Burn After Reading is a 2008 black comedy film written, produced, edited and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen.
[5] It follows a recently jobless CIA analyst, Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), whose misplaced memoirs are found by a pair of dimwitted gym employees (Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt).
[8] Faced with a demotion due to a drinking problem, Osborne Cox angrily quits his job as a CIA analyst and decides to write a memoir.
At the instruction of her lawyer, Katie delivers a copy of her husband's digital financial records and other personal files, unknowingly including a rough draft of Osborne's memoir.
The lawyer's assistant copies the files onto a CD-R, which she accidentally leaves on the locker room floor of Hardbodies, a local gym.
The disc falls into the hands of personal trainer Chad Feldheimer and his coworker Linda Litzke, who mistakenly believe it contains sensitive government information.
Upon their failure to secure money from Osborne, Chad and Linda try to sell the disc to the Russian embassy, meeting with an official who is later revealed to be a spy for the CIA.
Harry searches the body for clues, but finds an empty wallet and missing suit tags, a precaution Chad took at the behest of Linda's advice.
After they inform her the contents of the CD she has given them are worthless, she convinces the manager of Hardbodies, Ted (who has unrequited feelings for Linda), to help her by sneaking into the Cox household to gather more files.
Emmanuel Lubezki, four-time Academy Award-nominated cinematographer of Sleepy Hollow and Children of Men, took over for Deakins,[10] who had already committed to shooting Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road.
"[12] Burwell wrote that a percussive score would help "avoid any emotional comment" and "would lend an air of sobriety, gravity, and bombast to the general silliness".
[14] Ethan Coen compared Burn After Reading to the Allen Drury political novel Advise and Consent and called it "our version of a Tony Scott/Jason Bourne kind of movie, without the explosions.
[12] The Coens created characters with actors George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand, John Malkovich and Richard Jenkins in mind for the parts, and the script derived from the brothers' desire to include them in a "fun story.
[20] The Coen brothers script had nothing to do with the Turner book; nevertheless, the rumor was not clarified until a Los Angeles Times article more than one year later.
"[21] During a fall movie preview, Entertainment Weekly wrote that Malkovich "easily racks up the most laughs"[25] among the cast as the foul-mouthed and short-tempered ex-CIA man.
[12] In its opening weekend, the film grossed $19.1 million from 2,651 theaters in the United States and Canada, ranking number one at the box office.
The website's critical consensus states, "With Burn After Reading, the Coen Brothers have crafted another clever comedy/thriller with an outlandish plot and memorable characters.
"[31] Honeycutt also said "it takes awhile to adjust to the rhythms and subversive humor of Burn because this is really an anti-spy thriller in which nothing is at stake, no one acts with intelligence and everything ends badly.
"[31] Todd McCarthy of Variety wrote a strongly negative review, saying that the film "tries to mate sex farce with a satire of a paranoid political thriller, with arch and ungainly results.
"[32] McCarthy said the talented cast was forced to act like cartoon characters, described Carter Burwell's score as "uncustomarily overbearing"[32] and said the dialogue is "dialed up to an almost grotesquely exaggerated extent, making for a film that feels misjudged from the opening scene and thereafter only occasionally hits the right note."
"[33] David Denby of The New Yorker said that the film had several funny scenes, but that they "are stifled by a farce plot so bleak and unfunny that it freezes your responses after about forty-five minutes.
Even black comedy requires that the filmmakers love someone, and the mock cruelties in Burn After Reading come off as a case of terminal misanthropy.
"[34] Leah Rozen of People said that the characters' "unrelenting dumbness and dim-witted behavior is at first amusing and enjoyable but eventually grows wearing.
The alliance of political incompetence (the CIA), the cult of appearance (the gym club) and vulgar stupidity (everyone) is the target of a settling of scores" where the comedy "sprouts from a well of bitterness.
More than just a satire on espionage, the movie is scathing critique of modern America as a superficial, post-political society where cheating of all sorts comes all too easily....The most disturbing thing about Burn After Reading, though, is how it resembles every day in Trump's Washington, where the line between blundering idiocy and malevolent conspiracy is increasingly blurred.