"You are part of a league of morons"

Rating: 7/10 (10 January 2010)

In my review of 'North by Northwest (1959),' I proposed that Hitchcock had depicted his F.B.I. agents as omniscient deities presiding over the affairs of Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant), interceding sporadically in a Deus Ex Machina-like fashion. 'Burn After Reading (2008)' – the Coen brothers' follow-up to 'No Country for Old Men (2007)' – uses the government authorities in a similar manner. Unlike Hitchcock's Gods, however, the Coens' authorities are hardly omniscient. Owing to round- the-clock surveillance of suspicious individuals, the government is continually aware of the characters' movements; less complete, however, is their understanding of the characters' motivations, and, frankly, they don't want to know. "Report back to me when it makes sense," orders a high-ranking C.I.A. official (J.K. Simmons), who's so befuddled at the behaviour of this handful of American citizens that he'd rather cover up their crimes than get to the bottom of them.
'Burn After Reading' is a send-up of the thriller, rather than a straight example of the genre. Gym employees Chad (Brad Pitt) and Linda (Frances McDormand) are complete idiots who happen to stumble upon the memoirs of an insignificant government employee, Osbourne (John Malkovich), and attempt to blackmail him for them. Meanwhile, philandering charmer Harry (George Clooney) sneaks around with Osbourne's wife (Tilda Swinton), and eventually gets himself into all sorts of paranoid strife. The Coens are no stranger to film noir, having incorporated the style into a good half of their films, and here the inevitable failure of greed is played for laughs more than anything else. This breeziness is only possible because the viewer is kept detached from the fates of the characters. Like the various institutions watching bemusedly from the sidelines – government agents, divorce lawyers – the audience is merely a curious spectator in a perverted game of chance.