Pros: The way Brad Pitt drinks water
Cons: Everything else
The Bottom Line: There is no reason to consider this film no matter how much you may like any of the people involved.
Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie''s plot. Only use a command like “Burn” in your film’s title if you are sure the film is good enough for most audiences to consider the title ironic. Burn After Reading was a very poor title for a very weak movie. It would be a bad film no matter the writer and director, but when Joel and Ethan Coen are responsible, it just makes the movie that much more disappointing.
Senior CIA agent Osborne Cox is fired because he has a drinking problem. With nothing else to do, he decides to write his memoirs. His wife, Katie, decides to use his dismissal as an excuse to divorce him. Her attorney suggests she be as underhanded as possible in getting Cox’s financial information. Among the information she turns over is a CD of Cox’s notes for his memoir. The legal secretary responsible for cataloging the information accidentally loses the disk in the locker room of her gym. The gym’s assistant manager, Linda, and personal trainer, Chad find the disk. They believe what they have is secret information and decide to use it to blackmail Cox or sell it to the Russians, whichever turns up the most money fast. Linda wants the cash to pay for a long list of plastic surgeries she hopes will cure her of her self-esteem issues; Chad’s involved mainly just for funzies.
Katie has been having an affair with Harry whom she plans to marry when her divorce goes through. That bit is further complicated, however, by the fact that Harry is also married and having an additional affair with the same Linda who is playing both blackmailer and spy. Harry, Linda, and Chad are all bumbling stooges and their attempts at criminal and emotional subterfuge end up creating more than one bloody corpse.
Burn After Reading is just not funny. To my mind, it really never had the potential of being more than just mildly amusing. The biggest problem is that the characters don’t really work. The Coxes are not, or intended to be, funny characters. They exist essentially to put raw data through the joke-engine for Harry, Linda, and Chad. The result is the comedic version of the garbage-in/garbage-out paradigm. Instead of a farcical comedy of errors like Raising Arizona, it is just a silly movie of two-dimensional opportunists that are pathetic and embarrassing instead of foppishly funny. I didn’t like any of them and didn’t buy the motives that drove any of their interactions. Two A+ list writers/directors sketched a story on the back of a napkin so that 5 A+ actors and several notable character actors can waste their collective time, by and large.
John Malkovich seriously overplays Osborne. He tries to shove something akin to the wronged King Lear into a small part meant only for utility; it is very jarring. George Clooney, Harry, is an unholy mix of Ulysses Everett McGill (O Brother Where Art Thou and the eponymous Michael Clayton; the result is spastic. Francis McDormand’s Linda is just flat pitiful and humorless and I got the impression she was playing as if still in a dress rehearsal. Tilda Swinton (the reason I decided to watch it at all) plays her limited part well, but anyone could do it—in other words, in this respect I was roundly disappointed. The only actor/character combination that worked was Brad Pitt as Chad. Chad is a pretentious fitness instructor and slapstick idiot and Mr. Pitt puts in the right amount of funny to make his character the only believable one.
The plotline intersects are poorly handled and a couple of them seem tacked on and incomplete. Linda and Chad as blackmailers and Harry and Katie’s affairs are the only necessary plotlines. To make the full story work, each of these lines need to cross, but should only have to do that once. Instead, Harry hooks up with Linda. This relationship adds about fifteen minutes to the film for what seems to be one very bad and very telescoped punch line. It’s the only explanation I have for the unnecessary subplot. It also adds the opportunity for Harry to show Linda a particularly rococo sex toy. He only shows it once, it is never used, it never appears again, leaving me to believe it might have been an incomplete edit of a longer sequence. Likewise, Linda and Chad attempting to sell Cox’s memoirs to the Russians misses the mark. Instead of an analogue to the absurdly funny recording studio scenes in O Brother Where Art Thou it’s just flat, plain stupid. The quick thumbnail is that the film is sloppy and careless.
There is absolutely no reason to consider watching it, even if you’re sick and it’s on cable. Seriously.
Recommended:
No
