- Only the Coen brothers would follow No Country for Old Men, their masterpiece of violence and suspense, with a decidedly frivolous effort like Burn After Reading. It's not a bad film by any stretch, but it's very much the same quirky movie that they've been making for most of their careers. This time, the goofy characters are in Washington DC in a haphazard spy story. Otherwise, it's a slight variation on ingredients that we've already tasted in The Hudsucker Proxy, Fargo, and O Brother Where Art Thou?, just to name a few.
- Nearly everyone takes a turn at spying in this film, but the first spy we meet is a man named Osborne Cox (John Malkovich). Cox worked for the CIA, but he's in the process of getting fired by his superior (David Rasche), presumably because he's a condescending jerk (and, amusingly, a Princeton alum) who alternates between erudition and the F-word. His wife Katie (Tilda Swinton) is a physician whose hilariously icy bedside manner reflects the heartlessness with which she conducts the entirety of her life, notably including her love affair with a Treasury employee named Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney). While Pfarrer is not technically a spy, he does carry a gun and engages in seemingly covert operations in his basement. He also has sex with the frequency of a James Bond type, although such activities never leave him too tired for a run. Finally, there are the employees of Hardbodies Gym. Naturally, they end up doing the most spying of all.
- You see, through a course of events that don't merit repeating, gym employees Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) and Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) have gotten their hands on what appears to be some "highly classified shit" belonging to Cox. While neither knows precisely how to handle this delicate situation, Linda envisions spending the reward on that cosmetic surgery she's been wanting to get. Funloving Chad, on the other hand, just seems to be along for the ride. After some wonderfully amateurish attempts to contact Cox go horribly wrong, they try to sell the documents to the Russian embassy, logically. Pretty soon, they're breaking into Cox's house for more information, with even worse results than you might expect. Finally, things get so screwed up that only Ted (Richard Jenkins), the manager of Hardbodies who has an unrequited crush on Linda, can save the day. Or not.
- Admittedly, there's a lot of fun to be had in Burn After Reading with Pfarrer's weird sex obsessions, Katie's thorny personality, and Chad's happy-go-lucky outlook on life. The CIA scenes are also very amusing, particularly at the film's end when Cox's former boss must reluctantly explain to his own superior (J.K. Simmons) that the agency is basically in the clear, assuming they can cover the cost of some elective cosmetic surgery. That said, there's nothing even remotely like a deeper message within ten miles of this film. The characters are mostly funny, but their fates are about as arbitrary as the insertion of an orphan or a dame in one of Barton Fink's screenplays. Ultimately, I can't summarize the situation any more concisely than the CIA superior does when he says "What a clusterfuck!"
