Burn After Reading
The latest dark comedy from the Brothers Coen is a uniquely Washington story, not because of its easily recognizable locations in and around the District of Columbia, but because of the characters found inside those agency corridors, Georgetown brownstones and Chevy Chase manors.
Let's start with Osborne Cox, an onerous mid-level analyst at the C.I.A. with a drinking problem who is dismissed by the bureaucrats he loathes so much, even though technically he is one of them. He starts writing his memoirs, which find their way into the gym bag of a paralegal who works for the divorce lawyer his wife has just hired. She burned a CD of financial records and accidentally copied some classified information as well.Enter Chad and Linda, dumb and desperate personal trainers who hatch an ill-conceived blackmail scheme after finding the lost disc. They unwittingly start the ball rolling on a convoluted and wickedly amusing serious of events that can best be summed up in Osborne's favorite phrase, "What the fuck?"
Washington is a city built on the principle of accomplishing as little as possible for the most money. That zeitgeist permeates the whole greater DC area, so naturally Brad and Linda's plan is bound to meet with some resistance, and not just from the cantankerous fellow they're trying to blackmail. Throw in a federal marshal (a serial fornicator who happens to be sleeping with Mrs. Cox and Linda), the Russians and a kindly lost soul who pines for Linda's affection, and it's a recipe for a stew of comic disaster.
Standard Coen brothers procedure in their dark comedies is to reward idiocy with death, usually in a gruesome manner. Both Washington and Burn After Reading are full of morons—it's a wonder more of them don't meet with that prescribed fate in the film. So take what you will from it in terms of political commentary on the giant morass our nation's capital and the federal government therein have become.
If that's the case, the Coens don't take their own theme seriously enough to climb the heights of satirical social comedy set by their masterpiece, Fargo; and it certainly never achieves the off-the-rails lunacy of The Big Lebowski. Still, Burn After Reading is a mostly funny, almost thought provoking picture—not great, but not bad considering it's been seven years since the Coens have produced any wholly original material (the brilliant The Man Who Wasn't There). Think of this film as just getting their feet wet again.