Burn After Reading

Faced with a demotion due to a drinking problem, Osborne Cox angrily quits his job as a CIA analyst and decides to write a memoir. When he tells his wife Katie, she secretly files for divorce and continues an on-going affair with Harry Pfarrer, a married U.S. Marshal with paranoid tendencies. At the instruction of her lawyer, Katie delivers a digital copy of her husband's financial records and other personal files, unwittingly including a rough draft of Osborne's memoir. The lawyer's assistant copies the files onto a CD-R, which she accidentally leaves on floor of the locker room at Hardbodies, a local gym. The disc falls into the hands of personal trainer Chad Feldheimer and his co-worker Linda Litzke, who mistakenly believe it contains sensitive government information. Chad and Linda devise a plan to return the disc to Osborne for a reward, as Linda is eager to raise money for her cosmetic surgeries. However, their inept efforts to blackmail Osborne only enrage him. Upon their failure to secure money from Osborne, Chad and Linda try to sell the disc to the Russian embassy, meeting with a Russian government official. Information about the meeting later makes it back to the CIA via a mole inside the Russian embassy. Osborne's increasingly erratic behavior prompts Katie to change the locks on their house and to invite Harry to move in. Meanwhile, Harry is a serial philanderer who incidentally becomes romantically involved with Linda after meeting her on a dating site. Having falsely promised the Russians more files, Linda persuades Chad to sneak into the Cox house to steal files from Osborne's computer. Chad is discovered by Harry, who reflexively kills Chad with his firearm. Harry searches the body for clues, but finds an empty wallet and missing suit tags, a precaution Chad took on Linda's advice. Harry surmises from his lack of identifying features that Chad is a government agent. At CIA headquarters, Osborne's former supervisor Palmer DeBakey Smith and his superior learn that information from Osborne has been given to the Russian embassy. They are perplexed because the information is of no particular importance and the perpetrators' motive is unknown. To avoid involvement from the FBI because of interservice rivalry, the superior orders that Chad's death be covered up. Harry realizes that he is being tailed, and catches and confronts the tail, who admits to being a divorce lawyer hired by his wife. Depressed, Harry meets with Linda, who is distressed over Chad's disappearance. Harry agrees to help find him, unaware that Chad is the man he killed. Linda returns to the embassy, believing that the Russians have abducted Chad, but they deny this. After they inform her the contents of the CD she has given them are worthless, she convinces the manager of Hardbodies, Ted (who has unrequited feelings for Linda), to help her by sneaking into the Cox household to gather more files. Harry and Linda meet in a park, where Linda reveals the address where Chad went before he disappeared. Harry realizes that Chad is the man he shot and flees, convinced Linda is a spy. When Osborne breaks into Katie's house with a hatchet to retrieve his personal belongings and her valuables, he finds Ted in the basement; Osborne shoots him, chases him into the street, and kills him with the hatchet. At CIA headquarters, Smith relates the events to his superior. A surveilling CIA officer who saw Osborne's highly conspicuous attack intervened and shot him, leaving him comatose with a low chance of survival. Harry has been detained while boarding a flight to Venezuela, a country with no extradition treaty with the U.S.; the superior orders that Harry be released and allowed to continue to Venezuela, rather than deal with the consequences of bringing him into custody. Linda has been captured, but agrees to keep quiet if they will pay for her surgeries. The superior, bewildered by the litany of events, approves the payment and closes the file. ==Cast==

Background and writing Working Title Films produced the film for Focus Features, which also has worldwide distribution rights. Burn After Reading was the first Coen brothers film not to use Roger Deakins as cinematographer since ''Miller's Crossing. Emmanuel Lubezki, four-time Academy Award-nominated cinematographer of Sleepy Hollow and Children of Men'', took over for Deakins, who had already committed to shooting Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road. Mary Zophres served as costume designer, marking her eighth consecutive movie with the Coen brothers. Burwell wrote that a percussive score would help "avoid any emotional comment" and "would lend an air of sobriety, gravity, and bombast to the general silliness". The Burn score ultimately made frequent use of Japanese Taiko drums. Burn After Reading was the first original screenplay penned by Joel and Ethan Coen since their 2001 film, ''The Man Who Wasn't There. Ethan Coen compared Burn After Reading to the Allen Drury political novel Advise and Consent'' and called it "our version of a Tony Scott/Jason Bourne kind of movie, without the explosions." Joel Coen said that they intended to create a spy film because "we hadn't done one before", but feels that the final result was more of a character-driven film than a spy story. Joel also said that Burn After Reading was not meant to be a comment or satire on Washington. Ethan Coen said that Pitt's character was partially inspired by a botched hair-coloring job from a commercial that Pitt had made. Tilda Swinton, who was cast later than the other actors, was the only major actor whose character was not written specifically for her. The Coens struggled to develop a common filming schedule to accommodate the A-list cast. Production Weekly, an online entertainment-industry magazine, falsely reported in October 2006 that Burn After Reading was a loose adaptation of Burn Before Reading: Presidents, CIA Directors, and Secret Intelligence, a memoir by former U.S. Director of Central Intelligence Stansfield Turner. The Coen brothers script had nothing to do with the Turner book; nevertheless, the rumor was not clarified until a Los Angeles Times article more than one year later. == Release ==

