The Coens follow their bleakest film with their silliest: a Washington farce in which a disc of personal finances is mistaken for a state secret and ruins everyone who touches it. It is fast, mean and often funny, and it does not like a single person in it.
Joel and Ethan Coen have made a comedy about intelligence in a city with none. Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) loses his post at the CIA, quits in a rage and sits down to dictate his memoirs. His wife Katie (Tilda Swinton) is already planning to leave him and copies his bank records onto a disc. The disc gets lost, a gym trainer Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) finds it, and Burn After Reading follows from Chad’s conviction that he is holding something the government would kill for. It is frequently funny and it thinks every person in it is a fool. That is the joke and, by the end, the limit.
Pitt is the reason to see it. He plays Chad with a bleached quiff, an earpiece he never takes out and the open-mouthed confidence of a man who has been told he is a people person. His phone call to Cox, in which he tries to sound like a blackmailer and ends up sounding like a customer service agent, had us laughing, and the laugh came from how badly Chad wanted to be good at this. Frances McDormand’s Linda is the sadder half of the pair. She wants a new body because she has decided it is the only thing between her and a decent man, and McDormand plays the want straight, so that the scene where the insurance company says no is painful before it is amusing.
Malkovich swears as if he has been waiting twenty years for permission. His Cox is a man in a bow tie who believes he is the last serious person in Washington, and Malkovich gives him enough wounded dignity that the insults land on something. Swinton’s Katie is a paediatrician who tells crying children to stop it, and does the same to everyone else. Richard Jenkins, as the gym manager Ted, is in love with Linda and is the only character who behaves well; the film shows him no kindness for it.
The craft plays it straight. Emmanuel Lubezki opens from a satellite’s view of the earth and drops down onto the CIA’s headquarters, then lights the rest of Washington in the flat daylight of a federal brochure. Carter Burwell writes drums and low brass for a woman trying to afford a tummy tuck, so that every drive across town sounds like a coup. Jess Gonchor gives Cox a wood-panelled Georgetown house full of books nobody reads and Hardbodies an orange-and-blue brightness that makes everyone in it look ill. Mary Zophres dresses Chad in gym clothes a size too tight and Cox as if he had got dressed in 1962 and seen no reason to stop.
The Coens cut it themselves and cut it hard. The plot is coincidence piled on coincidence and moves fast enough that you have no time to object. Where it slows, it is around Clooney. Harry Pfarrer is a twitchy, sex-obsessed marshal who jogs the same block and checks the floors for the agency he is sure is watching him, and Clooney commits, but it is one note held for 96 minutes and the note tires. The scenes where a CIA officer (David Rasche) reports the mess to his superior (J.K. Simmons) are among the funniest in the film, and also where the Coens tell us that none of this means anything. It is a good joke. It also lets the film off having to mean anything.
Most critics liked it; a few found it cold and pointless, and we see why, because we felt it too. In the last twenty minutes we were still laughing and noticed that the people we were laughing at had been built to lose, with nobody to make the loss cost something. Fargo had Marge Gunderson. The Big Lebowski had a Dude you could warm to. This has nobody, by design, and a design can be a fault as well as a choice.
See it for Pitt, for Malkovich’s language, for Burwell’s drums and for the pleasure of watching expensive actors play idiots with care. It carries a 15 and most of that is Malkovich’s vocabulary. Do not expect to like anyone, and do not expect the film to mind.
