeavour that ultimately declares that it has absolutely nothing to say. In what is, to my mind, one of the best final scenes of any Coen Brothers’ movie, an unnamed CIA official played by J.K. Simmons directs orders to cover up the entire twisted comedy of errors that has made up the film’s run-time. Clearly exhausted just from listening to the spiel of deaths, misunderstandings, and infidelities, he delivers the deadpan lines “what did we learn? I guess we learned not to do it again. I’m fucked if I know what we did.”
Regarded by some as a project taken on by the Coens to blow off some steam after the success of No Country, Burn After Reading is nevertheless a stellar movie in its own right. It is perhaps the definitive nihilistic comedy, somehow pulling off the impossible and blending shallowness and murder with richly drawn characters and ridiculous hijinks. You can’t watch it without feeling that everybody involved is having a great time. Not every movie needs to end with a character narrating a deeply moving dream that they had. Sometimes all you need is a good old “what did we learn? I don’t fucking know” and cue the credits.
Words by Eleanor Burleigh
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