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Burn After Reading (2008)

Starring Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand, John Malkovich, and George Clooney.  Cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki.  Edited by Roderick Jaynes.  Produced Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, Tim Bevan, and Eric Fellner. Written and Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen.

In lieu of being terminated for alcohol abuse, agent Osborne Cox elects to resign from the C.I.A., which upsets his wife tremendously.  Meanwhile, her lover, Harry Pfarrer, is deciding whether or not to leave his wife while he searches for her potential replacement online. This is how he meets Linda Litzke, who is a gym instructor in need of money to finance her cosmetic surgery overhaul. 

A possible financially lucrative opportunity presents itself when her colleague, Chad Feldheimer, come across Cox’s memoirs, which he believes contains sensitive national security secrets, in their gym’s locker room.  When Cox proves to be a harder nut to crack than they anticipated, Chad and Linda plan to sell the disc to the Russians.  But the Russians are more confused than interested which and they are rejected there as well. What follows is a nearly unexplainable chain of chaotic events.

Burn After Reading was written by the Coen brothers in tandem with their award winning project, No Country for Old Men.  As Joel Coen describes it, it’s “sort of about the Central Intelligence Agency and physical fitness… and what happens when those two worlds collide”.  The inspiration for the film (their first original screenplay since The Man Who Wasn’t There in 2001) came about when the Coens assembled a group of unconventional characters they had imagined for actors they wanted to work with, or had worked with, before.  The reason it ended up being a sort of semi-political thriller was because the Coens, always ones to value originality, had never made a spy movie before. Ethan Coen refers to it as their “Tony Scott/Bourne Identity kind of movie… without the explosions.”

Burn After Reading has been compared to previous Coen masterpieces like Fargo and Raising Arizona in its bizarre story, eccentric characters, and cartoon-like violence.  Fueled by an exceptional inventory of A-list actors, and the Coen’s recent success with No Country for Old Men, Burn After Reading faired well at the box office, earning well over a hundred million worldwide. It also, despite its generally disregarded genre, seemed to satiate most of the critics. It was honored by opening the 2008 Venice Film Festival and ultimately found itself listed on a handful of top ten films of the year.

Budget: $37,000,000

Total US Gross: $59,899,420

Genre: Black Comedy

Runtime: 96 Minutes

US Release Date: 9/12/08

Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1

Awards:

Golden Globes: 
Nominated for best actress in a comedy or musical and best comedy or musical. 

Writers Guild of America: 
Won for Best Original Screenplay

Tagline: Intelligence Is Relative

Quote: “I thought you might be worried… about the security… of your shit.”

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