As David Crosby Said, Everybody’s Been Burned

Brad Pitt discourses on raw intelligence.

How do you find an antidote to the heart-wrenching bleakness tinged with just a little bit of hope in the Coen Brothers' Oscar-winning masterpiece No Country For Old Men? If you're Joel and Ethan Coen themselves, you do it by simultaneously writing and pre-producing a madcap, nonsensical screwball farce. Burn After Reading (2008) might be their most absurd movie yet. And it is the overwhelming absurdity which made me, while enjoying it, not like it as much as Country, Fargo, Lebowski, or Raising Arizona. Their other films featured protagonists you could relate to or a dose of the heart-warming, as the finale of Arizona included. In Burn After Reading, except for Richard Jenkins's sweetly hopeless Ted, the main characters are either mean-spirited (the Coxes) or plain stupid (everyone else). The laughs come from the premise that a few bits of misinterpreted information result in death, desolation, and complexities far out of proportion to what they are based around to the point where not even the CIA understands what's going on. It does make you think how much in history which had terrible consequences for all involved came about because one person misunderstood one thing, but it's a dark premise for so much comedy, and the humor itself is based around how self-centered and oblivious everyone is. All existence is absurd and means little in this universe. Ultimately, the laughter is tearfully painful as the Coens make us consider our own limitations, how we respond to the unknown and how we put our desires ahead of all else.

But it's good. There is a usual top-flight cast, with Frances McDormand, in her seventh appearance for her husband and brother-in-law, standing out as the most hopeless (and of course ultimately successful) character (Linda, whose obsession with her body blinds her to the happiness she has right now and who will go on to cause three deaths) and John Malkovich riffing on his usually creepiness as the embittered CIA agent. And the comedy, though bitter, comes fast and furious in Tilda Swinton's bedside manner, George Clooney's home-improvement project, Jenkins's tale of his time as a Greek Orthodox priest, Carter Burwell's over-the-top Hitchcock/Herrmann score (to think two months later millions of girls were swooning to his Twilight music), Coming Up Daisy, and every minute Brad Pitt is on the screen as Chad Feldheimer. Once again, Pitt shows how sad it is that this brilliant character actor was born in a matinee idol's body. I'm going to be using "Numbers, and dates, and numbers, and numbers…and dates, raw intelligence shit!" for a long, long time.