Burn After Reading

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More often than not the Coens have followed a downbeat outing with a light-hearted one: Raising Arizona followed Blood Simple; The Hudsucker Proxy followed Barton Fink (which was a lighter again than Miller's Crossing); The Big Lebowski followed Fargo; Intolerable Cruelty followed The Man Who Wasn't There; and now Burn After Reading follows No Country For Old Men. The peculiar plot sees bitchy ice queen Tilda Swinton cheating on her CIA analyst husband John Malkovich with twitchy George Clooney. Even though George is married and is having an affair, he still has time to prowl the Internet for dates and it's here he meets the insecure Frances McDormand. Frances works at a gym with dim-witted juicer Brad Pitt and, in need of some cash to pay for plastic surgery, agrees to help him scam money from John Malkovich when Brad finds a disc containing top-secret info. Burn After Reading is enjoyable and often funny - but it's never hilarious and falls short of the high standards the Coens have set for themselves. Rumoured to be written while No Country was shooting just to cheer themselves up, there's a rushed feeling to the proceedings and it looks like the brothers had more fun writing it than the audience will have watching it. Malkovich and Pitt, looking like they're enjoying the characters they're playing, stand head-and-shoulders above the rest of the cast - Clooney is miscast, Swinton has little to do and McDormand, although dependable as always, seems to mirror the film itself and doesn't get out of second gear. Still though, the Coens at half-mast is still a lot better than most and I'd always watch anything the brothers did more than once.