Burn After Reading [2008]

All the Academy Awards that Joel and Ethan Coen won for No Country for Old Men produced an unintended effect: It made the outlaw brothers respectable. That's got to be driving them nuts. (Have any Oscar winners ever looked more miserable on camera?) Luckily, the idiot-boy side of the Coens barrels out whenever prestige threatens to choke their rebel spirit. Blood Simple begat Raising Arizona, Barton Fink begat The Hudsucker Proxy, and Fargo begat (hello, stoner heaven) The Big Lebowski. For me, the only time the slide into silly didn't work was when The Man Who Wasn't There begat the twin low points in the Coen canon, Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers.

Burn After Reading will have No Country converts running for cover. Instead of a subtle walk through Cormac McCarthy territory, the brothers have conjured a crazy-quilt comic thriller that takes on our growing national stupidity in the form of a sex farce. The result is wildly funny, but just as wildly uneven. Such things happen when the Coens wield their wit like a blunt instrument. But if their control falters this time by pressing too hard on the "quirky" button, it's still a small price to pay for their indisputable daring.

The movie begins with an aerial map of the U.S. as the camera — in a game of "pin the tail on the donkey" — lands on the Beltway, where assholes wag in profusion. At CIA headquarters, perpetually pissed-off analyst Osborne Cox (John Malkovich, never funnier or more frazzled) quits his post before he can be demoted for drunken incompetence. He tells Katie (Tilda Swinton), his doctor wife, that he plans to write his memoirs. "Who'd read that?" she says. Props to the freshly Oscar-ed Swinton for flashing a delicious look of contempt that could freeze lava....

Runtime: 1 hr 36 mins

Genre: Comedy / Crime

Theatrical Release: Sep 12, 2008 Wide

Starring: George Clooney, John Malkovich, Frances McDormand, Brad Pitt, Tilda Swinton

Director: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

Link: Imdb