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Ten Days Of The Coen Brothers: Day Nine

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10 years ago

March 6, 2016

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File Under Unmemorable

♦ With the release of Hail, Caesar! in the UK on 4 March, Tripwire kicks off a look at all of the Coen Brothers films released to date. Yesterday we took a look at their twelth film No Country For Old Men (2007) and now our editor-in-chief Joel Meadows takes a look at their thirteenth movie Burn After Reading (2008) .

Burn After Reading

Director: Joel Coen

Stars: Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand, George Clooney, John Malkovich

A year after releasing the uncompromising tour de force that was No Country For Old Men, the Coen Brothers hurriedly churned out Burn After Reading. With No Country, the Coens were forced to restore a reputation that was tarnished thanks to the critically shunned Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers. However Burn After Reading was yet another misstep, albeit one which had all the usual Coen idiosyncracies, not to mention an all-star cast.

A meandering farce set in Washington DC, the film features John Malkovich as Osborne Cox, a CIA operative who decides to write his memoirs after being let go by the agency, but his efforts fall into the hands of two incompetent gym employees. One is the desperate Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) while the other is gormless bodybuilder Chad Felheimer (Brad Pitt, in a thankless role), who decides to fall in with Litzke. Weaved rather clumsily into the plot is a love triangle between Cox’s wife Katie (Tilda Swinton), Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney) and Litzke. Clooney plays philandering state department employee Pfarrer, who is already married to childrens author Sandy (Elizabeth Marvel), while cheating on her with both ice queen Katie, who he continues to string along, and Litzke.

The film does have that aforementioned remarkable cast, (although the anodyne Swinton can test the patience of most viewers), but the plot is riddled with dead ends, while the humour here is uncharacteristically broad and unwieldy. The film collapses under the weight of an A list ensemble that is far too numerous, with many of them having little to do other than act as vapid turns or stooges in the Coens’ clunky comedy of errors – the film’s epilogue, which ties up all the myriad loose narratives and missing characters, a lazy denouement indeed.

After their previous comedic triumphs Burn After Reading was a somewhat insubstantial, throwaway disappointment, made clearly on the hoof with little regard for internal logic or even a casual nod towards subtext, not to mention (considering the location) satire. As always with the Coens, their next film would see them get back on track yet again, this time with a far more personal and memorable project.

JOEL MEADOWS