movie review: Burn After Reading

As a die-hard Coen Bros fan, I went into Burn After Reading with enormous expectations, despite every attempt to temper them a bit. Even if I'd managed to expect less, I think I probably still would have been pretty disappointed. The individual performances were entertaining to watch, the dialogue was good and the plot moved right along, but somehow it just didn't add up to a great movie.

What bothered me right away was the lack of climax. Sure, the pressure built and everything seemed about to crash, but instead of showing us the product of the preceding 90 minutes of buildup and intrigue, they cut to a very bland scene of someone describing it. Great. Thanks for that. I'll admit that the whole cut-away-from-the-catharsis thing worked in No Country for Old Men, but that was a movie about nihilism and the bleak reality that in life, things don't work out the way you want them to, whereas Burn was a spy thriller about really, really stupid people. As they themselves admitted, they had no ideology, they were just in it for the money. In cases like this, the audience is, too, and we definitely want our money's worth. We're here to be entertained, so let the entertainment play out the way it should have (and almost did).

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that although I admire the actors employed in this film and loved watching them play, I only ever saw them as actors and never got lost in their characters. It's been less than 24 hours since I watched it, and I honestly can't remember more than one or two character's names. I'm reminded quite a bit of Intolerable Cruelty, another Coen- and Clooney-invloved flick that had remarkably similar problems. It seems as though their best work (and not necessarily best performing work in the box office) comes when they really commit to their genre as well as its language and color pallette, and with the exception of a couple of very Hudsucker-esque shots in Langley, they never really pinpointed a vocabulary, visual or otherwise, for Burn.

Perhaps, though, like The Big Lebowski, it'll take a few more viewings of Burn before I really get what they're doing. There are undoubtedly details and nuance I didn't catch the first time around, and the gestalt will improve as they are gleaned. My sense at this point, however, is no.


Overall rating: Meh.