burn after reading

Until about half way through Burn After Reading I wasn't at all sure if I liked it.

The main reason for this was that all the characters were either unlikeable or stupid or, mainly, both. Being a Coen Borthers film I was also expecting it to be darkly comic but it was also quite light on jokes.

However, a bit like the title (ooh, clever), it's a bit of a slow burner. There's a lot of build up and then about half way through things reach a kind of tipping point and just about everything flips into the ridiculous, with truly hilarious results.

Stupid people are quite a common theme in Coen Brothers films, although usually there's at least one character who's sensible or clever. Here the only people who come close to that are the CIA men, although they're not really major characters and even they come across as being a litte dumb.

What I think makes burn really work is the central stupidity - the mistaking of CD containing a fired CIA analyst's financial info and a copy of their memoires. This is mistaken for somethign valuable/secret by the two main chracters. The particularly clever bit is that a lot of the chracters fall into what you might call architypal roles are expected actions, despite this data not actually being of any interst.

So, for example, they try to sell the information to the Russains. This is the very much post cold war Russains. But it's like everybody forgets that the cold war is over and that they're not actually in a spy film. Liek they're acting on autopilot.

I'm finding it a bit difficult to explain and that's why it needs such a big build-up. Without that build up the farcical stuff would just seem bizarre. The punchlines need that much preamble in order to work.

You know really there's not a lot more I can say - I really enjoyed the film, but it took a while to really become funny.

My favourite characters were probably the CIA men. The scenes between Palmer and his boss had me in stitches. The palpable embarressment and bafflment of Palmer was rather delicious. The whole "We don't know why" "But we're the CIA" feel of it was just perfect.