Burn After Reading: Movie Review (2008)

The new Coen brothers movie, “Burn After Reading,” isn’t what it should have been, but it’s almost what it could have been--a consistently funny farce about dumb people creating a crippling run of chaos between the CIA and, well, a gym called Hardbodies.

There are some big, hammy laughs here--and a major twist that, for an instant, lifts the movie into the loopy stratosphere it strives to achieve throughout. But too often the movie is off balance--it seems strained and self-aware in ways that previous Coen films haven’t.

There’s a disconnect between the actors, the directors and the script that proves, at the very least, just how difficult it is to pull off a successful screwball farce, even when you’re armed with an A-list cast assembled by the same team that developed such dark, modern-day comedy classics as “Fargo,” “The Ladykillers,” “O Brother, Where Art Thou?,” and “The Big Lebowski” (to name a few). Of course, the Coens also wrote and directed “The Hudsucker Proxy,” so they’re aren’t incapable of producing the occasional misfire.

In a snapshot, the unwieldy plot: When Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), a CIA operative with alcohol and anger-management issues, is demoted for bringing those very issues into the workplace, he quits the agency in a rage and sets out to write a scathing memoir in hopes of bringing the CIA down.

Unfortunately for him, those memoirs fall into the hands of his icy wife, Katie (Tilda Swinton), who plans to divorce him in favor of continuing her torrid affair with Harry (George Clooney), an oversexed U.S. marshal who cruises the Internet for sex, has interesting ideas for what constitutes a sex toy, and who is married to a dull children’s book writer named Sandy (Elizabeth Marvel).

It’s when Katie inadvertently downloads onto a disc her husband’s memoirs while trying to retrieve their financial information that trouble erupts.

The disc, after all, finds its way to two half-baked employees at Hardbodies. First up is Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt), a power trainer with focus issues who is the biggest dumbbell in the weight room. Second is Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand), a sketchy mess with a Quaker Oates bob who works at the same gym, but who would prefer to shape her body through the cosmetic surgery she can’t afford.

That is, of course, until she and Chad come upon Cox’s memoirs, which they believe are filled with the sort of national secrets that could earn them plenty if they either blackmailed the easily infuriated Cox or, if that didn’t work out, sold the information to the Russians.

All of this and more simmers together in a plot that is so painstakingly intricate, much of the life has been manufactured out of it. This is a movie filled with so many stupid people doing so many stupid things, the wit for which the Coens are known is spotty at best.

“Burn” isn’t a bad movie--far from it, particularly given the game performances from Pitt, McDormand, Clooney and a marvelous J.K. Simmons--but in the wake of their aforementioned films and especially after their Academy Award-winning “No Country For Old Men,” no one is going to confuse “Burn After Reading” as anything other than a mildly above-average comedy from two brothers who usually come through with a whole lot better.

Grade: B-

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