With 'Burn After Reading', the Coen brothers went to Washington

15 years ago, the Coens made a successful dark comedy about the periphery of DC absurdity.

The genius of Burn After Reading, Joel and Ethan Coen's 2008 stab at a dark comedy about Washington, D.C., is that its plot keeps stepping right up to the line of specificity, when it comes to politics and diplomacy, before, at the last moment, choosing absurdity and silliness instead. 

This isn't a movie about Democrats, Republicans, policy, or any of sorts of things people argue about in real-life Washington. Aside from the brief involvement of the Russians, nothing that happens has much geopolitical significance. It's not really a Parallax View-style conspiracy thriller, mostly because no one in it is smart or put-together enough to actually execute a conspiracy. 

The characters — nearly all of them played by A-list actors — are all bumblers to some degree, which is on its own something of an indictment of the way our nation's capital is. People keep thinking, mistakenly, that other characters are spies when really they're just pursuing the plot's own lower-stakes agendas.

The film begins with Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich), a man who's clearly part of the WASP aristocracy that long ruled the CIA. He has all the trappings of that demographic— all sailing, Princeton reunions, effusive praise for George Kennan, and an elderly dad who was in the State Department. And his downfall is indicative of that cohort's long decline in influence. 

Cox is fired in the first scene, due to his "drinking problem." Over the objections of the wife who hates him (Tilda Swinton), he decides to write a "memoir," which later falls into the wrong hands. 

Katie, the wife, is having an affair with Harry (George Clooney), a paranoid, womanizing U.S. Marshal who, it's hinted throughout, is building something in his basement that appears nefarious. Is it a bomb? Some other type of weapon? Once we finally see what it is, it's none of those things, but rather the most sublime sight gag in the Coens' whole filmography (for probably obvious reasons, YouTube won’t let me embed it.)

Or take gym employees Chad and Linda (Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand), who stumble into Oz's writings and mistakenly believe them to be highly classified documents that they can sell to fund Linda's plans for extensive plastic surgery. We see them meeting with the Russian embassy, which in most movies would be an act of high treason, but in this case? It's "drivel." (The involvement of the Russians made a lot of people in the Robert Mueller era think Burn After Reading prefigured the Trump years, but that’s quite far from a one-to-one comparison.)

And Richard Jenkins, as the boss of the gym and boss of Pitt and McDormand, appears to take the legitimacy of his institution more seriously than the CIA or any of the government agencies do. 

The performances in Burn After Reading are all first-rate. Clooney has always been a completely different actor in Coen movies than for anyone else, doing a lot more mugging and eye-bugging than he typically does, and he's particularly outstanding here.

 And Pitt's peppy performance as the dimwitted gym employee is one of the great one-shot turns in a Coen movie by actors who never worked with them again, up there with Nicolas Cage in Raising Arizona and Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men. 

In the last scene, the absurdity goes from subtext to text, as the CIA bigwigs (J.K. Simmons and David Rasche) throw up their hands and declare that there's nothing to really learn from the events of the movie we just watched, and they're happy to pay whatever they have to to make it all go away: 

Burn After Reading arrived in September of 2008, the same month as the fall of Lehman Brothers, and in the thick of that year's presidential election, so it was a perfect time for a cynical film about distrust of American institutions. 

It also arrived in one of the Coens' strongest stretches, a year after their Oscar-winning No Country For Old Men; A Serious Man would follow in 2009, and True Grit the year after that. 

Since everyone loves to rank the Coens' filmography, I put Burn After Reading about in the middle. It's not quite as poignant as the best of their work, nor is it their best comedy (The Big Lebowski and Raising Arizona were both much funnier.) But I'm glad we got the Coens’ take on Washington, which is about exactly what you'd expect from them. 

Burn After Reading is streaming on Max.