Espionage For Dummies

[September 10th, 2008]

The rogue agents arrive at the Russian Embassy with a disk of classified intelligence. They demand money. The Russian consul is skeptical. “You are not ideological?” he asks. The rogue agents do not know what that word means. “I don’t think so,” one of them ventures. The other one knows her priorities: “I have a date,” she says.

Burn After Reading, the subversive new comedy from Joel and Ethan Coen, prowls around the corridors of CIA headquarters at Langley, but it isn’t ideological either, unless you consider a despairing cackle an ideology. Arriving on the heels of the Coen brothers’ big Oscar win, their latest movie isn’t as memorable as No Country for Old Men, but it might be a purer distillation of their mordant worldview, since it isn’t weighed down by Cormac McCarthy’s portentous cowboy talk. Instead, the brothers go to Washington and watch, one eyebrow arched, as a gaggle of mediocre strivers destroys itself with petty grudges and appetites.

Trailers for Burn After Reading make it look dangerously close in tone to the Coens’ misfires from earlier this decade, the broad farces Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers. But from the opening shot, it turns out to be something much better, if harder to sell: a satire of spy movies that never acknowledges it’s a satire. (Ben Stiller and his Tropic Thunder dollars could watch it and learn a trick or two.) It’s a pitch-perfect replica of somber inside-the-Beltway thrillers like Syriana and The Good Shepherd—all the way down to the ominous piano plinking on the soundtrack—except its players are morons, and nothing of consequence is at stake.

The Coens have always populated their universe with hapless connivers, but none of them have been so certain of their own importance as the fools here. John Malkovich is mid-level CIA analyst Osborne Cox, who, having been fired for a drinking problem, resolves to write a memoir. (He pronounces it, with great authority, “mem-wah.”) His disdainful wife (Tilda Swinton), who is cheating on Osborne with a cocksure federal marshal (George Clooney), prepares to raid his bank accounts by copying the files on his hard drive, which is how the memoir ends up on the floor of the ladies’ locker room at Hardbodies, a suburban gym. This is seen as a tremendous windfall by the staff of Hardbodies, especially Frances McDormand’s Linda Litzke and Brad Pitt’s Chad Feldheimer. (The outlandish names are never emphasized, but they are a source of constant delight.)

Pitt contributes some impeccable comedy to Burn After Reading: He gets a lot of mileage out of repeating the name “Osborne Cox” with increasing solemnity, and he does great things with his face until the moment when something regrettable happens to it. But it’s McDormand, Joel Coen’s wife and the brothers’ longtime muse, who provides the frozen heart of the movie. Her Linda gets embroiled in espionage only because she wants four separate plastic surgeries. (These are for the ostensible goal of meeting “a guy with a sense of humor,” which actually means that she wants to meet a guy who will laugh at the crappy Dermot Mulroney movies she laughs at. She meets Clooney.) “I’m reinventing myself,” she constantly asserts, and when her lovesick boss (Richard Jenkins, putting a droll spin on his reliable decency) assures her that she’s already good-looking—“It’s not one of those phony-baloney Hollywood bodies”—she never even blinks. “I know,” she says. “I would be laughed out of Hollywood.”

Burn After Reading gets a lot of laughs itself, and takes great pains to emphasize its own lightweight status, but the jokes are based on the Coens’ uncomfortable insight that there’s something rotten and pathetic about the current state of the American Dream—that it has curdled into unthinking entitlement. These characters, with their self-improvement mantras and casual betrayals, suggest that we have become a nation whose chief ideology is that we deserve everything we want. And so the Coens give us what we deserve.