Joel and Ethan Coen’s Burn After Reading opens with a man losing his job and ends with a bureaucracy deciding the whole mess was not worth understanding. In between, a CD-R left on a gym locker room floor sets off blackmail, an embassy pitch and a shooting in a closet.
The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival on August 27, 2008, then opened in the United States on September 12 and in the United Kingdom on October 17. It runs 96 minutes. It cost $37 million and grossed more than $163 million. It earned nominations at the Golden Globes and the British Academy Film Awards.
Trailer, via Focus Features.
Osborne Cox Quits the Agency
John Malkovich plays Osborne Cox, a CIA analyst facing a demotion over a drinking problem. He quits in anger and announces he will write a memoir. His wife Katie, played by Tilda Swinton, hears the plan and quietly files for divorce. She is already having an affair with Harry Pfarrer.
Harry is a married U.S. Marshal with paranoid tendencies, played by George Clooney. Katie’s lawyer tells her to hand over her husband’s financial records and other personal files. She does. The stack includes a rough draft of Osborne’s memoir. An assistant copies everything onto a CD-R and leaves it on the floor at Hardbodies, a local gym.
That disc is the engine of Burn After Reading. The Coens wrote, produced, edited and directed the film, and the script keeps the object moving between people who never understand what it is.
Chad and Linda Find the Disc
Brad Pitt plays Chad Feldheimer, a personal trainer. Frances McDormand plays Linda Litzke, his co-worker. They pick up the disc and decide it holds sensitive government information.
Linda wants money for cosmetic surgery, and the two settle on a plan: return the disc to Osborne for a reward. Their blackmail attempt is clumsy and only enrages him. The tagline on the poster reads “Intelligence is relative.”
When Osborne refuses to pay, Chad and Linda take the disc to the Russian embassy. They meet a Russian government official. Word of that meeting reaches the CIA through a mole inside the embassy. Richard Jenkins plays Ted, the gym manager, and J.K. Simmons plays a CIA superior who fields the fallout.
Harry Moves In, Linda Goes Online
Osborne’s behavior grows more erratic. Katie changes the locks on their house and invites Harry to move in. Harry is a serial philanderer. He also meets Linda on a dating site and starts a relationship with her, without telling her he is living in the house of the man she is trying to blackmail.
Every thread in Burn After Reading runs through the same small set of people. The film is a comedy about how much damage can be done by parties who are each certain they are the smartest person in the room.
The cast fills out the edges. Elizabeth Marvel plays Sandy Pfarrer, David Rasche plays a CIA officer and Olek Krupa plays Krapotkin.
The Closet Shooting
Linda has promised the Russians more files. She persuades Chad to break into the Cox house and pull documents off Osborne’s computer. Harry comes home, finds Chad lurking in a closet, is startled, and shoots him in the head.
The death is the film’s pivot. It is also where the Coens’ control is tightest and their cruelty is plainest. The scene is not staged as tragedy. It is staged as an accident, which is worse.
The Running Order
Here is how the film’s major beats play out, in the order the movie delivers them:
| Beat | What happens |
|---|---|
| 1 | Osborne quits the CIA and starts writing a memoir |
| 2 | Katie copies Osborne’s personal files, and the disc lands at Hardbodies |
| 3 | Chad and Linda try to blackmail Osborne for a reward |
| 4 | Chad and Linda take the disc to the Russian embassy |
| 5 | Chad breaks into the Cox house and is shot by Harry |
The film’s structure is less a plot than a sequence of escalating errors, and the order above is the order the audience gets them.
Ranked by how much damage each one does to the people involved, the same beats fall differently:
- Chad breaks into the Cox house and is shot by Harry.
- Chad and Linda take the disc to the Russian embassy, and a mole carries word back to the CIA.
- Chad and Linda try to blackmail Osborne for a reward.
- Katie copies Osborne’s personal files, and the disc lands at Hardbodies.
- Osborne quits the CIA and starts writing a memoir.
What the Cast Does With It
Malkovich plays Osborne as a man whose pride is the only thing he has left and who cannot stop spending it. Clooney plays Harry as a man who suspects everything except himself. McDormand gives Linda a flat, sincere want — the surgery money — that never turns into a joke at her expense.
Pitt is the film’s best piece of casting. Chad is dim, cheerful and completely out of his depth, and Pitt plays him without a wink. Swinton’s Katie is the coldest person on screen.
Where Burn After Reading Lands
The film is funny in stretches and slack in others. The Russian embassy sequence and the CIA debriefs are the sharpest material, because the Coens are best when they are watching institutions absorb stupidity and file it away. The middle section, where Harry juggles Linda and Katie, is the weakest stretch in the picture.
Burn After Reading is not among the Coens’ best work. It is a well-built machine with a thin payload. The disc is a prop that everyone misreads, and the shooting lands as a punchline the film does not quite earn.
That is a good joke. It is not quite a good movie.
The film’s critical score sits at 6.3/10, with a Metacritic mark of 63/100. That number is fair. Burn After Reading is worth watching for Pitt, for Malkovich, and for one of the more honest endings the Coens have written about how power responds to chaos — by shrugging and moving on.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
