Burn After Reading Review Part 3

Where does this film leave the Coens? Their unique position, as darlings of both the Hollywood set and the festival

circuit, is unchanged. What they have managed to come up with here, somehow, is a light-as-fluff flipside to

hardcore "insider" films like All the President's Men, Michael Clayton or, indeed, The Insider: it paints the

powers-that-be as goofy, chaotic and definitively non-sinister. This lot, you feel, couldn't bug their way out of a

paper bag.

Burn After Reading may also go down as arguably the Coens' happiest engagement with the demands of the Hollywood A-

list - but this bit of career development may also be contributing to a diminishing of their particular film-making

strengths. Or perhaps they are simply evolving. The highly-wrought grotesqueries with which they made their name

seem well in the past; stars find it difficult to merge with the scenery. For better or worse, their films are now

more simply natural to look at and experience. Whether it will pay off again at the Oscar ceremony or box-office

remains to be seen. [Guardian]