• The sense of genre inversion isn’t limited to the look and feel of the film. Most of the characters in the film also mistakenly believe themselves to be caught up in the kind of conspiracy thriller that flourished in the 1970s (Three Days of the Condor, The Parallax View, Marathon Man, etc.). It never occurs to Harry that the car following him might be driven by a private eye hired by his wife’s attorneys (shades of The Big Lebowski), rather than some government spook. Linda and Chad imagine themselves to be moles-in-training solemnly delivering the worthless CD they found on the gym’s locker room floor to the “cultural attaché” at the Russian embassy (a return performance by Miller’s Crossing’s Olek Krupa). And Cox believes that the buffoons he encounters are somehow involved in the same “political” conspiracy that brought his CIA career to an end. All of these misconceptions interlock with lethal precision—Blood Simple reimagined as a dark joke. Moreover, it can’t be a coincidence that the rampant, if comical, paranoia of the film coincided with escalating real-world concerns about government surveillance—especially given that the movie opens and closes with a zoom in from, and then back out to, the presumed view from a spy satellite.
• Angst regarding Big Brother aside, there is a more fundamental theme of mid-life crisis and ennui running throughout the film. (It could have been titled No Country for Middle-Aged Men and Women.) The gym, the bed-hopping, the retreat into booze—in one way or another, almost every character is turning away from adulthood, regressing or “reinventing” themselves. And they’re doing so at least in part, I’d venture, thanks to the most notable absence in the movie: kids. Not a single one of these 40- and 50-something Washingtonians appears to have any. (The closest we come to parenthood is a scene of visceral hostility between Swinton’s character, a pediatrician, and her young patient.) Trust me when I say that, in real-life, most of these folks would be far too busy with soccer practices and chorus rehearsals and birthday parties to devote half so much energy to adultery or extortion or the construction of elaborate sex machines. But in Burn After Reading, the absence of such domestic obligations is palpable, and the characters are all searching for some new innovation—a makeover, a memoir, a new conquest—to give purpose to their lives.
• Which brings me to perhaps my favorite element of the film: the CIA higher-ups played by David Rasche (as Cox’s former boss, Palmer Smith) and the great J.K. Simmons (who, if there is any justice, received this role as consolation for his appearance in The Ladykillers). Though the two are not explicitly presented as narrators, they ultimately perform a function not unlike that of Tommy Lee Jones in No Country for Old Men or Sam Elliott in The Big Lebowski. They frame the opening and closing of the movie, with one appearance in between, and as figures of perceived authority they offer the moral context within which to interpret the intervening events. The joke, of course, is that the context they supply is completely, abominably amoral. In place of Jones’s sorrow at the tragedies that have come to pass, we instead have a heartless bureaucratic handwashing. Midway through the film Simmons tells Rasche to “Report back to me, I dunno … when it makes sense.” But nothing makes sense until the final scene—my favorite, I confess—when most of the movie’s characters are dead, comatose, or en route to Venezuela. (The cut from Malkovich's’s horrifying hatchet-wielding on the streets of Georgetown to Simmons’s “Wait, wait a minute” interruption is remarkably wicked, and wickedly funny.) “What did we learn, Palmer?” Simmons asks. “I don’t know, sir.” “I don’t fucking know either. I guess we learned not to do it again … But I’m fucked if I know what we did.” I certainly understand why the bleak, black humor of Burn After Reading is not everyone’s cup of tea. But I hope I’ve manged to convey a sense of why, somewhat to my own surprise, it’s mine.
