Burn After Reading Gives Brad Pitt His Best Comedic Role Ever, Stream Before It’s Gone

Joel and Ethan Coen have established a firm reputation since the 1980s as writers, directors, and producers of movies that tell what should be serious stories with a fixation on the idiocy, ridiculousness, and humor to be found as the characters stumble and bumble their way through schemes. Burn After Reading is one such film, and among the many movies, it is perhaps the most effective and the most ridiculous (they got Brad Pitt to play a total loon). 

Think of movies like Raising Arizona, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Fargo, and The Big Lebowski. These Coen Brothers movies have a heaviness to them that balances the bumbling idiocy of the characters attempting to get away with their quacky schemes. Burn After Reading has very little of this heaviness because the schemes are imagined and fabricated, and, at least in the beginning, Brad Pitt plays against type as the character at the center of it all. 

The story begins with Osborne Cox, played by the brilliant John Malkovich, leaving his job as an analyst at the CIA, disillusioned and disenchanted with his boring life. Instead, he decides he’s going to write his memoirs.

Meanwhile, his wife, Katie (Tilda Swinton), is secretly planning to divorce Osborne after this last straw. She transfers his financial files to her lawyer without realizing his memoir is included. At this point, Burn After Reading takes off, with Brad Pitt as a hapless, hopeless gym employee. 

Katie’s lawyer’s assistant accidentally leaves the files on a CD-R at her gym, Hardbodies, where Pitt’s character, Chad (because of course it’s Chad), and his coworker Linda (played by Frances McDormand) find the CD and think they’ve got something that could be marked “burn after reading.” After all, it’s a CIA document that seems pretty classified.

The two gym dummies decide first to blackmail Osborne, who knows the files are worthless, and instead ends up yelling at Chad and Linda over the phone. Meanwhile, Katie is having an affair with Harry, a paranoid crackpot U.S. Marshall played by George Clooney.

As events unfold, Harry descends into madness while simultaneously starting an affair with Linda. And then, yes, Burn After Reading gets even crazier, complete with a car dance scene involving Brad Pitt. 

REVIEW SCORE

To say anything else would be to give away the twists and turns involving surprise deaths that let us know Burn After Reading could drop anyone at any time, including, you guessed it, our silly Brad Pitt. It is easily the actor’s goofiest role, and he’s had some looney ones. In an interview, he said he didn’t even know how to read the script at first. Reportedly, the Coen brothers said, “You’ll be fine.” 

And he was, the entire cast was. It is so much fun to watch such great, serious, important actors play against type in the most fun ways, and Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic seem to agree. Since the film was released in 2008, it has received mostly positive reviews.

I’d venture to say those who don’t enjoy this movie don’t have a sense of humor suited to Coen brothers films. Burn After Reading deserves to be seen for Brad Pitt’s character alone, and yet there’s so very much more to enjoy. Stream it on Amazon Prime before it’s gone.