Burn After Reading

The Coen broth­ers are on fire. After re-invent­ing the mod­ern west­ern by slam­ming an action movie up its pipe in No Coun­try for Old Men, they’ve now cre­at­ed a new film genus entire­ly – call it ​‘screw­ball nihilism’ – in Burn After Read­ing. For this quirky A‑list com­e­dy ensem­ble that deals osten­si­bly with hap­less huck­sters and wannabe spy­mas­ters is real­ly about the nag­ging empti­ness of the human condition.

It stars Brad Pitt, in cheeky charis­mat­ic form, as a ​‘flam­boy­ant’ per­son­al train­er called Chad (he’s nev­er actu­al­ly referred to as ​‘gay’, but he’s very, well, touchy-feely), who dis­cov­ers a CD-ROM of seem­ing­ly incrim­i­nat­ing CIA-relat­ed data on the floor of Hard Body’s Gym. The CD (actu­al­ly a banal pro­fes­sion­al mem­oir) leads Chad and cos­met­ic-surgery-obsessed co-work­er Lin­da (Frances McDor­mand) to low-rank­ing ex-CIA ana­lyst Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich).

Cox, an embit­tered bur­geon­ing alco­holic, is on the cusp of divorce from frosty wife Katie (Til­da Swin­ton), who in turn is hav­ing an affair with ex-Fed­er­al Mar­shal Har­ry (George Clooney) – who him­self is about to embark on a secret affair with Linda.

It’s typ­i­cal­ly labyrinthine stuff, but it unfolds, as you’d expect from the mak­ers of Far­go, with effort­less pre­ci­sion and then hap­pi­ly degen­er­ates from com­e­dy threats and mis­fired extor­tion into acci­den­tal manslaugh­ter and, ulti­mate­ly, mul­ti­ple gris­ly mur­ders (a shock­ing scene mid­way through the movie sig­nals the down­ward spiral).

And yet, it’s not the mur­ders here that make it dark. Instead, it’s the sheer des­per­a­tion that defines every sin­gle char­ac­ter. Linda’s crav­ing for surgery is near-psy­chot­ic. Harry’s addic­tion to online dat­ing is crip­pling. While Cox’s van­i­ty, evinced bril­liant­ly in the way he refers to his mem­oirs as ​“my mem-wah” is heart­break­ing. The result is a movie that’s fun­ny, cru­el and just the tini­est bit depress­ing. But in a good way.