Burn After Reading

Joel and Ethan Coen wrote Burn After Reading while adapting No Country for Old Men, and started from actors rather than plot: the Los Angeles Times reported the parts were written for George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand, John Malkovich and Richard Jenkins, with Ethan Coen saying the aim was to throw them together in a fun story. Joel Coen describes middle aged people in professional, personal and sexual crises; it wears a spy film’s clothes, with no real secret and nobody grasping what is happening. The music does the dressing up. Carter Burwell’s notes say that, to avoid emotional comment, he made the score mostly percussion so it could seem important without saying why, modelled on Jerry Goldsmith’s largely percussive Seven Days in May. The drums play a conspiracy thriller over a gym trainer and an analyst who quit when demoted for his drinking. With Roger Deakins, the brothers’ usual cinematographer, committed to Revolutionary Road, Emmanuel Lubezki shot it. It opened the Venice Film Festival out of competition on 27 August 2008. A good fit if you can laugh when Pitt’s dim trainer is shot in a closet without warning and two CIA officials close the file understanding none of it. Not for anyone needing the disc to matter or the threads to resolve.