An essential motion picture for the Trump era is one that I didn’t particularly care for when it first came out. I speak, of course, of “Burn After Reading,” the Coen brothers’ pitch-black comedy about morons attempting spycraft in Washington, D.C., which upon first viewing seemed too unremittingly misanthropic, too grimly contemptuous of its characters, without the flashes of grace that illuminate the darkness in most Coen depictions of human folly.
That was in 2008; how young and naïve I was back then. Just over a decade later, the Coens’ portrait of grasping fools and self-important Beltway nitwits trying to behave like characters in a John le Carré novel seems less like misanthropy and more like prophecy — a vision of amoral political buffoonery that’s arguably the most realistic depiction of Trumpiness to date.