YMMV / Burn After Reading

• Audience-Alienating Premise: A frequent criticism of the movie from its detractors is that it's hard to really care about what happens since the whole point is how random and nonsensical the events happening are, and the people they're happening to are either repugnant and unlikeable, too stupid to really identify with, or barely appear and seem just as confused as the audience.
• Awesome Music: The film's score by Carter Burwell has gained significant recognition, even being described as the most paranoid-sounding film score since The Anderson Tapes.
• Broken Base: The premier one among Coen Brothers fans. It's either an annoying, obnoxious film with a plot that stops making sense after twenty minutes that has a cast that is so thoroughly unsympathetic that you just want them gone, or an underappreciated absurdist masterpiece with a ridiculous plot that is entirely the point of the film, and a cast full of people whose extreme shittiness is an essential part of the film's humor because it feeds the schadenfreude that the film is based around.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Chad only has a supporting role and gets killed halfway through, but he's by far the film's most beloved character for being a complete idiot who's nonetheless a good person, his genuinely endearing friendship with Linda, and for Brad Pitt's hilariously against-type performance. His memorable outfit and hairstyle also add to his popularity.
  • The unnamed CIA director is also popular for being an Only Sane Man who is completely befuddled by everything that's going on and just wants an explanation for this whole mess, just like much of the audience.
• Hollywood Homely: Several characters are meant to be unattractive or unhappy with their looks. While Frances McDormand is not really a classical beauty, she certainly doesn't need all the plastic surgery her character Linda wants. The hairstyles are often to blame: Angelina Jolie claims that the only time she was not sexually attracted to Brad Pitt was when she visited him on the set and saw him in-character as Chad.
• Spiritual Successor: The Big Lebowski was a send-up of the Raymond Chandler/noir staples in which buffoonish characters chase around a plot that really adds up to little, which is the point of the humor. Burn After Reading does the same thing, but with spy/political intrigue tropes.
  • Some have labelled the film as this generation's Dr. Strangelove
• Unintentional Period Piece: The MockGuffin that starts the whole plot is a CD full of data (Cox would probably have a flash drive (ironically easier to lose) or a cloud now) and the CIA director's reaction to Cox supposedly threatening to sell his information to the Russians (before being told that Cox only had access to totally worthless data) being "why?" cements the film before The New '10s.
• The Woobie: In spite of the Black Comedy nature of their deaths, Chad and Ted are decent people who just want to help someone else (Linda, in this case) and end up dying for it. It's especially easy to feel sorry for Ted given that he died for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time and for his unrequited feelings for Linda, which was why he was trying to help her.

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