The tone might be (superficially) lighter than the Coen’s Oscar clincher, No Country For Old Men, but whether it’s Miller’s Crossing or The Ladykillers, the Coen-iverse is always out to thwart those who dwell there.
Burn After Reading, a freewheeling knockabout between beautifully written dunderheads, is no different. A screwy spy caper with a malevolent wit, the film’s loopy plot begins with the demotion of CIA op Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich), who promptly quits the agency and sets about writing a tell-all memoir, which, through a series of increasingly ludicrous convolutions, ends up on a computer disc in the hands of Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand). Linda, an employee at the fitness chain Hardbodies is desperate to secure funds for the cosmetic surgeries she believes will transform her life. Aided and abetted by an even dumber colleague (Brad Pitt), she initially attempts to blackmail Cox before opting to sell his disc to the bewildered, disinterested staff of the Russian Embassy.
Elsewhere, George Clooney’s serial womaniser is squiring Cox’s wife, the imperious Tilda Swinton, though her talk of divorce soon has him chasing other options, including Linda. And round and round we go until even the CIA can’t figure out who is doing what to whom.
Though hardly a vintage Coen presentation, Burn After Reading’s reliance on unforgiving machinations and human foibles ensure that nobody is likely to mark this one down as an Intolerable Cruelty. Every character from baffled CIA boss J.K Simmons to passed over love interest Richard Jenkins is keenly, meanly observed.
The pleasing, often blackly hilarious results have brought charges of heartlessness against our preeminent filmmaking brothers, a complaint that should be quickly filed in the crank pile alongside jeremiads against the sky being blue.
Forget it people. This is Coen-town.