Burn After Reading
Play it, Tuli!
This is quite complex, for such idiot characters, all of them. Absolute morons, every single one of them.
You can split them into three buckets: the spooks, the brownstones, and the white trash.
The spooks are the most passive of the lot. They just lurk in the background, doing nothing. Only our big boy Osborne Cox does anything (YES, I’M OSBORNE COX). An ageing failson from a pauper pseudo-aristo family, perma-drunk CIA middle manager, and overall bore. After being called a drunk by a Mormon, he blows a gasket and quits, whining about political crucifixions and complaining about the CIA not valuing independent thought. chef’s kiss.
He overlaps with the brownstones, since his wife is a “cold stuck-up bitch”. She’s got the real dough, being a paediatrician in DC, and lives in Nirvana. She is so empty inside, she is almost soulless. Their marriage is a complete sham, and she’s fucking Harry on the side, but this seems to unfaze her, like she’s going through the motions. She looks permanently in the verge of dying of boredom, no matter what is happening. Her most emotional moment is when Osborne forgets about the cheeses.
Harry is half of the other brownstone couple. His outgoing personality grates on the ears, a guy that leaves absolutely no dead air on a conversation, always be yapping. He just steamrolls over every single one of his dialogues, those are almost monologues, the experimental jazz of extroverts. Even though his wife is a somewhat well regarded children’s author, he still introduces her at parties, talks over her, just sucking all the oxygen in the air, no matter what.
Of all the brownstone people, only Cox doesn’t have an affair on the side, he lives on booze, resentment and daddy issues.
Finally, there is the white trash trio: Linda, Chad, and poor Ted.
Ted is their “boss” at Hardbodies, but he can’t even pay salaries in advance, there’s a payroll company, you know? Being a general wet blanket is not what he expected to do with his life, he was once a Orthodox priest for 14 years. It’s a long story, left untold. He’s got the hots for Linda but absolutely cannot say it, ever. Everyone around him is also totally oblivious.
On the other end of the spectrum, Chad is just a bundle of joy, he also lives in Nirvana. Nothing affects him, his happiness is endless. He’s always game for everything, knows a guy who knows a guy, ya know, positive thinking!
Finally, Linda, the middle aged gym administrative. Feeding her head with self-help, she lives in permanent anguish since she’s not so young anymore, with a regular body, she would be laughed out of Hollywood. How will she meet the man of her dreams that way? She won’t settle for losers like Ted, or most of the married guys she finds on online dating sites.
The main plot happens by accident, and many plot points come about because every brownstone is being surveilled by divorce lawyers constantly. They can barely find parking spaces on the street.
After Osborne quits, he plans to go into consulting, setting up the Cox Group in the basement, and prepares an explosive memoir where he blows the whistle on boring Balkans minutia, bureaucratic buffoonery, baseless bitching. His wife laughs at him with contempt, but she is right, why would anyone care about anything he has to say?
With Ozzie’s divorce, the wife takes advantage of his Princeton reunion to pilfer his finances, for the lawyers to go over. Together, his unfinished memoir is included in the mix. One of the lawyer employees leaves the CD on a Hardbodies locker room, and so the white trash has it now.
That looks like hot shit, the raw intelligence. Names, and numbers, and more arrayed numbers. They know this is some senior spook that fucked up big time. Chad knows a guy, so he sniffs around, and finds the name and number from the senior spook. They call him in the middle of the night, strongly implying they deserve a donation for “securing his shit”, but he blows a gasket and screams into the phone. Linda is the one who saw the spy films and hangs up on him, letting him cook. He will call back, she needs that cosmetic surgery money.
He does call back, and sets up a meeting to buy the CD for 50 thousand dollars. They meet in a park, but Osborne blows a gasket, saying they would be criminals if the blackmail material they have was published. Linda thinks on her feet, rams his car, then drives directly to the Russian Embassy and meets the “cultural attaché”. The Russians will accept this non-ideological contribution, they don’t have time to vet it all before they need to return to the gym.
After finding Osborne’s home address, Chad breaks in trying to find more intel, but by this time, Ozzie was already served divorce papers and is living on his sailboat. Harry was casually in her mistress’s house taking a bath, and since everyone is stupid, shoots Chad in the face. Searching his body, he finds nothing, no laundry marks, no ID. He knows he killed a spook surveilling him, so dumps the body on the sea.
Linda is desperate now, the Russians say they don’t care about this intel (it’s drivel, dribble), but Ted won’t break in again, unless she says she hates him. Ted goes there, sadly, tries to salvage more documents, but Osborne was also in the house, on a booze and jewellery run, and hears noises. After getting a gun, but more importantly fixing himself a drink, he confronts Ted, calls him a moron and shoots him, but Teddy fights back with a stapler and they both run into the street, where Ozzie hacks Ted to death with an ax he brought to break into his own house. The CIA minder shoots him offscreen.
Harry is very sombre after killing the spook, quarrels with Ozzie’s wife and just wants his wife back. They talk about love on the phone, but Harry chases a spook on the street, which turns out to be the Tuchman Marsh lawyer preparing his divorce. Distraught, he finds the only good time he had lately, some online date, Linda! They had a couple dates now, he even showed her the rocking dildo chair he built on the basement. They go out again, but she’s also distraught with all the Chad business. When she mentions Osborne’s address and he notices the guy he killed was this Chad, he snaps, sees spooks everywhere, and flees to Venezuela.
Linda is the only one alive by the end, and the real spooks just pay off her surgeries to shut her up. The real winner of the whole thing.
I just love the meta-commentary:
Joel also said that Burn After Reading was not meant to be a comment or satire on Washington.
Suuure, not a comment of the Beltway at all. At all!
Veteran actor Richard Jenkins said the Coen brothers asked him if he could lose weight for his role as the gym manager, to which Jenkins jokingly replied, “I’m a 60-year-old man, not Brad Pitt. My body isn’t going to change.”
He wasn’t representing Hardbodies either.
With all due respect, what the fuck? What the fuck is this? What the fuuuck… I know who you are, fucker. Fucking lunatics. Fucking morons.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.