Discuss After Watching

Michael Clayton 2: Settling Out of Court

The Coen Brother's maddeningly disjointed Burn After Reading is a message movie. As much as the droll tandem might protest, it is warning to those people with a predilection for insinuating themselves into situations that require expertise and tact that they do not possess, but it plays like another one of their dark screwball comedies.

Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest is the cinematic gold standard for the everyman who is drawn into a web of intrigue based on mistaken identity. Filmmakers have been parroting the conceit ever since. It's a way of connecting the audience to the story. After all, this could happen to you. This film's "heroes" are a pair of strip mall gym employees played by the always excellent Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt, who gives a broad comedic performance that turns his beefcake persona on its head. Here they aren't the victims of dangerous machinations that send them meandering aimlessly into harm's way. On the contrary, through a serious of laughable and self-important and self-serving missteps they uncork a chain of catastrophic events when they try to shop around the benign memoirs of a disgruntled ex-CIA employee to the highest bidder so McDormand can afford the plastic surgery that her health insurance will not cover. How the pair come into possession of the CD containing this manuscript is laughable in and of itself, and just as arbitrary as the rest of the plot. It's like the cinematic equivalent of string theory.

The joke is that no one gives a rat's ass about the memoirs except for their author, a seething, cuckolded, scotch-soaked cauldron of male impotency who has reached his breaking point, played by John Malkovich. While it is comical that the film's most menacing character is this ivy-leaguer and former CIA paper-pusher, it's the rest of the self-centered dopes that are far more dangerous. Even the CIA chief who receives periodic updates on the film's surprisingly high body count in the form of hilarious (and tidily matter-of-fact) reports given to him by a subordinate is only interested in saving himself a lot of paperwork. As the credits roll, it's a commentary on the film itself that these intermissions are its most memorable scenes. Maybe the brothers Coen should have just had these two tell us what happened to their little terrarium of morons instead of taking great pains to show us every tic.

Underneath the zany plot the film actually does present characters with real (albeit skewed) emotions, but the Coen's keep all that messiness at arm's length. For example, McDormand and George Clooney's search for love in all the wrong places could play as a poignant little independent film in another auteur's hands, but the Coens' penchant for high farce in Burn After Reading throws this fledgling relationship atop the ash pile along with everything else. In the end, the film is just an elaborate mousetrap, and as for that commentary on people swimming out of their depth: If you find a CD full of personal files on the locker room floor, just take it to the lost and found.