A carnival of human folly

Rating: 8/10 (13 September 2008)

In Burn After Reading the Coen brothers turn to a new genre, the spy story, and they shred it and, along with it, their cast of characters. Typically for the Coens, there's tight construction, quick pacing--and a somewhat unseemly delight taken in human stupidity--in the course of which a number of A-listers are coaxed into working hard to demean themselves.
This at least is what the critics are mostly saying. Now, in fact, the action's a bit puzzling, and the finale a tad unsatisfying. But what some reviews seem crucially to overlook is that there's much fun to be had here for viewers, not only in absurdities of dialogue and action--in the seemingly helter-skelter "clusterfuck" plot--but in the way the extreme story elements and satirical characters are destined to undercut whole chunks of movies you'll be seeing in the near future.
You've got a group of types. There's the ice queen wife (Tilda Swinton), her alcoholic husband (John Malkovitch), the cosmetic surgery-seeking plain girl (Frances McDormand), the ambivalent philanderer (George Clooney), the gym bunny (Brad Pitt), the good bloke (Richard Jenkins). Then you've got the various people they're tied to or get involved with, none of whom matter much except for a "CIA Superior" (J.K. Simmons). The machinations of the gym bunny and the plain girl (co-workers at a gym called Hardbodies) are reported to Simmons by an agent. They're trying to extort money from ex-spook Malkovich and sell his info to the Ruskies. Simmons gives orders to minimize damage and make some sense out of it all. It will be hard any time in the near future to observe any such characters and plot elements in another movie and not be reminded of how devastatingly they were twisted and mocked by the Coens.
The CD-rom Pitt and McDormand find at Hardbodies contains some intelligence-valueless memories of Malkovich's just-ended CIA career. He calls them a "league of morons," but he speaks too soon, because he's an idiot himself. Cruelty and anger do not make a man smart.
Reviewers accuse the Coens of meanness, but satire doesn't have to be nice. It is good to be able to laugh at ourselves, to see our own folly. The excellent and very famous actors who perform in this movie may understand that better than the critics do. They know the value of having a bit of fun--of laughing at themselves. They're not so much demeaned as set free of their solemn garb as tragedians who weep in a movie like Babel (as Brad Pitt did), or snarl and get tough like Clooney in Michael Clayton, and so on.
The action takes place in the environs of Washington, DC. The CIA, as moviegoers know all too well by now, is over the border in Langley. The opportunists, lobbyists, and exploiters, the poseurs and dreamers and has-beens, are everywhere--in the real DC, that is. This is a specialized and notional one, for the Coens are artists.
The Coens do not always succeed. There's a slight risk in their returning to mockery after the solemn horror of their literary adaptation of last year, Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. They had never worked off somebody else's story before and the purity of their accomplishment grew from their playing another's music, so to speak. In their own mode, ever since Blood Simple, the brothers have been cruel both to their characters and their audience--cruel in a way that gives excruciating pleasure in the suspenseful moments of Blood Simple. They can become too reductive and condescending, as in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, or too crass, as in The Ladykillers, or just boring, as in The Man Who Wasn't There, or merely conventional, as in Intolerable Cruelty. And as clever and able as they are, it is still true that when they have most succeeded, it is n partly by accident, as in Barton Fink, which owes much to the dorky intensity of John Turturro, and thegargantuan genius of John Goodman; likewise The Big Lebowski became a thing far beyond their abilities because it stars Jeff Bridges--and again the great Goodman.
But enough of the filmography--which in a way this movie has nothing to do with. Its virtue comes from its working a new game, the "clusterfuck" of schemers and cheaters so mixed up with each other everything ultimately implodes--with a plop.
The "clusterfuck" grows out of greed, vanity, and lust. The Coens' alleged "cruelty" comes from the stern morality of the satirist.
Clooney is sleeping with everyone he can, and that includes Tilda Swinton, Cox's (Malkovich's) wife, a mean pediatrician. McDormand, whose vanity makes her want thousands for wholesale cosmetic surgery, is dating via the Internet, and thus she starts seeing Clooney too. Clooney goes to Swinton's and Malkovich's house when Malkovich is away, and then Pitt goes there in search of more state secrets. The critics think Pitt is the dumbest character of all. But he is the most selfless: he only wants to exploit the discovered data because it excites him to do so, without any real ulterior motive or plan. Malkovich is motivated, as in so many of the actor's roles, mostly by malevolence, and this time, the perversion of feeling that arises from alcohol.
The Russians are not in bed with anybody, but the CIA has an inside man at the Russian embassy. The lesson of John Le Carré: the Secret War is always behind the times.
Other than this, it is dangerous to reveal the plot; the trailers already revealed too much. The devil is in the details.