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Burn After Reading, Dir: Joel and Ethan Coen
Starring George Clooney, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich
One of the major hits of last year’s Toronto Film Festival was the Coen Brothers’ Oscar winning masterpiece No Country For Old Men. For that reason, the brothers’ triumphant return to this year’s fest is highly anticipated…but sadly disappointing. This is quite odd given that screenwriting has always been the siblings’ major strength. Unfortunately, this movie feels like a collection of scenes and characters that amused the

This CIA blackmailing farce has a variety of hysterical sequences, but the script is surprisingly inconsistent and unfocused.

brothers awkwardly combined into a confusing narrative that some characters even mock onscreen for being convoluted and insubstantial in the final scene. All that said, Burn After Reading is not a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination. The Coens are just too subversively funny and the all star cast too talented for that to happen. However when you reach the stature of Joel and Ethan Coen your work gets judged by different standards. If anyone else made this movie it would probably be discussed as a fresh and amusing farce. But, in the hands of such brilliant filmmakers Burn After Reading can only be described as a mildly amusing trifle between substantial efforts. They are capable of much more and will undoubtedly deliver next time.-PB