It’s weird, but I don’t even think of Brad Pitt as an actor anymore.
I think of him as a photograph—a still image in a tabloid looking
serene and carrying around 15 babies. But Pitt does, in fact, act in
Burn After Reading, the Coen brothers’ follow-up to last year’s
stunning cinematic tension headache No Country for Old Men. And
he’s fucking funny. As Chad Feldheimer, clueless personal trainer at a
Washington, D.C., gym called Hardbodies, he comes into possession of a
CD containing highly classified CIA intelligence. Along with Hardbodies
coworker Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand at her chirpy best),
Feldheimer fumbles through a blackmail attempt on ex-CIA analyst
Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich): “I thought you might be worried… about
the security… of your shit.”

Burn After Reading is an astute, brutal comedy about
infidelity, modern idiocy, paranoia, and the CIA. Set to thundering
action-movie drums, the characters brew immense tempests over the most
mundane nonsense. The acting is uniformly fantastic—George
Clooney, Tilda Swinton, Richard Jenkins—but no character is
particularly likable, and all border on the cartoonish. Burn After
Reading is sillier and less thematically cohesive than Fargo or Raising Arizona, but it takes a turn exactly one hour in that
reminds you just how fucked-up and brilliant the Coens can be. Brad
Pitt is involved.recommended

Lindy West was born an unremarkable female baby in Seattle, Washington. The former Stranger writer covered movies, movie stars, exclamation points, lady stuff, large frightening fish, and much, much more....

6 replies on “On Screen”

  3. saw a sneak last night, and it really is vintage coen brothers – pretty taughlty pulled together, quirky ridiculous and just the right amount of twisted!

  4. I don’t know if this will work for anyone else but…I laughed more at Burn After Reading than I did at Tropic Thunder. Thank you Tilda Swinton.

  5. I stopped paying attention to the movie. Until Brad got shot in the head (uhh..spoiler? also the best part). That definately got me watching again. I even started it over to see why he was in that closet to begin with. It was actually a pretty good movie.

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