Rapid Review: Burn After Reading
This weekend I saw the new Coen Brothers movie Burn After Reading -- the Coens' twisted version of a spy film.
The Coen brothers don't actually do spoofs - their films rarely directly reference or mock anything specific. But they do have a penchant for taking established film genres -- detective flicks, gangster pictures, caper movies, Capra-esque morality tales, romantic comedies -- and giving them their own bizarre twist.
In this sense, Burn After Reading is firmly in the tradition of The Big Lebowski (a bizarro Raymond Chandler-style detective movie) and Fargo (a murder mystery with the unlikeliest of heroes, villains and settings). Like those films Burn's plot is complicated, unlikely and whirls and circles itself like the hula-hoops in The Hudsucker Proxy. But it splits the difference between those films in terms of serious darkness.
What people will probably talk about most is Brad Pitt's performance as...well, a complete doofus. We've seen Pitt the romantic leading man, the dirtied-up terrifying villain (Kalifornia) and the spastic head case (12 Monkeys). But even in The Mexican I'm not sure we've ever seen him this broadly, proudly moronic.
But for my money some of the best scenes are the drier CIA-centric ones with John Malkovich as a disgraced, defeated analyst and JK Simmons (the dad in Juno, Garth Pancake from The Ladykillers) and David Rasche as his former bosses.
What did you guys think?
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