Review of Burn After Reading (2008) by Raji K — 09 Sep 2016

By now it is a well known fact that I find the Coen Brothers to be excessively overrated. I've slogged through Fargo, The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Inside Llewyn Davis, No Country For Old Men and others while still failing to really grasp why the Coen Brothers get such a fantastic rap.

Culturally their movie titles come up often and certain aspects of their middle American focus have become more popular and certainly the sepia overtones of O Brother, Where Art Thou? have become an important benchmark but overall, I still can't seem to find an impact that even begins to rival that of Lucas, Kubrick, Spielberg, Scott, Scorsese or Tarantino, despite the brothers often occupying the same space as these great directors (and sometimes winning awards over them as well).

Burn After Reading has been next on my Coen Brothers filmography road trip and after seeing it, I have to say it may be my favorite of their films. That isn't to say it was fantastic. While the plot and timing came together better than their other films and the characters were infinitely more fascinating, Burn After Reading bears some similarities to Hail, Caesar! in that it continues to appear as a vanity project for Hollywood elite.

While I like the cast and appreciate their stories a bit more, the brothers don't even make an attempt to disguise zoom shots on George Clooney and others that seem to serve no purpose other than to allow these high class thespians to showcase their fantastic and profound line delivery and acting skills during one of the movie's many monologues.

In some ways, it continues to seem like, that in their attempt to highlight incredible performances, the brothers actually make a mockery of just that. Maybe that has always been the intention but it comes off as incredibly pretentious and off putting.

Nevertheless, more than any of their other films that I have seen, Burn After Reading actually seems to latch on to both a coherent plot and a unifying philosophical identity. Aging seems to be the target here as all of the main characters struggle to come to terms with the disappearance of their youth.

Clooney is obsessively exercise oriented even as he courts droves of women. Malkovich is paranoid and delusional about the importance of his life's work. Swinton desperately craves a change of scenery while McDormand plans to literally change her appearance to that of a younger woman.

Brad Pitt has the most iconic performance, as the gym bro who opts for the ignorance is bliss approach as the youngest character on screen. It all goes down rather smoothly, even if it isn't as funny or profound as it could have been.

Despite once again working with an A+ cast, the brothers still can't seem to distill the purest form of what their working with but Burn After Reading still seems like a high note for their filmography.