Burn After Reading (4 1/2 Stars)

By David Wildman

If you’re like me, you’re thinking it’s time to tell Brad Pitt and George Clooney that you want to start seeing other people. Luckily the two are such superior talents that despite their overkill presence on the big screen as of late, they can still sometimes manage to beat the odds and bring something new to the table. The same can be said for Joel and Ethan Coen, who as director/writers triumphed at the Academy Awards last year with the disturbing and powerful No Country for Old Men. With their latest they’ve put together a fast-moving, madcap satire that, despite featuring familiar Coen themes and faces, still comes off as fresh and unpredictable.

The Coens have a knack for everyman protagonists who walk the line between believable human and surreal, living cartoon, like Jeff Bridges’ The Dude obsessed with getting his rug paid for in The Big Lebowski, or William H. Macy’s creepy car dealer in Fargo. In Burn After Reading they have done it again, pooling top-notch talent and creating an ensemble of quirky and flawed yet somehow likeable characters.

Like so many of their plots, this one revolves around some none-to-bright people of dubious moral fiber who get involved in a crime and then suffer the consequences, leading to a dire situation and very dark humor. The victim in this case is CIA analyst Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), who quits his job and decides to take time off to write his memoir. This angers his doctor wife Katie (Tilda Swinton) who is boffing total sleazeball Harry Pfarrer (Clooney) and was ready to dump Cox’s ass anyway. In preparation for a divorce, she downloads all his financial info off his computer onto a CD, but the lawyer’s secretary mistakenly leaves it at a fitness club. Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt), a hyperactive gym employee, finds the disc. Thinking that it contains classified info, he comes up with the idea of returning the disc to Cox for some kind of reward. His co-worker Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) — desperate to pay for cosmetic surgery she’s convinced she needs — goads him into trying to extort Osborne. Needless to say, Chad and Linda get in way over their heads and the whole thing ends up in a huge bloody and hilarious mess.

It’s obvious that Clooney and Pitt relish the chance to take on characters outside of the know-it-all studs they usually play. Pitt is a kinetic bundle of pure innocent athletic stupidity, grinning like an ass and constantly pumping his fists to dance music on his iPod. Clooney is vapid and neurotic, which he conveys by taking all his usual alpha male mannerisms and exaggerating them to the point of parody. The film also pairs Clooney with Swinton, both of whom were so explosive last year in Michael Clayton, although the dynamic between the two here is decidedly much different. Swinton plays an icy British bitch instead of an insecure, highly ambitious American corporate criminal, and Clooney, rather than a beleaguered, compromised good guy is an adulterous pathological liar who cheats on both his wife and mistress by trawling the Internet.

McDormand, as always, is fascinating to watch. We see her flabby, half-naked body on display in her first scenes where she’s talking to the plastic surgeon, giving an aura of vulnerability that instantly makes her appealing. And yet, as we witness her single-minded drive toward self-improvement and the dark direction it leads, we eventually realize that the dream she is chasing is nothing more than a sad expression of her vanity.

The Coens do an amazing job balancing the tone of this film, filling the cracks with a portentous classical soundtrack, a straight-faced annunciation of the political thriller genre that is being parodied. And while truly funny, the script does not go for the joke all the time. In an example early on, Osborne is out on his boat talking to his invalid father about his plans to write his memoir. I was waiting for the old man to let loose with some sort of senile quip, but the writers wisely let the scene play out, instead building some depth and pathos to back up the comedy.

After a summer dominated by Apatow-induced juvenelia (not that there’s anything wrong with that), it’s gratifying to have a film where the laughs are based on people who act more or less like adults, albeit greedy, psychotic and not-very-bright adults. o