Burn After Reading
Dir: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen feat George Clooney, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton (MA)
By David Fear
Let's say you're the Coen brothers and you've delivered the elegiac, majestic No Country for Old Men.
You don't follow it up with a movie that's equally serious; rather, you
revert to knucklehead-humour mode, a Tolstoy-to-Tex Avery sucker punch
that's worked wonders for the siblings before (from Blood Simple and Raising Arizona to Fargo and The Big Lebowski).
You still have to make an effort to produce something of quality,
however, which apparently slipped the Coens' minds this time around.
Granted, this tale of a former CIA analyst (Malkovich) and what he
calls "the league of morons" blackmailing him would seem slight and
slapdash coming after most of the brothers' other works. But the
transition from Oscar-winning masterpiece to this mess is especially
depressing. Burn After Reading is a disposable lark, and it's treated by the filmmakers as such; Forget After Seeing would be a far more honest title.
It's
not a total loss: you still get McDormand spitting out primo rapid,
vapid patter, and Pitt sporting a pompadour that ranks between HI
McDunnough's and Barton Fink's impressively vertical 'dos. After that,
however, the pickings are slim. Clooney's lunkheaded lothario continues
a curious losing streak with the Coens (why do their collaborations
never jell?), and the attempt to blend Pakula-era paranoia with cheap
gallows humour simply devolves into atonal anarchy.
At the end, one
peripheral character asks another, "Well, what did we learn here? We
learned never to fucking do that again!" Amen.
You've read what we think. Now tell us what you think.