Burn After Reading Review
by Jerry Saravia (Faust668 AT msn DOT com)October 20th, 2009
BURN AFTER READING (2008)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
RATING: Three stars
How do I review the Coens latest wacky comedy? Tough to say except that it is blazingly original and wacky and schizophrenic and, occasionally, hilarious and spectacularly uneven. You know, the usual brand of Coens humor.
John Malkovich is CIA analyst Osborne Cox, who is beyond upset that his services are no longer required due to rampant drunkeness. He is unhappily married to Katie (Tilda Swinton), who is having an affair with one of the strangest Coens characters ever, Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney), a married and paranoid federal marshal who has a predilection for dildos! Harry navigates an online dating service where he meets Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand), who works at a gym called Hardbodies. It is there where the foolhardy and foolish Chad Feldheimer (the hilarious and truly zonked-out Brad Pitt) comes upon a computer disk that supposedly contains CIA secrets ("It is s**t and more s**t.") Somehow all this leads to the irascible Osbourne Cox, who is trying to write his memoirs, Cox's CIA boss (J.K. Simmons) who hopes to make sense of all this, Pfarrer's paranoia thinking he is being followed, and some business revolving around Litzke's planned plastic surgery and the alleged CIA disk being sold to the Russian Embassy.
On the Coens scale of pure frenetic idiocy, this is not as much fun as "The Big Lebowski" but it is far superior to "Hudsucker Proxy" and "Intolerable Cruelty." All the actors in "Burn After Reading" pretty much overact and do it as well as you can imagine. Brad Pitt comes off best as the most idiotic and memorable character in the Coens universe, salivating every syllable of the Coens language to the nth degree. Clooney is rather creepy in this film, playing a very mysterious character to say the least. McDormand is always fun to watch as is the underrated Richard Jenkins, the manager of Hardbodies who doesn't like espionage. Malkovich gives the F-bombs a special kind of lunacy with his temperamental diction - you swear he is saying the words as if they were written by Shakespeare. Brilliant, I say.
"Burn After Reading" is manic, riotously funny and rather empty. It is full of calories but it pretty much dissolves after its abrupt ending and you wonder, what the heck was that all about? Why am I still hungry after it is over? I love jokey, harebrained movies like this, which are hardly a dime a dozen, but I am not sure what to take away from it. Just like its equally jocose cousin, "The Big Lebowski," that movie also ended before it should have. I guess the best way I can describe it is like this: "Big Lebowski" was about a stained rug that managed to involve bowling alleys, cremation, violent Vietnam Vets, mixed identities and Yma Sumac. "Burn After Reading" is about a CIA computer disk that involves gyms, plastic surgery, dildo contraptions, unfortunate encounters, paranoia and some other s**t. It is good s**t but don't ask me to analyze this s**t.
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