Burn After Reading (Focus Features)
Forget After Seeing
The Coen Brothers won the Academy Award for Best Picture last year with their quirky, horrific film No Country For Old Men. Their follow up to that movie is the quirky and insane Burn After Reading. This is a movie that focuses on bizarre characters doing bizarre things and none of it matters in the least. But being a Coen Brothers film many of the nations critics are salivating over it just being in existence. Hello world, the emperor is not wearing any clothes.
The film takes a look at Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand), a health club employee who is not happy with her body. She wants to have several surgeries to correct things, but that calls for a lot of money and her insurance company will not come through for her. When a disc is found at the gym belonging to former CIA employee Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) Linda seizes on this as an opportunity to get some extra cash.
She and her goofy co-worker Chad (Brad Pitt) devise a scheme to blackmail Cox into paying up. But getting the money proves to be a little difficult. Before this issue has been resolved there are many murders and many compromising situations.
George Clooney, Tilda Swinton, Richard Jenkins and J K Simmons are also in the film. They make contact with these other characters in one way or another. Some of them are funny while others are dramatic and none of them is impressive.
The star of the show is Pitt. He shows true acting talent as the aforementioned goofball Chad. With his pompadour hair and his Cheshire cat grin, this is a man to remember even when the movie is forgettable. Pitt has often been dismissed as too handsome to be talented but this movie proves that theory totally wrong.
The film is rated R for violence and profanity.
The Coen Brothers are talented filmmakers. Their Fargo is one of my all time favorite films. However, Burn After Reading is a waste of their talent and my time. In this movie the plot is almost non-existent and their desire to be quirky and crazy just means the film is hard to follow and eventually boring. When it ends it evokes a sigh of relief from the audience.
If you could pull out the Brad Pitt performance and disregard everything else then you might have something worthwhile. But then the movie would only be about twenty minutes long.
I scored Burn After Reading a charred 5 out of 10.
