From its crash and burn debut at the Venice Film Festival to its slightly more positive but still definitively mixed reception here at the Toronto Film Festival, people who like to spend a lot of time bitching have spent a lot of time bitching that the Coen Brothers‘ Burn After Reading is at the very least a “disappointment” as a follow-up to No Country For Old Men, and is maybe even Exhibit A to the charge that this is a disastrous year for American pseudo-indie film. The former might be true, if one was of the mind that No Country as a masterpiece … which I was not. The latter might be true, if one was of the mind that a star-studded festival entry with little to no chance of impressing the stodgy middlebrow fetishists of the obvious of the Academy is synonymous with failure…which I am not. Burn After Reading may not have the sparse majesty of No Country––it may not go out of its way to tell you that We Are Getting Deep Up In Here––but in its own way its even more brutal assignation of moral confusion.

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