Product Description
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John Malkovich, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, George Clooney
and Brad Pitt star in this Coen brothers crime comedy concerning
the whereabouts of a sensitive disc containing the incriminating
memoirs of alcoholic CIA agent Osbourne Cox (Malkovich). Cox's
wife, Katie (Swinton), who is having an affair with married
federal marshall, Harry Pfarrer (Clooney), is making plans to
leave her husband, and is advised by her divorce lawyer to copy
his personal files onto a disc. The disc finds its way via a
circuitous route to the Hardbodies fitness gym, where two
unscrupulous employees, Linda (McDormand) and Chad (Pitt) decide
to exploit their find for all they can get. Events soon spiral
out of everyone's control in a cascading series of surreal and
darkly comic encounters and misunderstandings.
From .co.uk
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After the dark brilliance of No Country for Old Men, Burn After
Reading may seem like a t, but few filmmakers elevate the
trivial to art quite like Joel and Ethan Coen. Inspired by
Stansfield Turner's Burn Before Reading, the comically convoluted
plot clicks into gear when the CIA gives analyst Osborne Cox
(John Malkovich) the boot. Little does Cox know his wife, Katie
(Tilda Swinton, riffing on her Michael Clayton character), is
seeing married federal marshal Harry (George Clooney, Swinton's
Clayton co-star, playing off his Syriana role). To get back at
the Agency, Cox works on his memoirs. Through a twist of e,
fitness club workers Linda (Frances McDormand) and Chad (Brad
Pitt in a pompadour that recalls Johnny Suede) find the disc and
try to wrangle a "Samaratin tax" out of the surly alcoholic. An
avid Internet dater, Linda plans to use the money for plastic
surgery, oblivious that her manager, Ted (The Visitor's Richard
Jenkins), likes her just the way she is. Though it sounds like a
Beltway remake of The Big Lebowski, the Coen entry it most
closely resembles, this time the brothers concentrate their
energies on the myriad insecurities endemic to the mid-life
crisis--with the exception of Chad, who's too dense to share such
concerns, leading to the funniest performance of Pitt's career.
If Lebowski represented the Coen's unique approach to film noir,
Burn sees them putting their irresistibly absurdist stamp on
paranoid thrillers from Enemy of the State to The Bourne
Identity. --Kathleen C. Fennessy
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Synopsis
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The Coen Brothers re-team with George Clooney for this blackly
comic film set in the world of a former . John Malkovich,
Frances McDormand, Brad Pitt, and Tilda Swinton are along for the
sure-to-be wild ride filled with the Coens' trademark humour.
With their overtly comedic follow-up Burn After Reading, the Coen
Brothers return from the dark, dank recesses of the human psyche
they traversed in their O-winning No Country For Old Men. For
those unfamiliar with the landscape of modern movie
psychoanalysis, this puts the fraternal filmmakers square in the
cruel, misanthropic, and farcical realm of their 1990s-era body
of work, somewhere between the tragicomic crime thriller of Fargo
and the disconnected noir-homage anti-storytelling of The Big
Lebowski, with 2007's No Country retroactively adding new
nihilism-tinged dimensions of smart scepticism to the
proceedings. In a more linear trajectory, Burn After Reading also
stands as the third entry, after Blood Simple and Fargo, in what
could be an unofficial Tragedy of Human Idiocy trilogy, wherein
characters make the most outlandishly moronic moves to
devastating consequences simply by adhering to true human
behaviour. Indeed, Carter Burwell's emotionally weighty score,
which washes over biting scenes of explosive, anesthetizing belly
laughs, is very reminiscent of his Fargo work. Burn After Reading
is ostensibly structured and propelled by a -thriller plotline
involving a classified CD lost by a disgraced CIA spook and found
by two simple gym employees. The CIA superior who learns of the
film's events (always second-hand and sometimes along with the
viewer) doesn't know what to make of it, and why would he? This
is the first Coen film in almost 20 years not by
cinematographer Roger Deakins, yet the ‘new’ guy, Emmanuel
Lubezki (Children of Men), has created as visceral and
emotionally fraught a high-definition cartoon as any since Barton
Fink.
DVD features English and Spanish language soundtracks.
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