Burning Down the House

The Coen brothers switch it up for their No Country follow-up.


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Published: Sep 10, 2008

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HAIR APPARENT: Brad Pitt demands cash for finding "secret CIA shit" in Burn After Reading.

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At first blush, Joel and Ethan Coen's high-grade farce Burn After Reading feels like an abrupt, if not unwelcome, about-face from the moral sobriety of No Country for Old Men. Set on the periphery of Washington, D.C., the movie follows a coterie of self-involved backstabbers whose convoluted machinations rapidly transgress the boundaries of common sense. Clambering over each other like seals begging for a fish, they form a slippery scrum of unfulfilled desire, a whirlpool of want that eventually sucks them all to the bottom.

At its center is Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), a humorless, high-strung CIA analyst who quits the bureau in a snit after he is demoted for drinking on the job. Seeking vindication, the first of the movie's petty sins, he sets out to write a memoir (a term he invariably pronounces à la Français) that even his wife (Tilda Swinton) struggles to show interest in. Imperious and dismissive as only Swinton can be, she is plotting to leave her husband for a grinning, faithless U.S. marshal (George Clooney) whose eyes flash with panic when she brings up anything more lasting than an afternoon tryst.

Laying the groundwork for her divorce, Swinton surreptitiously copies her husband's files, inadvertently including his manuscript on a disc that promptly falls into the fumbling hands of Brad Pitt's featherbrained fitness instructor. His hair swooped up in a preposterous pompadour, Pitt manages to seem venal and guileless at the same time. When Malkovich violently rebuffs his attempt to demand a reward for the return of his "secret CIA shit," Pitt seems less angry than hurt, as if he's managed to convince himself that his attempted extortion is merely the work of a Good Samaritan.

In a world full of conflicting agendas, the single-minded cut through the static, and so it is for Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand), whose obsession with her deteriorating physique drives her every act. Although she works in Pitt's gym, Linda is convinced that plastic surgery is the only answer for her flabby thighs and dangling upper arms. When her insurance company denies payment for the elective surgeries, Linda is aghast; as far as she is concerned, it's a matter of necessity, not choice. So when Pitt's criminal instincts falter, she steps into the breach. If Cox won't pay, perhaps the Russians will. Until the fat has been sucked from her body, the wrinkles stretched from her face, she will not rest.

The performances in Burn After Reading are pitched, often brilliantly, at screwball speed, but the movie's presentation is rigorously unstylized. Instead of regular cameraman Roger Deakins, the Coens tapped Emmanuel Lubezki, who tends to favor more sober fare (among his credits are Children of Men and The New World). Burn doesn't look like comedies — especially those with such antic performances — are supposed to look, all bright light and reflective surfaces. It isn't edited that way, either. The Coens leave just enough air around their punch lines to give the movie a deadpan feel, as if reminding us that some jokes are funny right up the point that they're not.

After No Country for Old Men, it would be easy to dismiss Burn After Reading as a lark, but there's a bitter aftertaste to the movie's sugary farce. Not for nothing have the Coens set their story in the capital of mistrust, nor is it an accident that their ex-spy shares a surname with Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox. The movie makes a joke out of the deceit and avarice that have poisoned Washington's air. When the hapless characters start dropping like flies, Cox's CIA superiors are relieved. Covering up misdeeds is more important than preventing them.

The Coens' are often accused of having contempt for their characters, and the ease with which Burn After Reading kills some of them off (reminiscent of No Country for Old Men's last-act deaths) will only reinforce the charge. But the fact that the innocent die and the guilty survive is not a snide joke but an occasion for despair, the edge where comic absurdity shades into Beckett bleakness. Towards the end of Burn After Reading, one character asks, "So, what have we learned?" There is no answer.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Burn After Reading | Written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen | A Focus Features release