Burn After Reading

This is probably going to be pretty short because its been a while now since I watched it and its not that fresh in my mind anymore, but here goes.

Burn After Reading (***)

After watching Burn After Reading on DVD, I watched a little big of the "making of..." featurette included in the Special Features which included Joel and Ethan Coen being asked how the origin of the movie came about. The Coens explained that it arose from having a bunch of separate ideas for characters specifically tailored to actors that they liked, and then they built the rest of the story to tie together these parts. Hearing this was unsurprising, firstly because the actors do clearly seem to have a lot of fun in their roles and do seem to be excellent matches for most of them, but also unsurprising because the story feels extremely haphazard and rough around the edges. It is intended to feel somewhat, because its an ensemble movie that turns into this big, interconnected comedy of errors in which no one character really knows the full extent of what's going on. But in other movies of this ilk, take for example Guy Ritchie's Snatch or Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, the movie eventually brings all of the separate storylines together at a climax where it becomes clear how everything ties in and all of the stories come to a satisfying resolution. In Burn After Reading, there definitely is a converging of storylines, and there certainly is some sense of closure to some of them--notably for one character who doesn't make it out alive--but it nevertheless doesn't feel complete at the end. The payoff, when you look back at the whole movie from its ending, isn't quite satisfactory, and though the movie tries to be clever through its various twists and turns and intertwined relationships, it doesn't have the same wit that the Coen brothers' previous forays into comedy like The Big Lebowski have in droves.

Like I said, it's been a little while now since I watched this, but from what I remember, the gist of the story goes something like this. Osbourne Cox (John Malcovich) is an easily agitated CIA Agent, who gets called into a meeting in which he finds out that he's been "reassigned" from his current job. His superiors assure him that this isn't the same as him getting fired and that they have another position lined up for him, but this is cold comfort to Osbourne, who decides he's going to leave his job on his own terms and quits. With a lot of free time now on his hands, Osbourne decides his going to write memoirs of his time in the CIA and try and get a book deal out of it. His wife, Katie (Tilda Swinton), who obviously doesn't have a lot of confidence in his ability to write an entire book, this a fairly absurd idea. Actually, Katie dislikes being with Osbourne for more than just his memoirs and is planning to divorce him, which is probably for the best because she's already secretly banging another married man, Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney). Harry, in turn, also ends up banging Linda Litzke, a woman who seems to be going through a bit of a mid-life crisis which manifests itself through her planning a bunch of plastic surgeries and trying a bunch of online dating services.

Thing is, plastic surgery costs money, of which Linda isn't swimming in from her salary as a personal trainer. As such, she is immediately interested when her co-worker, Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt), finds a CD with what he describes as "Some serious CIA shit with like... numbers..." in one of the locker rooms. In actuality, the CD is stuff Katie pulled off of her husband's computer. The "CIA shit" is fairly harmless information from Osbourne's memoirs, and the "numbers" are from his tax statements, information which a lawyer suggest she obtain before filing divorce papers. This never occurs to Chad and Linda, who attempt first to extort a random out of Osbourne Cox, then, when that doesn't work, try to sell the disc to the Russians, who they apparently still consider America's number one enemy. The CIA eventually gets wind of this attempted espionage, but doesn't really find out much about the whole situation, except who's sleeping with who.

Brad Pitt's character is easily the funniest part of the movie, and I'd say the movie is almost worth seeing just for his performance, even if the movie as a whole is kind of a mess. His chracter is kind of a spazz, and Pitt spends most of the movie in bicycle shorts dancing to music on his iPod or drinking out of a water bottle in the most effeminate way possible. The thing is, his character is completely ridiculous compared to the other main characters involved in the love triange (or love whatever the polygon would be for the total amount of people involved) part of the storyline. He seems more like a character that would be alongside Walter or "The Jesus" from The Big Lebowski, but the rest of the movie doesn't have the surreal quality that Lebowski has that allows you to believe that its taking place a world where those characters can exist. Which brings me back to where I started this. The movie has a lot of clever ideas, but they're clever ideas that seem to be pasted together with that crappy glue stick they give you in second grade art class that doesn't hold anything for more than about 20 seconds. Its not a terrible movie, but with what the Coen brothers have done in the past both dramatically and comedically, I expected something more polished.

I guess that didn't end up being all that short.