Burn After Reading

Burn After Reading is the riotous new comedy with a great cast and excellent script, done by two of the greatest filmmakers in Hollywood today, recent Oscar winners Joel & Ethan Coen. It aims its satire at CIA "intelligence", plastic surgery, spy movies, and the ensemble cast involved often use their characters to parody their on-screen "personas". The key thing is not to take anything seriously, even through the plot twists, dark humor, and oddly comic violence.

Where do I begin to summarize the plot? Osbourne Cox is writing his memoirs. He's just been fired from his job as a CIA analyst. His cold-hearted wife Katie is considering divorce, and is secretly seeing US Marshall Harry Pfarrer. It seems like Osbourne's world is falling apart.

But Katie begins secret divorce proceedings, and downloads all the content off Osbourne's computer to a disc, including his memoirs, thinking it is financial data. When Katie's divorce lawyer loses the disc in her gym locker, two dimwitted gym employees think it is top secret information and try to blackmail Osbourne.

These gym employees are Linda Litzke and Chad Feldheimer. Dimwitted Chad takes the action to blackmail and extort Osbourne for money. Linda goes along with it because she wants money for plastic surgeries. Meanwhile, Harry is assigned to find the two who have taken the disc, and meets Linda and starts to date her.

These events are framed by two clueless CIA agents who periodically summarize the events, and try to find out what all this means. Their final scene, which is also the movie's last scene, is impeccably written with humor and vigor.

Are you still there, reading? If so, I am amazed. It's pretty much the most complex plot since Spider-Man 3. Somehow the Coen brothers manage to simplify all this to an comprehensible rate without dumbing it down, that alone is a feat.

All the performances are great and the one-liners are subtle, but hilarious. I don't know what I loved most about the film. Brad Pitt's high-wire, low-intelligence performance? Perhaps. The ending that hits you hard until long after it's over? (That's a good thing) Perhaps. I don't really know myself.

This is a bona-fide awesome movie, so subtle in humor and yet so outrageous in execution and acting. A-