Brad Pitt Movie:

				Label: Focus Features Salesrank:
		MPAA Rating: Media: Theatrical Release

Editorial Review:
After the dark brilliance of No Country for Old Men, Burn After Reading may seem like a trifle, but few filmmakers elevate the trivial to art quite like Joel and Ethan Coen. Inspired by Stansfield Turner's Burn Before Reading, the comically convoluted plot clicks into gear when the CIA gives analyst Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) the boot. Little does Cox know his wife, Katie (Tilda Swinton, riffing on her Michael Clayton character), is seeing married federal marshal Harry (George Clooney, Swinton's Clayton co-star, playing off his Syriana role). To get back at the Agency, Cox works on his memoirs. Through a twist of fate, fitness club workers Linda (Frances McDormand) and Chad (Brad Pitt in a pompadour that recalls Johnny Suede) find the disc and try to wrangle a "Samaratin tax" out of the surly alcoholic. An avid Internet dater, Linda plans to use the money for plastic surgery, oblivious that her manager, Ted (The Visitor's Richard Jenkins), likes her just the way she is. Though it sounds like a Beltway remake of The Big Lebowski, the Coen entry it most closely resembles, this time the brothers concentrate their energies on the myriad insecurities endemic to the mid-life crisis--with the exception of Chad, who's too dense to share such concerns, leading to the funniest performance of Pitt's career. If Lebowski represented the Coen's unique approach to film noir, Burn sees them putting their irresistibly absurdist stamp on paranoid thrillers from Enemy of the State to The Bourne Identity. --Kathleen C. Fennessy

Burn After Reading [Theatrical Release] Reviews:
Burn before Viewing
2008-10-24 - I have to side with the disappointed reviewers on this one. As a devotee of the Cohen's oevre, 'Burn' falls well clear of the comedic heights of Lebowski or Brother, even Arizona. And I agree with those who identify the script as the fluff in the mix. No matter what acting prowess the stars bring to it(and I liked Pitt's performance!)they fail to bring the narrative to satisfying resolution. Tongue in cheek? Sure. But there's too much sucking at the particles left between the teeth.

Spies go comedy?
2008-10-23 - No body here seems to have a clue?
At first I thought the plot was just slow,
but it appears that the people are all kind of blunt.
A secretary for a divorce lawyer loses the disk with
information about the CIA and two pretty dumb people find it.
Everybody is either a drunk or sleeping with the other guy's wife,
friend or the dumb person with the disk?
The comedy just sort of creeps up on you until
they walk into the Russian embassy?
The actors deliver and the plot is well done:
sort of an anti-spy movie?! Like the man who knew too little
this is disaster waiting to happen?

Burn After Reading - Cohen puppets
2008-10-22 - The Cohen Bros. are expert at manipulating characters to do stuff disregarding all logic, only for their enjoyment. And I admit, in this case also for ours. The convoluted plot is only an excuse for making us cringe with every new crazy development that put those characters under strain. The actors are all great, but you're always conscious of their real-life presence: you are not watching a convincing portrait of an alcoholic-Tourette syndrome ridden ex-spy but a self-conscious John Malkovich interpretation of himself doing that portrait. This is more obvious in the case of Bradd Pitt and George Clooney. It is almost as a Spike Jonze film but without the humanity. Funny through its brief duration, ends without warning, and lets you empty but satisfied. Like a sitcom.

Spies and Lovers
2008-10-13 - Coen brothers films come in two kinds: The Comedies and the Tragedies. The Tragedies, like last year's Oscar winning No Country for Old Men and The Man Who Wasn't There are generally more critically acclaimed. But as a Big Coen fan I prefer the Comedies, not just classics such as O Brother, Where Art Thou? [Region 2] and The Big Lebowski - 10th Anniversary Limited Edition, but also the less prestigious ones like Raising Arizona and The Ladykillers (Widescreen Edition).

"Burn After Reading" is a Coen Brothers comedy, and thus I came into it expecting to love it. While not a bad film, "Burn After Reading" is the weakest Coen brothers movie I've seen (and I've seen most of them).

The plot is classic Coen; after being pushed out of the CIA, Analyst Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich) starts writing his memoirs. These memoir fall into the hands of two gym workers played by Brad Pitt and Coen regular Frances McDormand. The two plan to blackmail Cox for returning the memoirs, and when that scheme fails, they try to sell the memoirs to the Russians. This is the starting point for a comedy of errors involving, in addition to our aforementioned heroes, George Clooney as the married lover of McDormand and of Cox's wife, the CIA, a Sex Machine, the Russians embassy, and an army of lovers, spouses, spouses' lovers, and their lawyers.

