The Coen Brothers’ latest effort is a snappy, brief, state-secret caper that feels like a cross between Michael Clayton, Charlie Wilson’s War, and the Coen’s own Barton Fink.  It’s classy and old-fashioned like Clayton (and slyly features George Clooney as an anti-Clayton-esque Federal Marshal), it’s light on its feet with political intrigue like Charlie, and it’s lightly sprinkled with characteristic offbeat Coen oddities.

The story turns on CIA analyst Osborne Cox who, rather than accept reassignment, quits the Agency and decides to pen a lid-blowing memoir.  When his bossy wife starts gathering “evidence” to support a divorce proceeding, Ozzie’s files accidentally end up in the hands of a couple of dimwitted fitness club employees—and the CIA winds up with one helluva mess on its hands.

99% of the fun here—and there’s a good deal of it, which is a breath of fresh air after No Country For Old Men—comes from the casting and performances.  It’s almost sheer cheeky genius to cast Clayton costars Clooney and Tilda Swinton (who plays Ozzie’s wife) as lovers, and nearly everything Malkovich has done since Being John seems like an extended cameo—so it’s fun watching him waltz through the part of Os Cox as if he’s wearing some version of some audience’s impression of some filmmaker’s interpretation of himself.

The most fun comes from Brad Pitt as Chad, one of those clueless fitness club trainers.  Pitt hasn’t projected this much energy and vigor in years, and he’s supported at the gym by performances from Frances McDormand (ditzy Linda Litzke, who’s obsessed with plastic surgery) and Richard Jenkins (sad-eyed manager Ted, who longs after an uncaring Linda).  David Rasche and J. K. Simmons round out the main cast as clueless CIA officials in a suitably dead-pan fashion.

But what’s it all about?

Well, it’s certainly not about state secrets, fitness clubs, or plastic surgery.  And I don’t think it’s about sexual politics, either, though the film certainly spends a good deal of its satiric capital in that shopfront.

If I had to guess—and look at that: I do!—I’d hazard that Burn After Reading is once again a Coen musing on the craft and the business of filmmaking.  In this instance, the strange case of Litzke and Cox stands in for Barton Fink’s mystery box, with Simmons intoning at the end, “Well, what did we learn here?”  And Fink’s answer about the contents of that box works just as well in this case: “I don’t know.”  The film is a giant and indirect metaphor for the creative process, and the unreasonable demands that critics and audiences place upon artists. 

Why, the Coens seem to ask, does the process of making and watching a film have to be about learning something?  Why do we have to have everything wrapped up, even if not so neatly?  Why can’t we just let Llewelyn Moss wander out of the narrative of No Country For Old Men without complaining about it?  Who makes these bloody cinematic rules, and why does anybody feel like it has to be their business to enforce them?

There’s certainly a raft of that kind of storytelling here, and to a certain extent it almost seems like an “in your face” commentary from the Coens.  It’s almost as if they’re confident that the reviews for Burn will be uniformly positive, with critics and audiences alike calling it “entertaining,” “brisk-paced,” and “dynamic”… even though it duplicates, in spades, some of the very narrative “shortcomings” of No Country.

For my part, I did find it enjoyable and briskly entertaining, if ultimately not about much at all—except about the Coens themselves.

And as we all know, in the world of film these days, that’s more than enough!

Burn After Reading is rated R for “pervasive language, some sexual content and violence.”  Malkovich’s language is particularly pervasive, but I’d say the sexual content is fairly light—and the violence is only sporadic.  Honestly, considering that No Country was also R, I’m not exactly sure how this doesn’t tally as PG-13.  Darn that language!

Courtesy of a local publicist, Greg attended a press screening of Burn After Reading.