The Red and Black

Issue date: 9/18/08 Section: Out & About

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The Coen brothers came into the making of "Burn After Reading" armed with a brilliant idea and a top shelf comedy cast - and they should all be ashamed of themselves.

As much as I'd love to rave about the inherent authenticity and delightfully dry, offbeat humor that we've come to expect of a Coen production, the advertising for this film proved better executed than the film itself.

"Burn After Reading" was a laugh-less chain of tiresome situations that gives a bad name to screwball comedy.

In this excessively peculiar plot line, two particularly moronic employees of a gym, Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) and Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) find what they suspect to be an important classified government document.

In actuality, the disk contains the personal memoirs and financial records of ex-CIA agent Osborne Cox (John Malkovich).

The idiotic partners in crime decide to blackmail the author in order to raise enough money for Litzke's plastic surgery.

Ex-agent Osborne, who is constantly cursing, is in the middle of being divorced by his wife Katie Cox (Tilda Swinton), who is having an affair with a Treasury agent, Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney).

Harry, unbeknownst to his lover, is a raging sex addict and ends up meeting Linda Litzke on an internet dating site.

From there, sloppy infidelity and slapstick violence take over.

The Russian embassy gets involved, and the rest leaves you pushing through the crowds as the credits roll, trying to make sense of it all.

While Burn After Reading had some hilarious moments of awkward human behavior - and who doesn't love it when Brad Pitt gets punched in the face - the whole picture didn't satisfy my thirst for a clever, cynical Coen-style movie.

Perhaps I would be more forgiving if "Burn After Reading" had been advertised for what it is: a ridiculous tragicomedy that, in a childish rebellion against mainstream filmmaking, failed to demonstrate the classic components that make a film unique and enjoyable at the same time.

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