Before 2008, I did not buy into the Coen brothers oeuvre. I did not dig their stuff, at least not their dramas. I found their comedies fun, but couldn’t figure out the hoopla. No Country for Old Men didn’t even do it for me the first time. Then I saw Burn After Reading, and for some reason, a lightbulb went off.
The bulk of the movie is mostly forgettable to me—the details seem unimportant, as I remember finding the dialogue really fun and the characters pleasantly absurd. Most memorable is the final scene, which provides a weird justification for everything that preceded it. For me, it was a justification for every previous Coen brother movie by extension. It’s a similar kind of ostensibly nihilistic theory of art you’d find in the movie Rubber, where aesthetic decisions are made not for moral or thematic reasons, but really for no reason at all. It’s just a story.
Burn After Reading follows roads that are similar to previous Coen stories, with a bunch of fools going to ridiculous lengths all for a little money, in the words of Marge Gunderson. What finally became clear to me in this one is that there need not be a greater point to this, because it applies to so much of actual human experience. The Coens view moral dilemmas as essentially a big clusterf**k, and I’ve come to dig that.
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