Festival run and press tour The film opened the Venice Film Festival in August 2008. The Coen brothers said idiocy was a major central theme of Burn After Reading; Joel said he and his brother have "a long history of writing parts for idiotic characters" Pitt, who plays a particularly unintelligent character, said of his role, "After reading the part, which they said was hand-written for myself, I was not sure if I should be flattered or insulted." During a fall movie preview, Entertainment Weekly wrote that Malkovich "easily racks up the most laughs" among the cast as the foul-mouthed and short-tempered ex-CIA man. The first scene Malkovich performed was a phone call in which he shouts several obscenities at Pitt and McDormand. But Malkovich could not be on the sound stage for the call because he was rehearsing a play, so he called in the lines from his apartment in Paris. Regarding the scene, Malkovich said, "It was really late at night and I was screaming at the top of my lungs. God knows what the neighbors thought." Joel Coen said the sex machine built by Clooney's character was inspired by a machine he once saw a key grip build, and by another machine he saw in the Museum of Sex in New York City. ==Reception==

Box office In its opening weekend, the film grossed $19.1 million from 2,651 theaters in the United States and Canada, ranking number one at the box office. It went on to gross $60.4 million in the United States and Canada, and $103.4 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $163.7 million worldwide. Critical response On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 78% based on 248 reviews, and an average rating of 6.90/10. The website's critical consensus states, "With Burn After Reading, the Coen Brothers have crafted another clever comedy/thriller with an outlandish plot and memorable characters." Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 63 out of 100 based on 37 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews. The Times, which gave the film four out of five stars, compared it to the Coen films Raising Arizona and Fargo in its "savagely comic taste for creative violence and a slightly mocking eye for detail." Pulver said that the film "may also go down as arguably the Coens' happiest engagement with the demands of the Hollywood A-list." Honeycutt also said "it takes awhile to adjust to the rhythms and subversive humor of Burn because this is really an anti-spy thriller in which nothing is at stake, no one acts with intelligence and everything ends badly." McCarthy said the talented cast was forced to act like cartoon characters, described Carter Burwell's score as "uncustomarily overbearing" David Denby of The New Yorker said that the film had several funny scenes, but that they "are stifled by a farce plot so bleak and unfunny that it freezes your responses after about forty-five minutes." Denby criticized the film's pattern of violence in which innocent people die quickly and the guilty go unpunished. "These people don't mean much to [the Coen brothers]; it's hardly a surprise that they don't mean much to us, either. ... Even black comedy requires that the filmmakers love someone, and the mock cruelties in Burn After Reading come off as a case of terminal misanthropy." But Rozen said that the performances are a redeeming factor, especially that of Pitt, whom she described as a standout who "manages simultaneously to be delightfully broad and smartly nuanced." Almost a decade later, The New Republic senior editor Jeet Heer argued that the film was "singularly prophetic of the Trump era" anticipating "the Trump campaign's collusion with Russian operatives" and "the wider culture of deceit that made Donald Trump's rise possible. More than just a satire on espionage, the movie is scathing critique of modern America as a superficial, post-political society where cheating of all sorts comes all too easily....The most disturbing thing about Burn After Reading, though, is how it resembles every day in Trump's Washington, where the line between blundering idiocy and malevolent conspiracy is increasingly blurred." In July 2025, it was one of the films voted for the "Readers' Choice" edition of The New York Times list of "The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century," finishing at number 276. ==Accolades==

The National Board of Review named Burn After Reading in its list of the Top 10 Movies of 2008. Noel Murray of The A.V. Club named it the second-best film of 2008, ==See also==