The Reel Critic Burn After Reading

Author: Josh Wessler

The subject of the film "Burn after Reading," by Ethan and Joel Coen, is the multitude of daily obsessions that seemingly subsume all of our lives. Overflowing with compulsive exercisers, serial adulterers, pathological masochists, paranoid conspiracy theorists, lonely internet-addicts and relentless alcoholics, the Washington D.C. of the Coens' imaginations is, unsurprisingly, Anytown, U.S.A. It is not unusual that the Coen brothers offer a sharp critique of the new American lifestyle. Since their earliest films, every cultural hiccup, each local mannerism, has been skewered by characters and plot lines that feign absurdity but may as well be ripped from the headlines. The only difference in the latest film is that it may all be too obvious.

Osborne Cox, a man employed by the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.), finds his life's occupations crumbling: his job, his marriage and his alcoholism (if not deterred, at least questioned). In the wake of being fired, feeling as if he failed the promise of family and fortune, Cox, who is played by the unflinching, unblinking John Malkovich, retires to an Old Boy reunion of Yale alums. In classic Coen fashion, the table of overweight, white-haired, white men drinking scotch is served by a black man in a waiter's coat. The scene dutifully reminds us that the pathways to national power are nothing if not monochrome. Left to his own devices, Cox drinks his way to a divorce, though the adulterous wife Katie - played by an overbearing and wonderfully unbearable Tilda Swinton - was merely looking for a good excuse to take his money. George Clooney, as the wife's lover Harry, is electric as a hot-wired Treasury Department agent with a confused litany of deadly food allergies. As if pawns in a surreal version of "Clue," the characters constantly toe the line between farce and sadism.

On the other side of town, two bumbling citizens seize their chance to break open and cash out on a government conspiracy. Mistaking Cox's memoirs for confidential materials, Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) and Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) are not very creative in their attempts to blackmail Cox and to sell the (personal) secrets to foreign governments. Much to their dismay, no one in the intelligence community seems much interested in the attempted act of non-treason (only in the imagination does the U.S. government turn its head from an attempted threat). In the Coens' collective mind, the C.I.A is an austere, quiet building where old white men quietly weed out any inconsistencies in the daily monotony of peace and order, to such an extent that none of the Agency's primary activities - ostensibly taking place outside the U.S. borders - are even hinted at. Instead of occupying themselves with official business, paranoid government officials validate their own conspiracies. Na've citizens imagining illegal espionage find themselves embroiled in a plot of their own creation. In D.C.'s insular mode of doing business, the system works for everyone, with two crucial exceptions: those found on the wrong side of a gun and those outside the elite inner circle. The town is too small for all the personalities that try to squeeze in; those that fall off are marked down as victims to natural selection.

The film opens and closes with a satellite shot of the United States that replicates the impossible "zoom-in" that many have enjoyed on the Google Earth program, bringing the camera from the moon to a C.I.A corridor in a matter of seconds. Perhaps the Coens want us to feel concerned that the U.S. government seems to have unprecedented surveillance powers and a seemingly unquestioned authority to deal with "disturbances," but really, nothing feels more mundane.