Quirky characters and A-list actors

Rating: 7/10 (28 December 2010)

Murder, blackmail, espionage – and this is a comedy? But Burn After Reading, the Coen brothers' latest film, is hilarious. Joel and Ethan Coen, who directed the movie and wrote the screenplay, have created an ensemble of wacky, egocentric characters whose worlds collide with disastrous results after a computer disk falls into the wrong hands.
Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) and Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) are clueless, greedy gym employees who find the disk containing personal and ­financial files of Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich), a CIA analyst who quits his job after ­being demoted. Linda and Chad are sure the data is top-secret government information, and since Linda needs money for cosmetic surgery, they ­decide to blackmail Osbourne.
Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney) gets tangled up in the mess too. He's involved with Osbourne's wife (Tilda Swinton) and Linda – and he's married.
Burn After Reading may initially appear to be a lighthearted comedy, but, as Chad puts it, "appearances can be ... deceptive." The Coen brothers wrote the screenplay while they were writing No Country for Old Men. In both movies, the deaths of innocent people are not taken very seriously, and there are no consequences for the killers; so the ending of Burn After Reading is unsettling for me.
Why is this movie doing so well at the box office? The answer is simple: big names. I admit that my main reason for seeing it was that it was done by the Coen brothers. As for the actors, I don't think the characters would have been as amusing if they hadn't been played by A-list celebrities; at least Chad (the funniest, in my opinion) wouldn't have been as funny. He is the epitome of idiocy and artlessness, and yet, audiences love him, because he's Brad Pitt.
Overall, it was the quirky personalities of the characters and the talent of the actors who portrayed them that gave this movie its distinctive quality.