Burn After Reading

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Movie Details

• Genre: Comedy, Drama
• Release Date: 2008-09-12 Nationwide
• Running Time: 97 min.
• Director: Ethan Coen
• Cast: George Clooney, John Malkovich, Frances McDormand, Brad Pitt, Tilda Swinton, Richard Jenkins, Lenny Venito
• Producer: Tim Bevan, Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, Eric Fellner
• Writer: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
• Distributor: Focus Features
• Official Site: Burn After Reading Official Site

Taking aim at the CIA as well as Washington-paranoia flicks in general, Joel and Ethan Coen's latest is as svelte as it is snarky. For openers, the camera descends from an Olympian altitude to the corridors of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where intelligence reader Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) is being taken off the Balkan desk. Then it's back home to Georgetown, where Osborne barely has time to hit the vodka before his nightmare wife Katie (Tilda Swinton) embroils him in preparations for the evening's cocktail party—whose guests include her ex–Secret Serviceman lover, Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney). Katie is soon sneaking off for a divorce consultation, while Osborne seeks consolation by dictating a tell-all CIA memoir. Somehow, some of it winds up on a computer disc that falls into the hands of Linda Litzke and Chad Feldheimer (Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt), two employees at the Hard Bodies gym, leading them to embark upon a comically bungled—but inevitably and increasingly violent—shakedown. Say this for the Coen aesthetic: There's nothing these boys can't hold up to ridicule. Murder—the more cold-blooded, the better—is usually a laugh line; anti-Semitic stereotypes were played for yocks in Barton Fink; lynching was a gag in O Brother, Where Art Thou? It's the brothers' heartfelt nihilism that made No Country for Old Men so convincing: Masters of the carefully crafted cheap shot, the Coens have built a career on flippancy.