I know I'm really late to the party on this movie, but I finally got a chance to go see Burn After Reading the other day and since several of my readers have asked me to post my thoughts about it, I hereby oblige. Please read no further without seeing the movie first (something I highly recommend under any circumstances).

After seeing the movie, I checked the reviews at Rotten Tomatoes to see what our critical elite thought of the picture. To my shock, the critics seem divided into two camps: those who hate the movie because it's just silly and doesn't add up to much, and those who love the movie because it's just silly and doesn't add up to much. Color me flabbergasted: Burn After Reading, while certainly being a comedy, is by no means "silly" and adds up to a great deal, too much to take in in one viewing. The critical response is especially surprising coming ten years after The Big Lebowski, another dense, rich, oddball Coen comedy that was dismissed as a trifle in its initial release. Given that Lebowski has, this very summer, undergone a popular rebirth and a wealth of new analysis, this critical lapse strikes me as especially confounding. Critics are, after all, professional writers, surely, surely, one would expect at least a few of them to recognize quality writing when they see it.

The screenplay is, like all Coen scripts, ridiculously dense and multi-layered, and competent analysis will have to wait until the DVD is released. In the meantime, here are my initial impressions:

Like the Coen classics Blood Simple, Fargo and No Country for Old Men, Burn After Reading features multiple protagonists that form their own "teams:" Osbourne is trying to maintain his dignity and place in society after being fired, Linda is trying to maintain her looks in the face of simple aging, and Harry is trying to turn his sexual addiction into a moneymaking scheme. The extremely unlikely collision of these three self-improvement agendas is what drives the plot. Tone-wise, it feels to me like a smushing-together of Fargo and The Big Lebowski, and that's a very good thing.

Metaphorically speaking, it seems that the Coens are examining a kind of mind/body split. Osbourne is from the intelligence community and represents the mind, while Linda is from the body community. Harry, on the other hand, seems to spring from the sex community. So maybe we're talking about a mind/body/sex split. Osbourne, Linda and Harry are all specialists: Osbourne is very good at thinking (or claims so, anyway) while being useless as a physical being, Linda is valuable as a physical being but has no mental faculties whatsoever, and Harry's sexual obsessions speak for themselves.

Thinking about specificity brings me to the idea that all the characters represent different parts of the body. Osbourne represents the mind, Linda the face (her obsession is her appearance), Harry the penis. Chad, Linda's hapless pal, is "nosy," and gets his nose punched for his trouble, before getting shot in the face by Harry with his gun (that is, his penis metaphor). Ted, Linda's unrequited lover, is all heart, the various spooks, detectives and lawyers are all eyes, constantly watching the action. These characters are all good at their specific functions, but utterly incompetent in others. It's as if the Coens are examining the "body politic" of the US, suggesting that, if the population of the US could be looked at as a single body, there's something dangerously unhealthy about us. This lack of health presents itself as a profound confusion: the signature line for the movie is "What the fuck?"

If we look at this health report as a business model, here's what emerges: Linda, the face, wants to steal from Osbourne, the mind, to improve the appearance of the body, in order to invest in a merger with Harry, the penis. The penis is king in this portrait of a body, with all the effort and capital flowing in its direction. That's why I think the plot begins with Osbourne getting fired: the problem, say the Coens, begins when we de-value "intelligence," then de-value it further by investing in appearances, in order to fuel our sexual obsessions. Obviously there is an Iraq metaphor in there: Bush (Bush!) prosecuted his adventure in Iraq by ignoring his intelligence, investing all his capital in the appearance of victory, all to fuel what could easily be the sexual need to bomb the shit out a country. Viewed this way, Burn After Reading becomes a political satire beyond anything Kubrick ever came up with.

Even if we remove a political metaphor, we still see a satire about people with important jobs who are nevertheless enslaved to the demands of their bodies, specifically their addictions. Osbourne would be a great analyst, if he weren't also an alcoholic, Linda would be happy if she weren't addicted to a good appearance, Harry would be a useful marhall if he weren't chasing skirt all day (I forget why he's not a marshall any more -- if anybody caught that, let me know).

If we trace each protagonist's need, we see that they each get what they want, although they each get it in a way they weren't anticipating. Osbourne, after getting fired, wants nothing more than to drink himself into a coma. He does end up in a coma, but he gets there despite his drinking.  Linda does indeed rob the intelligence community in order to improve her body.  Harry, who is obsessed with running (and has been running from responsibility for years), gets his wish -- he runs all the way to Venezuela.  Chad, obsessed with his body, becomes just that -- a body.

The acting throughout is excellent, some of the best in the Coen canon, but let me single out Brad Pitt for his extraordinary performance as enthusiastic dim-bulb Chad. I've been an admirer of Pitt for a decade now, but he just seems to get better and better, a leading man with a huge range and an ever-increasing command of technique.

I've also noticed that the Coens' directorial style, which was ironed flat for No Country, has become increasingly fluid and un-selfconscious, almost mannerless, which I think is a big part of why Burn After Reading is on its way to becoming their biggest hit.