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A Review of Burn After Reading

Disappointing Film Stars Brad Pitt, Tilda Swinton, George Clooney

Sep 18, 2008 Eric Mungenast

A mediocre effort by two fine filmmakers, Burn After Reading fails as a comedy and as a follow-up to No Country for Old Men.

The Coen Brothers waste a fine cast and a solid plot and deliver a comedy that simply isn’t that funny and is missing the quirky wonder of Raising Arizona or the epic proportions of O Brother, Where Art Thou.

The Plot

It’s easy to see what the filmmakers were aiming for, a film that mixes the current paranoia about government surveillance with people too self-absorbed and stupid to care about such things. And the premise, an odd tale of how the memoirs of a CIA analyst end up in the hands of incompetent gym employees, is a humorous enough idea.

Burn After Reading Cast

But the jokes fall flat and the characters are too one-dimensional to compensate, which is a shame for such a solid cast. The most egregious example of this is poor Tilda Swinton, a fine actress who is forced to play an underwritten character.

Frances McDormand, a much better actress than this film allows her to be, is wasted in her role as the aging, lonely exercise instructor. Her character acts more as a punch line, the butt of a cruel joke, poked and prodded and mocked for being old and stupid.

John Malkovich mails in his performance as the fired CIA analyst, while George Clooney doesn’t bother to put a stamp on the envelope as the philandering lover to Swinton and McDormand.

The one exception among the leads is, surprisingly, Brad Pitt. His character’s a cliché, an idiotic exercise instructor named Chad with bleached hair and a carnal need to ride his bike. But Pitt plays him with a child-like innocence, a character that is both harmless and surprisingly loveable, and the comic relief in what is meant to be a comedy.

Other solid performers include Richard Jenkins as the lovelorn Ted, a Droopy the Dog look-alike who falls for a woman he’s too good for, and J.K. Simmons playing the fast talking CIA superior. It’s the same character Simmons’ plays in many of his films, including Spiderman and Thank You For Smoking, but one he is exceptionally good at playing.

Too obvious

The clearest flaw of the film is how the theme, the paranoia derived from being watched continuously and the loss of privacy, is shown, or rather beaten into the audience. For whatever reason, the Coens eschew subtlety and replace it with the obvious, beginning and ending with a digital map zoom in and out, respectively.

The lack of subtlety ruins what is an important message. The Coen brothers, on the whole, are wonderful filmmakers who can do much better than this. It’s not a bad movie, but not a good one either.

The copyright of the article A Review of Burn After Reading in Romantic Films/Comedies is owned by Eric Mungenast. Permission to republish A Review of Burn After Reading in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.