Burn After Reading, ©2008 Coen Bros.

[Scroll to the bottom for a summarized "verdict", or read ahead for my full thoughts.]

If you've seen any of the Coen brothers' films, especially their older stuff, then you'll know exactly what you don't know is going to happen in their most recent effort, Burn After Reading. I have to confess that I haven't seen all of the Coens' films, only Blood Simple; Raising Arizona; Barton Fink; Fargo; The Big Lebowski; O Brother Where Art Thou?;The Man Who Wasn't There; and now Burn After Reading. Still, despite my incomplete viewing catalog, I expected every unexpected (and almost always unfortunate) twist of BAR's blackly humorous plot. That is to say, I had no idea what the details of the plot were going to be, but I was definitely not surprised by anything that took place on screen.

The previous Coen film that I was most reminded of was Fargo; BAR is more humorous and overtly satirical, but both indulge (perhaps to excess) in the Coens' trademark violent, bordering-on-absurd, darker-than-dark sense of humor. However, the brothers' stamp on this film is simply unmistakable, and if you've seen any of their films, you'll be able to see some similarities.

So it probably goes without saying that if you're a fan of the Coens' other work, you'll like this movie too. Then again, if you're a Coen Bros. fan, you've probably already seen BAR, so you're rather unlikely to be reading this. If you're going into this as your first Coen film, though, you should be warned: it is (like most of their other films) very dark.

The premise, as given by trailers and box summaries and the like, is that there is an ex-CIA analyst, Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich) who is writing his memoirs. These memoirs are found by two not-too-bright gym employees played by Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand, and they mistake them for intercepted intelligence. In pretty typical Coen brothers fashion, though, that's really only the coincidence that starts the plot rolling. Also pretty typically, the characters and plot twist and weave with little or no regard for viewer expectation, and things generally go from silly to bad to worse to worst for everyone. Not that I, watching the characters, particularly wanted happy endings from any of them.

None of that is to say, however, that I disliked the movie; quite the opposite, in fact. BAR was a very amusing, well-made film, but whether or not you should see it depends largely on how you feel about black comedy, and even about humanity in general. If you are prone to get depressed by misfortune or by despicable and/or ridiculous people, then you may want to give this one a pass. You see, some movies are downers but must be seen anyway because of the way they effect you, or because they're staggeringly powerful achievements, or they reach some fundamental truth of human life. But BAR is not one of those movies. It is well-made, to be sure; after all this time, the Coens certainly know what they're doing. The acting is very solid, so that you believe the characters without always seeing the high-profile actors portraying them. It's also entertaining, in the Coens' trademark way. It's even got solid social and political satire running through a lot of it. But it didn't have an effect on me in the same way as movies like Pan's Labyrinth, Princess Mononoke, Children of Men, Forrest Gump, or Amelie, to name a few.

My last critisim of Burn After Reading is that, like many of the Coen brothers' films that I've seen, I'm left wondering what the point of it all was. Some movies never make you ask the question at all (Spaceballs is obviously just supposed to be fun to watch, and it is), but for some reason, I always get to the end of a Coen film and wonder what they were trying to say. Perhaps its because I have a black humor threshhold, or because I generally look for some sort of emotional anchor in a story in order to really get into it, but Coen films are never entertaining enough to convince me that wry, witty fun is the whole point. So I cast about after the inevitable anticlimax in their films looking for some sort of theme, message, meaning, or thought, often in vain. Certainly, that was the case with BAR; the satire is unmistakable but vague, and slips into the background a lot, and I couldn't find anything to be learned from the characters or their stories.

So in the end...

THE VERDICT: I respect BAR more than I like it. The film is well-made, well-acted, clever, satirical, and entertaining, but the Coens' dark, near-nihilistic stamp is unmistakable, and in the end it felt kind of soulless. I'm glad I saw Burn After Reading, but I won't be buying it anytime soon.