Burn after Reading is a movie based on a mixture of bad decisions as well as reasoning. Although most of these decisions portrayed in the movie come up in our day to day lives, the characters end up having a hard time dealing with each consequence from these decisions. From typical feelings of insecurities, divorce problems, multiple scandalous acts in love affairs to one’s paranoid thoughts, this movie portrays a lot of average people on missions to different things they believe they need to succeed or further their lives.
However, the movie shows a quite unrealistic and out-of-the ordinary ending to all of the problems. I believe the downfall begins when Linda decides that she needs plastic surgery to ‘improve herself,’ if you will. Instead of questioning the surgeon who is in the procedure for the money, she believes he is correct in every aspect. He says that she needs more than what she came in to ask for and she goes along with his recommendations because he is a ‘professional’ in the plastic surgery field. She believes that these surgeries are exactly what she needs to make her self-esteem rise above her insecurities.
When it comes to the end of the movie, the CIA makes the statement, “Report back to me when it makes sense. ” This is seen as ironic humor, I believe, because nothing ever quite makes sense throughout the ending of the movie. Nothing really adds up in each situation and how each character was interconnected. I believe it was indeed best for them to let Linda get her surgeries because wasn’t that what perhaps caused a lot of the issues. Maybe if she didn’t want surgery, Chris would have never gotten shot. Maybe the Russians would have never been involved.
Maybe her employer wouldn’t have gotten killed. I feel as if she didn’t get her surgeries in the end, all of this would have been a waste of time and effort. Perhaps the message in the end is you can get what you want if you go through hell to get to it. Even though I wasn’t really a fan of how each event went into play, I believe the point got across to all of the audience. Nothing good comes easily, therefore; you have to do crazy things to get what you feel is what you deserve like in Linda’s case, plastic surgery.
