![]() The more they fight tooth and nail, the more they are punished. Every individual is blinded by delusions of grandeur. ![]() Everyone wants to be better than they are. Burn After Reading succeeds in smartly presenting wannabe spies who are dumber than rocks. “It takes a while to adjust to the rhythms and subversive humour of “Burn” because this is really an anti-spy thriller in which nothing is at stake, no one acts with intelligence and everything ends badly.” In an admirable review of the film from the Hollywood Reporter by Kirk Honeycutt describes the film as thus: This is part of Burn After Reading’s charm. Even with Inside Llewyn Davis (2014), grumpy musician Llewyn gives us his cat. The absurdity of what happens to their protagonists are rarely in doubt yet Burn defies in given us anyone to get our empathy behind. However, Burn After Reading falls into a smaller sub-division of Coen’s brother’s movies. Characters start with nothing, look towards boosting their materialism via untoward methods but usually end up with nothing or worse. The cyclical nature of the narrative is now hilariously commonplace when it comes to The Coens. They look to be rewarded by selling the information back to its original owner Osbourne Cox. Pfarrer is a serial shagger who finds himself involved with Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) a fitness instructor whose quest for superficial self-improvement takes a wild turn when she discovers a disk of what appears to be a batch of sensitive files with her go-getting colleague Chad (Brad Pitt). A task which would cause more strain on his decaying marriage with his wife Katie (Tilda Swinton) if she wasn’t already shacking up with U.S. He decides to use his enforced retirement to concentrate on his memoirs. Osbourne Cox (a boorish John Malkovich) is an alcoholic CIA analyst who has suddenly been given a lot more free time on his hands than expected. As the visual zooms in, we focus in on fast striding feet walking into a room of serious looking suits with one vaguely bemused gentleman, whose about to get fired. The fatalistic world that often inhabits a Coens’ movie only helps compound this. Its opening shot which is framed as a view of earth from a satellite can also jokingly be considered as a god’s eye view of the world. But as with so many of the Coen’s films, if the characters weren’t so greedy they wouldn’t need to be spanked so hard.įrom the moment Burn After Reading starts, the Coen’s are hoping you get the joke. ![]() The shenanigans which occur between a spate of eccentrics in Burn After Reading plays on the clear and apparent goofiness. The plight of Llewelyn and his ill-gotten gains is tense and harrowing. The only major difference between the two movies appears to be the element of farce. Once individuals fall into the trap, they find the walls of the plot to be well greased and they struggle to get out. The two films both push their characters into almost Rube-Goldberg style catastrophes. Even though it comes off a film which considers itself as a grandiose and profound work, Burn After Reading, while slight and swift in its pacing, feels very much like a sibling to No Country. ![]() In rewatching Burn After Reading, it’s difficult to consider it “minor”. Either that or viewed as a “minor” work by folk, as the film was their first work which came after their Oscar-winning feature No Country for Old Men (2007). This is certainly true of Burn After Reading, a film I found dismissed by friends who’ve fallen out of love with the Coens. There’s a certain amount of glee that resides in most of the Coen’s movies, as you watch their characters flap and frail helplessly as the python-like coils of fate wrap around them and begin to squeeze. If you watch enough Coen Brother movies, one wouldn’t be surprised if you found it difficult not to feel that to be true. If you follow the right circle, you will find people who believe that the Coen Brothers hate their characters.
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