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Rating: I can already imagine the scene, one brother must have said to the other:
- What do we come up with for the next movie? -
- How about a nice spy story? -
- Great! But not a serious spy story, it has to be a real joke! -
Burn After Reading, released in 2008, is the first 100% film by the brothers since "The Man Who Wasn't There." Such an intricate plot hasn't been seen since Miller's Crossing, while never before had such a stellar cast been seen in a Coen film. The story that the duo sets up is a complicated series of misunderstandings and coincidences that affect a fired CIA analyst who intends to write a book with his memoirs (Osbourne Cox/John Malkovich), a personal trainer obsessed with cosmetic surgery (Linda Litzke/Frances McDormand) and her young colleague (Chad Feldheimer/Brad Pitt), and a marshal (Harry Pfarrel/George Clooney) who cheats on his wife with both Linda and Mrs. Cox (Tilda Swinton). When Linda and Chad find a disk with Osbourne Cox's documents at the gym, they try in every way to get the money for the surgeries, both by blackmailing Osbourne Cox and even by contacting the Russians (?!).
Linda needs the surgeries to "reinvent herself" and is obsessed with appearances, the same goes for Harry and his fixation on physical fitness; Clooney with this character closes the "trilogy of idiots" (as he himself has defined his roles). But all the characters are "idiotic" in their own way. Once again, pessimism rules the day: Linda and Chad's attempted blackmail will trigger a series of events that no one will be able to stop, and even the CIA, which is following the affair, cannot predict what will happen or offer an explanation as to why. The fuel for this explosive mixture is always Chance, which causes Osbourne Cox's disk to be left at Linda and Chad's gym and brings Linda and Harry together. There is no innocence in the Coens' world: even Harry's wife (who should be a victim, cheated on by her husband) was in fact cheating on him too and had asked for a divorce long before he did. But it's not just marital infidelity; there's also Linda's betrayal of her own nation, trying to sell a useless disk to the Russians, a symbol of an America that has lost its values and finds itself in a burgeoning moral "ground zero." Although Linda eventually gets what she wanted, the viewer will not be led to call this a happy ending at all, given that the price for those operations will have been very high. The laughs the film produces are bitter because the recreated fiction is very close to reality.
After the stasis of their previous film, the Coens return to playing with the camera as they were used to, using the genre's stereotypes: rhythmic soundtrack, semi-amateur shots from inside cars, documentary-style subtitles. However, behind the appearance of a spy story lies its parody: no character is a spy or anything like it, and even the CIA itself seems to be run by incompetents.
It was difficult to produce a second masterpiece just a year after the previous film, but even among the duo's "minor" films, Burn After Reading does not stand out as one of the most successful. Certainly a good film, formally impeccable, especially in the pace and succession of plot twists, but too mannered (in the end, the spy story is just a trick to conceal the typical jigsaw noir to which the brothers have accustomed us), with characters too caricatured, even if the performance of the actors is remarkable, and it seems that both they and the directors had a lot of fun making it. Perhaps this is the way to frame the film, a divertissement among the more serious episodes of their filmography.
<<What have we learned? I don't even know. Maybe we've learned not to do it anymore. Even though I don't know what we did...>>
RATING = 7.5
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