‘Such a Tonic’: Why ‘Burn After Reading’ is the feel-good movie I’m in | Coen brothers

TThe opening credits suggest interesting action: a view of Earth from outer space on the East Coast of the United States and zoom in on what is revealed to be a large building complex nestled in the woods – what we soon learn is the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia – to a soundtrack of propulsive thunderous percussion. From here, it will gradually become clear that there’s no great mystery in the film, Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2008 spy thriller, Burn After Reading, as its characters prepare instead to chase ghosts, walk down blind alleys, and, ultimately, learn nothing at all.

In one of Coens’ convoluted plots, Linda (Frances McDormand) and Chad (Brad Pitt), gym workers in Washington, D.C., come across a disc containing the raw memoirs of former CIA analyst Osborn Cox (John Malkovich) – what Chad concludes is “top secret bullshit” – and decide to try to blackmail the former agent into his return. Meanwhile, Linda begins a dalliance with Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney), a paranoid US Marshal who is also having an affair with Osbourne’s wife Katie (Tilda Swinton).

Overall, this adds up to a darkly comedic, and at times sadistic, farce that centers on the most ambiguous and unsympathetic cast of characters fronted in the Coen brothers’ film. Always tormenting their characters a little, in Burn After Reading the Coens are merciless, whether they’re mocking Osbourne’s arrogance (who pronounces his memoir “mim-wah”) or Harry’s self-absorption (who thinks he’s starring in his own conspiracy thriller, seeing a potential threat in every passing car and person who looks his way), or they’re subjecting one of their main characters to a sudden, gory death. As absurdly funny as it is shocking.

But Burn After Reading’s greatest joke is its rejection of the idea that a movie should be on Something, perhaps especially when it comes to such talent. You’ve got the Coens, who just months before Burn After Reading’s release had won Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture, plus a host of esteemed movie stars and character actors, here all playing lunatics with gritty straight faces. Then there are regular Coens composer Carter Burwell and master cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who even treat scenes like the reveal of a homemade sex machine as if they were worthy of their audio-visual poetry.

What all of this brings to Burn After Reading is an importance, an appeal that is deliberately at odds with the banality of the material, and this disconnect makes for a perverse kind of comic art.

The film’s DC setting allows for higher interpretations. There might be a comment here on the incompetence and self-interest of those at the heart of American power – a reading that resonates under Trump, as it did under Bush in the film – or on adapting to life in a post-Cold War America, where historical enemies no longer pose a threat. (At one point, Linda and Chad try to sell Osborne’s memoirs to uninterested Russians, apparently too stupid to realize that the Cold War is over and that Russia is – at least at this moment in time – officially friendly.)

But politics have never been a feature of the Coen brothers’ work, and the brothers themselves have insisted that Burn After Reading was not intended as a snapshot of the contemporary American political climate. According to Ethan, Burn After Reading is rather a film about how everyone has an “inner knucklehead” inside them; In other words, it’s a movie that’s about little more than a zany spectacle. Harry and Linda can be seen in one scene braying in Dermot Mulroney’s broad faux-romance, as the Coens satirize what they saw as the popular culture of the time, but if there was ever a Coen brothers movie you could close your mind to, it’s this one.

Burn After Reading is, in some ways, one of the most disposable pieces of Queens. However, it’s the ease of action that, for me, makes the film so entertaining, and the knowledge of its irrelevance that makes it a tonic in important times (like, say, the kind we’re living through now). Between one of their most “serious” pictures, “No Country for Old Men,” and a rare autobiographical work, “A Serious Man, Burned After Reading,” the Coens approach a piece of material like a cat fussing over strings, and the filmmakers play with their characters and audience expectations just for the fun of it.

In the film’s final scene, a CIA representative, played with hilarious impertinence by J.K. Simmons, closes the book Burn After Reading, dismissing any doubts the viewer might have that this story is “about” much at all. “What did we learn?” Simmons asks angrily. Then, the view moves away from Langley, and back to the sky, where you get the sense that the gods – here, that would be the Coen brothers – were all along laughing at the sheer stupidity of their creations.