Burn After Reading: Watch character featurettes
Compiled by Jack Foley
BURN After Reading, the new film from the Coen brothers, opened the 2008 Venice Film Festival on August 27, 2008, to widespread acclaim.
The Hollywood Reporter, for instance, wrote that “the Coen brothers have taken some of cinema’s top and most expensive actors and chucked them into Looney Tunes roles”.
It added: “As a follow-up to last year’s multiple-Oscar winner No Country for Old Men, Joel and Ethan Coen clearly are in a prankish mood, knocking out a minor piece of silliness with all the trappings of an A-list studio movie. Those who relish this movie might treat it as the second coming of The Big Lebowski; those who don’t might wonder at a story in which no character has a level head.”
The film picks up as CIA analyst Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich), fired and disgruntled, decides to write a memoir. His wife, disgruntled herself and secretly planning divorce, loads the manuscript along with his financial information onto a disc which is inadvertently left in the locker room at her gym.
The computer disc, with its important-sounding references to the CIA and its obscure numbers, looks like a treasure-trove of government secrets to assistant gym manager Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand), and her best friend, trainer Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt).
They decide to sell the information to the highest bidder. Feeling the sands of time running through her sagging figure, Linda needs the money for a battery of plastic surgeries.
She becomes even more determined once she starts seeing secret service agent Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney), a man who dotes on his wife but whose sex addiction has sent him cruising the internet for dates.
The compulsively womanizing Pfarrer, as it happens, is also carrying on an affair with the CIA analyst’s wife. Things get complicated. The characters are only looking for love, or plastic surgery, or their manuscript back, but none of them will get what they bargained for. Read more
Watch the character featurettes…
Chad (Brad Pitt)
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Cox (John Malkovich)
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Harry (George Clooney)
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Linda (Frances McDormand)
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