"Burn After Reading" - dark humour, satire and farce

By Joyce Glasser - 21/10/2008

Following the harrowing hunt for a serial killer in the Oscar winning No Country for Old Men, comes some relatively light relief from Joel and Ethan Coen. Burn after Reading is a mix of dark humour, satire and farce, along the lines of their other ‘comedies’:  the Big Lebowski, Intolerable Cruelty, Lady Killers and Oh Brother Where Art Thou? 

 

Still, the difference between a Coen brother’s tragedy and comedy is not always distinct. Along with some funny lines and scenes satirizing the CIA, the spy genre and the plastic surgery craze, Burn after Reading offers a very pessimistic view of middle aged, middle class men (and women).

Co-director, writer, producer Joel Coen tells us that ‘the story is about middle aged people, all of whom are undergoing professional, personal and sexual crises touching on matters of national security. That’s what makes it a Washington D.C. tale’ (though most of the film is shot in New York). The superlative cast is divided roughly between the world of Government security and the fitness industry, which is associated with the characters’ quest for youth and beauty (plastic surgery) and finding love (internet dating, affairs, and divorce).  

Three of the film’s stars work at Hardbodies Fitness Centre. The action is sparked and driven by employee Linda Litzke’s (Francis McDormand) obsession with finding the money to pay for her nip and tuck surgery.  Her boss, Ted, (Richard Jenkins) loves her just the way she is, but Linda is oblivious to his reticent intentions.

 

She uses office time to search for love on the internet where she meets Harry Pfarrer, ‘recently separated’. Harry (George Clooney) works for the Government and is in a long term extra marital relationship with the calculating, no nonsense wife (Tilda Swinton) of CIA analyst Osborne Cox (John Malkovich). Brad Pitt, playing a gum chewing,  IPOD addicted fitness trainer with bleach blond streaked hair, finds a disc traced to Cox in the gym locker room. Believing it to contain top secret information, he sets out with cash-strapped Linda to black mail Cox for its return.  

When the film opens, Cox has been called into what he expects to be a routine high level meeting only to be told he’s being ‘moved’ due to his drinking problem. “I have a drinking problem?’ retorts the indignant Cox, who can never control his temper. ‘You are a Mormon. Next to you, everyone has a drinking problem!”  He resigns in anger and, after attempting to write his memoirs, spends the rest of the film in a bitter depression, with only booze to ease the pain.  George Clooney sums up the movie pretty well: ‘Despite the Washington setting, this picture is really about shockingly dumb people doing dumb things involving sex and other situations. What makes it even more interesting is that they’re not politicians.’

Therein lies the rub.  These characters, none of whom we can like very much let alone admire, are all doing dumb things, which tends to be a turn off. This isn’t helped by the plot, which isn’t as clever or suspenseful as it needs to be to sustain interest in their fates. 

 

We might think that some of these characters cannot be the morons they seem because they hold down high level jobs, but one of the film’s points is that the world is run by these irresponsible morons. Certainly these characters are out of control. Would a fitness worker really go to the Russian embassy to sell government classified information to pay for plastic surgery? Well, maybe, particularly one living in Washington DC.   In the end it’s difficult to care about them and when, in the middle of the film, the humour stops and the nasty retribution begins, it is difficult to know what emotions to feel.  

The possible exception is Linda’s boss, Ted, who has the only genuine feelings for a person in the film, and these are ignored.  But Linda is so desperate, needy and self-obsessed that we really don’t want them to get together.  McDormand, usually so great in the Coen Brothers’ films, overdoes the screwball comedy. Malkovich, appearing in a Coen Brothers film for the first time, is very good as the intelligent, but myopic, angry alcoholic throwing his life away. 

 

In arguably his best scene, Cox tells his elderly father, who probably cannot understand, why he quit, explaining that the job was ‘all bureaucracy and no mission’. He adds, ‘Sometimes there’s a higher patriotism, dad’, half hoping to convince himself that his rash resignation could be justified on this level.   But it’s not too long before our sympathy for Cox, too, is eroded.

 

Clooney is watchable as ever, but seems uncertain how to play this hybrid comedy bordering on sex farce.  It’s JK Simmons, as a practical CIA Superior, who steals the show in a hilariously cynical scene that’s worth the price of admission.