A throw-away effort by the Coen Brothers, but Tilda Swinton takes the prize for seriously unlikable funniness

Rating: 6/10 (6 October 2008)

If you enjoy sour shaggy dog stories told for the enjoyment of clever, sour people, you might like Burn After Reading...a shaggy dog story if there ever was one. It takes the easy target of Washington's shallow denizens and mixes them into the equally easy targets of CIA paranoia and serial infidelities. And all these denizens, with one possible exception, are either numbskull boobs or nasty boobs. The Coens have given us not only a sour shaggy dog story, designed to pull the rug from under the audience, but they've populated their tale with characters that are interchangeable cardboard cutouts. The characters may look different and sound different, and may even appeal a little because of the cleverness of their unlikability, but they all dance to the same tune...the Coen Brothers patented polka that can be mighty engaging at times, but can also become as condescending as a Saturday Night Live skit.
If a director and a writer have any respect for their audience, they don't behave as if the audience is just part of the joke...the dumb patsy everyone else will snigger at for being taken in by that shaggy dog. If Marge Gunderson had turned out to be the shallow, constant butt-of-a-joke that Linda Litzke is, Fargo would never have been a great movie, just a show- off film filled with nothing but black humor and technique. With Burn After Reading there's no one likable except a guy who gets his with an axe. Even the Coen Brothers' technique seems to fail them. Burn After Reading, for me, just lurches from one set piece to the next. Half way through we realize nothing is going to get better, nothing is going to change, and the deaths, body disposal issues, black humor and CIA insouciance are going to be tiresome and predictable.
Brad Pitt has gotten a lot of press for his performance, and why not? But I'll give my award to Tilda Swinton. For my money she was the only person who managed to be both true to her character (e.g., a boob or unlikable, and in Swinton's case, unlikable) and yet very amusing in her unlikability. She's first rate. Wish the movie had been.
To see Swinton at her most sympathetic, watch her in Young Adam and The Deep End.