Cast: John Malkovich, Frances McDormand, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Tilda Swinton

Director: The Coen Brothers

Screenplay: The Coen Brothers

Running time: 1 hr 36 mins

Genre: Comedy



CRITIQUE:

To dismiss the Coen brothers’ latest cinematic serving Burn After Reading as a bland follow-up to their masterpiece-branded, Oscar-hailed No Country For Old Men is just plain folly. No one would surely expect these siblings to produce another film of the same strand of DNA. What they have conceived in here is a retrace to their roots, when they were famous for absurdist comedy. Burn After Reading is an eclectic mix of lampoonery, absurd characters, and a very silly plot that basically revolves around nothing and ends in nothing – that turns out to be an ingenious satire on human idiocy and the paranoia of overloaded intelligence.


Here, like most Coens films, there is savagery and viciousness wrapped in a foil of tar-black humour: characters die out of impulse, people running around after money, and everyone sleeps with everybody. Their fondness for bizarre characters is palpable. Their love for plot mechanics and snappy dialogue is crucial. You come out of the cinema wondering whether the whole thing makes sense, and strangely enough, it does. The whole storyline seems like a fart in the wind. Two idiots, gym-workers Frances McDormand in twitchy mode and Brad Pitt in ecstatically cutesy blockhead, stumbles into a disc supposedly loaded with “highly classified shit”. It belongs to John Malkovich’s ex-CIA agent, recently fired for being a hate-figure and ranting with excessive expletives, whose wife, Tilda Swinton secretly sleeps with George Clooney’s totally clueless clot, who, in turn, beds with the physically insecure McDormand. Criss-crosses around an entangled web of people, mistaken identities, and incidents, this is a loud shout to America’s listlessness, a wake-up call to the modern day idiocy. This is the Coens firing sharply at bull’s eye towards the unsatisfied society, to political paranoia (does CIA really function? so how come there are no nuclear weapons in Iraq?), and the greed for green paper. All of these elements fit like tight gloves to a parody of the spy genre, where editing is maximised to create thrills, butt-quivering music usually familiar to spy thrillers is in full use, all supplementing situations in the film where nothing is virtually happening.


There’s no denying this is a slighter fare compared to No Country For Old Men’s gnarling brilliance, but Burn After Reading stands on its own ground. Whilst Hollywood continues replicating spoofs and flat-nosed comedies, here is something that turns out to be genuinely laughably funny. There’s dark, grimy humanity beneath the coil of these characters, but we can’t help laugh at them idiotically. After all, that’s the point of the film.


VERDICT:

A comedic farce of a plot miraculously shunted to higher echelon by the verve
and wit of the Coens. It’s black, biting, and sarcastic – all beneath the amusing canvas about the lack of human common sense.



RATING: A-