8) Burn After Reading
Speaking of No Country for Old Men, we have to talk more about the Coen brothers. For some reason, something in me clicked when I watched the ending of Burn After Reading, not only for ‘getting’ the movie itself, but possibly finally understanding the entire filmography of directors Joel and Ethan Coen. I’ve always responded far more to the Coens’ comedies like The Big Lebowski and Raising Arizona than to their dramas, so I naturally found Burn After Reading a delightful picture from start to finish. The ending, though, summed up the movie so well that it may have also defined their whole cinematic philosophy at the same time.
The CIA director played by J.K. Simmons asks his colleague, “What did we learn, Palmer?” They can’t identify a single lesson. “Not to do it again, I guess,” they conclude. But then they admit that they don’t even know exactly what they did. The film ends on the line “Jesus f**king Christ.” It’s a movie where characters do dumb things for seemingly no reason, and are then screwed by the consequences. They all reap what they sow, except of course when they don’t. For years I was looking for some sort of moral point to Coen movies, and settled on the unsatisfactory explanation on greed that Frances McDormand gives in Fargo.
But this brief dialogue, which mirrors the conclusion of No Country, finally explains: there is no point. Money motivates people, but no one ever learns from the problems it causes. People act out of selfishness, but even though this can lead to incredible suffering, there’s no real hope for this changing. And sometimes just random shit happens. There’s no real explanation for it. We see this again in A Serious Man. But this final scene in Burn After Reading made everything clear somehow, to hilarious and elucidating effect.