An odd venturing into territory of both the political and pastiche sort, as the Coen's just about tread water with a purposely dopey spy thriller-come-romance feature.

Rating: 6/10 (20 May 2010)

It seems somewhat strange that George Clooney and Tilda Swinton would be in Michael Clayton, one of 2007's better films: a thriller about corruption; guilt; paranoia; espionage and so forth about a year or two prior to the pair of them then staring together in this; a pastiche of most of those things from the usually frustratingly wavy pens of the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan. The Coen's do indeed deliver a strange spoof-come-pastiche, delivered by way of their off beat and scatty humour ranging from dark and dreary in brutally efficient deaths inflicted on some by others to the construction one character lends towards a contraption designed to give its user the full benefit of a sex toy with minimal effort. Burn After Reading calls to mind a number of films of old, mostly of the spy or espionage ilk; broadly speaking, the film is a little like that 1998 John Frankenheimer film entitled Ronin only with Stellan Skarsgård's character completely removed and somebody like Jim Carrey's character from Dumb and Dumber inserted in place of him; an idiot that just happens to hold all the aces, much to the frustration of some of the other more brutal, more professional individuals entwined. Even Clooney's character himself has a name that echoes Michael Caine's Harry Palmer, but really only if you say it relatively quickly and repetitively.
The film over-complicates a relatively routine premise, but deliberately so. Brad Pitt's Chad Feldheimer and Frances McDormand's Linda Litzke work at a local gym in the Washington DC area. He's eccentric in his body movements and gestures, the sort that strolls on ahead with an idea because it initially seems like an hilarious thing to do without much thinking about what the consequences might be; she's a lonely woman desperately seeking companionship via an online dating website, with a number of expansive operations on her body and facial area the overall goal so as to completely reinvigorate herself. Their roles as gym supervisors signals a sense that they're based within a zone in which people are present so as to tone up or to change appearance, dramatically or otherwise. Linda and Chad will undergo a similar 'toning up' process as they ill-advisedly leave their common existence behind and enter the world of espionage as gym owner Ted (Jenkins) persistently tells Linda she looks fine in a physically sense, and that the changes she has planned are unnecessary. Whilst on the surface a mere comment about her plastic surgery, it works on another level as a warning of greater items of change; particularly, her dipping into this new world she is ill fitted to exist in.
This is all before we get to Clooney's Harry Pfarrer, a U.S. Marshall having an affair with Katie Cox (Swinton), the wife of C.I.A. higher-up Osborne Cox (Malkovich) whose compact disc those pesky gym employees have happened to stumble into contact with. It's an act on behalf of the U.S. government that sparks all this off, their demoting of Osborne signalling his resignation out of anger and the consequent embarking on the writing of his memoirs, a document you can understand will reveal the last 'x' number of years of C.I.A. work. By the end, The Coen's have got a little more political than perhaps they ever have been when they provide us with a scene that sees oblivious, dumbo government officials, sitting around discussing the eventual aftermath of the unholy mess they themselves have created. The film has begun with the removing of a higher-up from a position of power; innocents have since been caught up in the aftermath; many people have perished in the mean time and then the American government have, in a rather brutal fashion and through J.K. Simmons' character, brushed it aside in a foul swoop when taking responsibility and finding out why certain things went so wrong would be recommended. Read into whatever political under currents you like.
Following Osborne's leaving of the service, he finds himself on a yacht out in the water with his father, informing him of the situation and talking of past decades when his father was in the force in a romanticised tone. He points at the ending of The Cold War as a moment that his line of work turned into something else as the boat seemingly drifts aimlessly out in the waters of nowhere, apparently going nowhere in the process, capturing what Osborne is feeling as he gazes off screen into the unknown. The best parts involve Osborne with the gym employees, Malkovich just about pulling off the scenes that require him to shout and badger people who are into something that's way over their heads, with Chad and Linda themselves trying to figure out the next plan of action; items that involve burglary and extortion in what is a passingly entertaining passage of play. The rest of it is a hit and miss meshing of romance and floundering on Clooney's and Swinton's behalf, barely any of it all that interesting but it somewhat eerily passes the time in an odd, numbing manner.
Despite its light hearted tendencies within the genre, it's perhaps more involving than Ridley Scott's relatively pedestrian Body of Lies or either of Greengrass' two hollow; wishy-washy; turgid Bourne sequels which run on a premise but are practically devoid of character and narrative, the second sequel of which uses a bog-standard framework of self-discovery so as to provide a sense things are progressing. Clooney's consistent state of paranoia born out of the fact he believes he's being followed and the strong phobias plus reactions he has to the idea of surveillance actually addresses the issues at hand in a far more involving manner than either of the three aforementioned films. It's tough to get too excited about Burn After Reading, the directors' skill in film-making compensating for the brash, aggressive energy the piece carries but it's not enough to render it anything too great.