OPTIONAL 'READING'

Coen Comedy Goes Gently

Joel and Ethan Coen give us “Burn After Reading,” a salute to stupidity in a post-modern, post-stupid world. The film, almost as disjointed as the premise, joins meandering chaos with bitter cultural observations and a few genuinely sad glances to the side. Not funny so much as apropos, “Burn” is ignorable in guise and exorable in geist. Like a lost CD of Agency memoirs, you can take it or leave it.

The crux of my sentiment is already covered well in Dustin's earlier review, so this will be short. Here I can just highlight a few interesting points. There exists a plethora of various characters. It is hard to declaim one as a central character, but rather they all seem to be playing various levels of support. Quite what or who they are supporting is hard to say. Perhaps the main character is stupidity itself. The logical foil for stupidity is obviously intelligence, but none of that is on display here. So each scene is just an additional crescendo of ineptitude. This is intriguing, but cannot carry the film. The stand-out bastion of stupidity is Pitt's character, who is really kind of sympathetic for anyone who knows a similar fellow in real life. He carries his scenes by a wide margin.

The rest of “Burn” may leave you with a drinking problem yourself. Bodies start accumulating. The subtext, as best as I can elucidate, is that everyone dies, and dumber people die faster.

My roommate pointed out that this is an American Irish comedy. It is American because it features lots of people, who sleep with other people, who are not their respective spouses. It is Irish because everyone dies. Those are easy to show. It is harder to show that it is a comedy.