In the opening scene of
the Coen brothers' Burn After Reading, the camera takes a long drop down from space,
then lands in a hallway at CIA headquarters. It's found a true corridor of
power, a place for people who know what's happening and can make the world move
in the direction they choose. The film doesn't linger; its business lies
elsewhere, in places where people have learned just enough to obscure the fact
that they don't really know anything at all.
One such place: a gym
called Hardbodies, employer of a lonely woman (Frances McDormand) who can't
fathom why her HMO doesn't cover the extensive plastic surgery she believes she
needs, and a dim fitness instructor (Brad Pitt) who thinks they might earn some
leverage after finding a CD filled with secret-looking "shit." Said shit
actually belongs to John Malkovich, a disgraced ex-CIA agent now working
halfheartedly on his memoirs (a word he's careful to pronounce with the proper
French inflection). McDormand and Pitt's incompetent attempts to extort
Malkovich, and Malkovich's nearly as incompetent attempts to rebuff their
efforts, keep the Coens' shaggy-dog tale rolling. Eventually, it draws in
George Clooney's boyishly enthusiastic adulterer and one of his lovers, Tilda
Swinton, who's also Malkovich's calculating wife.
Shadowing the spy genre
from a disrespectful distance, the Coens have created a kind of reverse Parallax
View, in
which there's usually less going on than meets the eye. The punchline comes
about halfway through with a scene that reveals just how inconsequential its
characters' acts of subterfuge and misdirection look in the grand scheme of
things. It's a thin joke, but a clever one, though Burn occasionally feels like
an excuse for the cast to deliver broad comic performances that wouldn't really
fit anywhere else. It ultimately looks like a collection of moments woven
together by a ridiculous-by-design plot, but at least they're almost uniformly
funny.
Still, this feels like a
second-shelf Coen comedy, particularly when compared to their no-less-shaggy The
Big Lebowski.
It might simply be that, unlike Lebowski, it lacks a strong protagonist, presenting
a world of stupidly dangerous characters driven by unenlightened self-interest,
without even Jeff Bridges' voice of stoned reason. The final scene, which makes
the end of No Country For Old Men look indulgent, concludes it all with a shrug, as
if the silliness could stop whenever, so it might as well stop now. Which is
fine. Burn's
land of the perpetually deluded works as an amusing place to visit, but an even
better place to flee.