Structurally, this is one of the most interesting Coen Brothers Films. Many Coen brother movies follow a search for what Alfred Hitchcock called a "MacGuffin", the object all the characters try to capture. In "Burn After Reading", the MacGuffin, Cox's memoirs, is utterly worthless and of no use to anyone. It's the misunderstanding surrounding it that drives the plot forward.

Unfortunately, although the story had a great deal of potential and the structure is clever, the end result is a disappointing film. In this, "Burn After Reading" is the exact opposite of the Coen's earlier Intolerable Cruelty (Widescreen Edition). Cruelty had had an ordinary subject matter and regular plot, but a brilliant script which allowed the movie to transcend its topical and structural limitations. "Burn After Reading" surrenders its advantages to a weak and unfocused execution.

Part of the problem is that there are too many stars. Malkovich, McDormand, Pitt and Cloony, and Tilda Swinton as Malkovich's wife are given starring roles. Consequentially, the film is unfocused, and is slowed down by its characters and their subplots. The film's first half hour, which focuses extensively on Malkovich's character, is particularly hard to watch. Once the film actually gets going, Malkovich's character all but disappears.

The story itself is also weak; The various sub plots, instead of escalating or playing off against one another, are dealt with in turn, and often without sufficient punch (Such as when Clooney finally confronts his tail). The story depends on much too many coincidences (Not just the unlikelihood of Clooney dating Swinton and McDormand simultaneously, but also the characters perfect timing at entering and exiting Cox's house).

"Burn After Reading" is not a bad film, however. It is salvaged by great performances all around, by some pieces of clever writing and funny dialogues, and especially by two minor characters who steal the show - the always brilliant J.K. Simmons as a senior CIA agent, and J.R. Horne as Swinton's divorce lawyer. Each get about two scenes, and in both cases the characterization, the writing, the acting offer perfect Coen moments within an otherwise mediocre Coen experience.

Burn Before Viewing?
2008-10-12 - "Burn After Reading" shows what happens when a couple of bungling amateurs attempt to beat the big boys of the C.I.A. at their own game.

Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand are the D.C.-based health club workers who stumble across a computer disc that they believe contains top secret, classified information. In actuality, it's the property of Osbourne Cox, a C.I.A. analyst who has recently been let go from the agency, and who is composing his memoirs as an act of retaliation against his former bosses. Tilda Swinton plays Osbourne's harridan wife who's having an affair with a tic-plagued, exercise-obsessed married man embodied by George Clooney. The discovery of the disc leads to a roundelay of false assumptions and comical misunderstandings all wrapped up in an intricately plotted scenario dripping with situational ironies.

"Burn After Reading" is Joel and Ethan Coen's darkly humorous follow-up to their Oscar-winning masterpiece, "No Country for Old Men," a grimly serious work that took little time out for comic relief (and earned them bucket loads of awards for doing so). This new film finds the boys back in the more familiar terrain of "Fargo" and "The Big Lebowski," where the laughs outnumber the gasps by a healthy margin. "Burn After Reading" certainly adheres to the customary Coen Brothers formula where a heightened quirkiness and a deliberately disjointed storyline are coupled with sudden flare-ups of violence and the unexpected deaths of major characters.

While the refusal to follow a predictable narrative path is one of the chief selling points of any Coen Brothers film, the fact of the matter is that, in the case of "Burn After Reading," the script probably could have used a few more revisions to bring the disparate elements more satisfactorily in line with one another. Too often it feels as if the movie itself is rambling around pointlessly, without any clear direction or purpose. For one thing, many of the scenes that might have served as the connecting tissue holding the various story lines together seem to have been - perhaps deliberately - left on the cutting-room floor. We're laughing along with the craziness all right, but we're also hoping against hope that the filmmakers will find a way to bring it all together in the end. Instead, what we get is a sit-down synopsis of events that is probably the least successful finale of that sort since the closing scene in "Psycho." For if viewers think they were frustrated by the truncated ending in "No Country," they ain't seen nuttin' yet.

The best thing about "Burn After Reading" is the delicious performances from a cast that any director would give his eyeteeth to work with. Malkovich, McDormand, Clooney, and Swinton all manage to define their characters through individualized quirks without ever going over the top and reducing their characters to caricatures. But it is Pitt who steals every scene he's in as the nerdy, hyper kinetic doofus who fancies himself a double-naught spy fit to stand alongside the James Bonds of the world. Pitt has rarely been this winning.

Now don't get me wrong. "Burn After Reading" is a frequently hilarious film that is vastly preferable to all those cookie-cutter comedies that can be found habitually ensconced in the neighborhood multiplexes. But it's not exactly prime Coen Brothers either, and, for that reason, I have to make this only a halfhearted recommendation. But, then again, even inferior Coen Brothers is better than no Coen Brothers at all.