Movie Review: “Burn After Reading”
By Anne Bernays
The foundation of every successful satire is a heavy dose of skepticism about the human race, almost never articulated, but nonetheless there, a powerful psychic reminder
The Coen brothers, Ethan and Joel, have been making movies since 1984 — no two anything like any of the others. Their range seems endless. Good for them; good for those who admire their courage in trying something new each time they get the green light.
If you liked “The Money Pit” or “Arrested Development” or “Afterlife” — all of them satire/farces, you’ll love “Burn After Reading.”
The setting — Washington D.C. populated by assorted egos, philanderers and wishful thinkers — works perfectly with the theme, i.e. making the wrong decisions is much easier than making the right ones.
A lot of the film’s success lies with its super cast: George Clooney as Harry Pfarrer, a sex-obsessed government employee; John Malkovich as Osbourne (Ozzie) Cox, an alcoholic CIA operative; Tilda Swinton as his icy wife Katie Cox, who’s getting it on with Pfarrer; Frances McDormand as Linda Litzke, a gym employee who, in spite of appearing perfectly normal, yearns for a complete makeover via plastic surgery. And then there’s Brad Pitt as a sort of nudnik (consult your Yiddish dictionary) intrigued by the possibilities of a hair-brained scheme to blackmail Cox. Pitt, as the gum-chewing Chad Feldheimer, is hilarious. (The reason I bring up characters’ names is that having co-written a book about the importance of names, I’m assuming that the brothers Coen must have spent a good deal of time coming up with tags that are not accidental; fiction writers often insert subliminal messages inside the names of their characters: Sherlock Holmes, Fanny Assingham. Charles Dickens and Henry James filled pages of notebooks with possible names for fictitious characters.
The plot of “Burn After Reading” is not the point. Rather it’s a series of comedic encounters showing each man or woman as hapless, driven, lonely, sex-starved, wishful thinkers.
The final scene is about as sharp, funny, devastating as anything I’ve seen in a long long time. In fact, I watch it over and over again both for the pleasure it gives me and for the wonder of its brutal economy. It takes place in the office of the director of the C..I.A, played by the lustrous J.K. Simmons, and his deputy, the character actor, David Fasche (one twitch of his mouth and you know exactly what he’s thinking), trying to understand what’s been happening to the hapless characters who have been trying to breathe freely throughout this brilliant farce .
