'Burn After Reading' is mean-spirited and mediocre

Brad Pitt's character seems to be the only pleasant person in the film.

By Dan Moore

Published Sept. 16, 2008

"Burn After Reading" is not a film so much as what happens when talented adolescents are given a very large magnifying glass and some ants of their own design. The Coen brothers' familiar cast of malformed, un-pitied idiots are sent on a snipe hunt of little consequence, they say things that are mildly entertaining and, finally, they die in incongruously bloody ways. The cast and crew seem to have a lot of fun, but they're the only ones in on the joke.

The story is of little consequence, tightly wound but completely arbitrary. Frances McDormand stars as Linda Litzke (the movie finds her alliterative name unceasingly hilarious), an unhappy personal trainer whose life takes a strange turn when a disgruntled CIA operative's memoirs are left in the locker room. With Chad (Brad Pitt), her tip-highlighting man-child of a co-worker, she decides to blackmail the CIA agent (played in autopilot by John Malkovich) to earn money for some cosmetic surgeries. Meanwhile, she happens to be dating Harry (George Clooney), who also happens to be having an affair with the CIA agent's wife.

Things snowball, but because we're not sure why they started rolling downhill in the first place, the transition from quirky comedy to bloody Coen pseudo-thriller seems rote and mechanical. Most disappointingly, though, the laughs never come. Aside from the unstoppable Chad, whom Brad Pitt portrays at triple speed and who seems to be the only pleasant character in the film, nobody has anything but swearing heavily in their comedic repertoire.

Linda and the CIA agent, the two point-of-view characters, aren't given much to do between heavily telegraphed plot points, and when they do act it seems that no care has been given to make them internally consistent. The characters, constantly belittled by the plot, are finally subservient to it. Ironic or not, that's bad filmmaking.

Finally, with the plot unraveling and important characters dying left and right, the movie shuts down and reaches for one final, meta-fictional trick. The point of view moves from the action to two tangentially related CIA agents who discuss the increasingly irrelevant case that's unfolded over the course of the movie. They can't make heads or tails of it, and neither can we, and if you were to ask the Coens about it I suppose that would be the big joke of the whole film. But in the end it's just a heavy-handed bit of pandering, an adult version of those toddler TV shows that have off-screen children giggle and scream out answers at the right moment so that the kids at home will know what to do. 

On the whole we're left with a mean-spirited, mediocre movie, an inexplicably smug failure that doesn't know where the real humor is coming from and isn't very interested in finding out. Like the device Clooney's character constructs in his basement - and I couldn't possibly reveal its purpose, if for no other reason than that this is a family newspaper - "Burn After Reading" is remarkably well-made, but why on earth would anybody want to make it?