Burn After Reading - "League of Morons"

I’ve finally reached the end of the trilogy of Coen Brothers movies that I like to varying degrees but have very little to comment upon with Burn After Reading. When it first came out, I was quite disappointed with this. Sure, the dildo sex chair thing Clooney makes was funny, and that Brad Pitt death scene is amazing, but overall I just didn’t like the pointlessness of it all. And worse, the characters were classic Coen stupid/evil, but they weren’t fun to be around. 

Years later, I enjoy Burn more, but it’s not one I’m interested in watching again any time soon. The characters are still too unlikeable for me, but the pointlessness of it worked this time around. In fact, the final scene with J. K. Simmons basically laying out how all of this was stupid and meaningless was my favorite moment of the entire movie. 

It took me three Coen comedies, but the ending of Burn After Reading made me realize that my issue with these three films isn’t so much that they are comedies; it’s that plot is not important. In my favorite Coen films, there is comedy, but it happens as part of a story. In Intolerable Cruelty, there are so many marriages and divorces that they become meaningless, and the film is more about wacky humor and Clooney discovering love. With The Ladykillers, there is a heist story, but it’s actually mostly happening in the background as the focus is on the idiosyncratic characters. In that film, they all seem so inept you almost forget that the robbery is actually successful. And then there’s Burn After Reading, which is almost a spoof of spy movies in that no one ever seems to precisely know what’s going on, and the plot is just there to show how stupid everyone is in this “league of morons.” 

But in films like Miller’s Crossing, Raising Arizona, and even The Big Lebowski, the story is given more focus (even if it’s convoluted as it is in Crossing and Lebowski), so the characters, dumb or evil or otherwise, are on a mission in which comedic things sometimes happen. It certainly feels like I’m splitting hairs here, but I believe this is why some of their films hit more with me while others fall a little flat. 

Burn After Reading is my favorite of this trilogy of comedies because it acknowledges that the story is largely pointless. And, after years of watching spy movies, I often stop and think during them that none of it matters, and it seems like each side is going through the motions to justify their existence in the intelligence community. So even if Simmons didn’t learn anything by the end of this movie, I did.

Special Features

There isn’t a ton of stuff with this release. But I did enjoy a moment from one of the behind-the-interviews with the Coens. They talk about their actual first film about Washington, a remake of Advise & Consent they made on Super 8 when Joel was 12-13 and Ethan was 10. Ethan says it's “underrated.” By whom?