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A complete tonal mess that finds the Coen Brothers swinging wildly from wry farce to blood-soaked slapstick to harebrained lampoonery, Burn After Reading is muddled but entertaining enough. It seems that every time the Coens obtain some level of respectability they immediately follow it up with a confused big swing as if to reorientate their misanthropic worldview away from prestige. No Country for Old Men won them a bushel of Oscars, so they called up a bunch of their movie star friends (George Clooney, Tilda Swinton, John Malkovich, Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand) for a farce of conspiracy theories and an examination of one man’s grandiose sense of importance.
I suppose some of it works, but it also feels like the Coens are aware that Burn After Reading is all over the place as there’s a moment when J.K. Simmons appears to declare “Report back to me when it makes sense.” They’ve effectively hit pause on their own narrative to meta-comment on its ever expanding and convoluted plot that built out from adultery, cosmetic surgery, failed life transformations, bad marriages and mistaken identities before spiraling even further into espionage and a MacGuffin that leads to plenty of blood splatter.
If the movie is a bit of a mess, and it very much is, at least the cast appears to be having fun with it all. Clooney and Pitt are absolutely fabulous as a pair of idiots, Swinton is reliably icy and domineering, Malkovich gets to take his tortured cuckold self-proclaimed genius shtick for a ride, and McDormand and Jenkins bring a touch of sadness to their characters that’s a welcome undercurrent to the hijinks. Burn After Reading functions best when it isn’t trying to give these actors a coherent narrative but skits to play. When we eventually return to Simmons, he’s as flummoxed about what’s been told to him as we are about what we’ve just watched. “I’m fucked if I know what we did,” once again, Simmons functions as a mouth piece for the Coens, and as ending codas go, it’s as succinct yet unable to wrap things up as “Shut up and deal” or “Nobody’s perfect.”
