Some Came Running‘s Glenn Kenny seems to understand and appreciate the Coen Bros.’ Burn After Reading as much as yours truly, if not more so. Consider: “In its incredibly goofy, nasty, and…smart-alecky way. Burn After Reading evokes a fallen world just as strongly as the Coen’s previous film, No Country For Old Men, did.”


George Clooney after dispatching intruder

Which is sorta kinda what I said last week, to wit: “It’s the genius of Burn After Reading, their latest, to offer another serving in a way that may seem slight or irksome to some, but it is in fact — I mean this — a major satirical meditation about everything that is empty, wanting, sad and hilariously absurd in these united and delusional states of America.”
Kenny contends that “the signs of the apocalypse are everywhere” in the film. “Among them: People who say they’re out to ‘reinvent’ themselves, voice-activated HMO ‘help’ lines, perky morning TV hosts, and, perhaps Dermot Mulroney (who is, in a sense, the most game of all the very game players here). And just as the Coens showed their viewers some mercy by not showing the awful way Moss met his fate in No Country, here they cut away from the action just as it’s eddying into what would have been roiling grotesquerie, leaving two subordinate characters to provide the exposition, and, yes, do a little philosophizing. Which is much funnier than Uncle Ennis.”
I also said the following in my 9.5 review:
Burn After Reading is not a movie for the ages, but a modest and dead-perfect geiger-counter reading of what ails those desperate, constantly itchy and perturbed Americans in the comfortable urban areas who can’t help but shoot themselves, attack others, make mad lunges at quick money and temporal erotic satisfaction. Prisoners of their swollen egos and limited intelligence. Strivers who must (they feel) have more, who can’t be satisfied or serene, who eat the right foods, belong to health clubs, drink too much, scheme and claw too much and are natural-born comedians in the eyes of God.”