Review of "Burn After Reading"

We caught the Coen brothers' latest film last night, a star-laden farce of violent intentions called Burn After Reading. If you've already seen their Oscar-winners No Country for Old Men or Fargo, rejoice! This also contains odd characters who have just enough information about their situation to do real damage. If you've already seen their excellent comedies Raising Arizona and O Brother, Where Are Thou?, be unhappy! Most laughs in the movie come from the release of nervous tension, not actual hi-jinx or excellent physical humor. (Minor exception for Brad Pitt, who hams it up successfully as a low-brained physical trainer.)

The Coen brothers draw most viewers into their films with strength of character, a sense of constancy that explains and links seemingly unbelievable behavior across varied scenes. The stoic killer in No Country for Old Men held a strict code of conduct that made his otherwise repellant and psychotic actions somewhat sympathetic. Unfortunately, character's the primary failure in Burn After Reading. Most of the story takes small-scale mistakes and blows them out of proportion so quickly, we lose the power to judge. (Wait, is that believable? Could I get a time out to think about this?) By the end, all the characters with inner demons exorcise them by killing the people who seemed happy to start with.

The film's poster design hearkens back to Hitchcock films and the marquee design for Anatomy of a Murder, both excellent sources for life-or-death material frequently plumbed by the Coen brothers. (For example, this movie's MacGuffin is a single CD-ROM of memoirs and financial data whose contents become quickly irrelevant.)

In my opinion, they leaned too heavily on the story's comedic aspects. Fargo seemed rightly concerned with how poor choices lead to terrible outcomes--and was incidentally funny. They inject more humor here, but sacrifice how we regard the characters. Rather than communicating intelligence and an ability to cope with the world around them, everyone seems stubbornly stuck in a single-rail existence. Once it's over, did any of the characters actually learn anything? Do the viewers?