After taking home multiple Oscars for last year’s brutal crime drama “No Country for Old Men,” Joel and Ethan Coen return to considerably lighter territory with the darkly hilarious comedy “Burn After Reading.”
John Malkovich plays Osborne Cox, a recently laid-off CIA employee who sets about writing his memoirs while his icy wife, played by Tilda Swinton, sets about getting a divorce. When a computer disc containing Cox’s memoir ends up in the hands of two less-than-brilliant gym employees, Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand, they assume it contains important classified information, or, in the movie’s terms, “secret CIA shit,” and hope that returning it will get them a reward. This is the basic framework for a somewhat haphazard web of adultery, death and, of course, hilarity.
This movie is superbly cast all around, but Pitt and McDormand steal the show. Pitt’s brainless, childlike fitness junkie, Chad, provides a good share of the film’s funniest moments, due to both excellent writing and the enthusiastically goofy abandon of Pitt’s performance. McDormand, meanwhile, is both hilarious and somehow incredibly relatable as Linda Litzke — it amazed me how this name seemed to encapsulate her entire personality — a middle-aged, serial online dater obsessed with getting plastic surgery in order to start her life anew. Her desperate faith in the ability of superficial changes to make her happy is something most people can sympathize with, and as such, McDormand’s Litzke becomes the unlikely heart of the movie.
The one performance that seemed to miss the mark a bit was that of George Clooney. Clooney plays Harry, an intelligence official who is having an affair with Cox’s wife and, later, Litzke. Clooney never seems to quite make up his mind on how his character would be played; he is alternatively bumbling and sleazy, but these two characteristics never quite mesh properly. To be fair, I have a recurring qualm with Clooney as a comedic actor, which is that he sometimes seems to be laughing along with the movie a little bit too much.
Clooney’s performance reminds me of Saturday Night Live when a cast member, or several, would suddenly burst into laughter in the middle of a skit, except less pronounced but somehow a lot more off-putting. Clooney is consistently likable, but to me, absurdity is always funnier when the characters seem completely unaware of it. Farce is just funnier with a straight face than with a smirk, and Clooney crosses the line into the latter enough that it takes you out of the movie a bit.
While this movie succeeds on many levels, in some ways it feels like a missed opportunity. Ultimately, it is a farce rather than a satire and it works well as a farce, at least for the most part. The first half or so of the movie is consistently brilliant. But after a shockingly violent event that, incidentally, is one of the truly surprising twists I’ve seen in a movie in a while, the second half, while still very funny, gives in perhaps a bit too much to its own ridiculousness. It becomes so absurd that it almost feels like the Coens have a joke that they’re not quite letting the audience in on: their comedic aim is so wide that it’s hard at times to know exactly what the target is.
Still, there is something about a Coen brothers comedy that puts it in a completely different league than, say, a Will Ferrell comedy. You might laugh just as much at “Stepbrothers,” but even when it devolves into silliness, as “Burn” does, there’s an underlying depth and sharpness that makes it a decidedly more satisfying experience.