“Burn After Reading” isn’t a deep movie. The closest the Coens get to making any sort of statement is showing that even the intelligence field is susceptible to arrogance and blind stupidity—a fact the last eight years of government shenanigans have confirmed time and again. There are no portentous affirmations about the inevitability of death and the rising tide of evil in the world, like in their last film, “No Country for Old Men.” Instead, the Coens are back to having some fun in “Burn,” fun that’s tinged with blood that flows when the unstoppable force of greed meets the immovable object of stupidity.
In this case, greed and stupidity come together in the form of Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt as Linda Litzke and Chad Feldheimer, a pair of dim-witted gym employees. They find a disc containing the memoirs of Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), a former CIA analyst, and decide to blackmail Cox. Linda wants money for a series of cosmetic surgeries (“I’ve gone as a far as I can with this body,” she says) and Chad decides to go along for the ride. But Linda is dating Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney), a similarly dim-witted Treasury Department agent who also happens to be having an affair with Cox’s icy wife, Katie (Tilda Swinton). Everyone is spying on everyone else, though no one really knows why, and even the CIA (represented here by David Rasche and J.K. Simmons) can’t figure out what’s going on.
But the plot details are beside the point, and once the Rube Goldberg-like story is set up, it’s a joy to watch the characters stumble blindly into disaster after disaster. They’re all kinds of stupid and not very sympathetic, especially Malkovich and Swinton, whose self-important arrogance and general jerkiness set the events of the film into motion. Meanwhile, Clooney and Pitt turn their idiot settings up to 11 for “Burn,” and it’s fun to watch two normally coolly serious actors throw caution to the wind and act completely screwball. The film’s lone voice of reason is Simmons, a grumpy CIA chief whose dozen or so lines turn out to be some of the movie’s best.
If the film does have a cynical, screwy heart, it comes in the form of Clooney and McDormand, a pair of people looking for love and using all the wrong methods. Linda’s fixation on plastic surgery as the only way to win herself a man is a little sad, and Harry’s serial philandering culminates with the unveiling of a mysterious device so hilarious and disturbing in its implications that you feel bad he can’t curb his physical and emotional impulses. But Linda’s ignorance (when trying to sell the worthless memoirs to some confused Russian embassy workers, she asks if they’re speaking on a secured line) and Harry’s misplaced paranoia turn them into tragically comic (or maybe comically tragic) figures before they get too sympathetic.
“Burn” doesn’t rank as one of the Coens’ best films. Its rambling nature never fully ties together, and the characters, as funny as they are, are hard to root for. But make no mistake, “Burn” ranks high in the comedy department and is an easy movie to laugh all the way through. The Coens’ script is full of the sort of tight yet idiosyncratic dialog they’re known for, and “Burn” may be their most quotable movie since “The Big Lebowski.” And while most of the humor comes from the characters saying and doing absolutely ridiculous things, there are other, smaller touches that make “Burn” good. Frequent Coen brothers collaborator Carter Burwell’s bombastic, overwrought spy movie score emphasizes how unintelligent these intelligence operatives are, and a well-placed picture of Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin gets some good laughs.
“Burn” mocks itself even as it plays at being overly important, and the result is a smartly stupid movie that avoids drawing out any moral lessons in favor of some screwy antics. Stupidity is its own sort of punishment. Luckily, all the laughs make that grim certainty easier to swallow.
