Burn After Reading (***½)

Directed by: Joel and Ethan Coen (Fargo, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Intolerable Cruelty. No Country for Old Men)
Starring: Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Tilda Swinton, John Malkovich, Frances McDormand, J.K. Simmonds, Richard Jenkins
Seen: January 10th 2009

***½ Out of ****

After the relatively dark and utterly brilliant No Country for Old Men, the Coen brothers return to comedy that is brilliant and, well, relatively dark. Osbourne Cox (Malkovich) works as a senior analyst at the CIA, until he is removed from office one day for no apparent reason. He decides to start writing a memoir of the things he saw and did because he’s always wanted to write a novel, and his newfound freedom (unemployment) affords him the necessary time to get quite a lot of information committed to paper (PC in this case).

Linda Litzky (MacDormand) and Chad Feldheimer (Pitt) are two extremely clueless fitness club employees – most probably because they would never achieve anything more in their lives. Linda wants cosmetic surgery, she can’t afford it, and her boss, Ted (Jenkins), can’t even give her an advance on her salary, even though he is secretly in love with her. Chad is a body-builder to the extreme, and Pitt plays this moron with gusto, he must have had a ball in this part. Linda and Chad dream up a scheme of blackmailing a CIA agent after finding a CD full of information in a locker (or as Manolo, the Philippine employee repeatedly states: “on the floor then…”). This information is Cox’s memoir, and after contacting him things start getting strange.

Katie Cox (Swinton) is having an affair with ladies’ man Harry Pfarrer (Clooney), and she is looking for dirt on her husband because she eventually wants to leave him, but needs fodder for the divorce fight. Pfarrer is a Treasury agent, but he is most definitely of dubious character, as we see in the way he conducts himself at parties and in his own basement (where he builds his wife a very obscure machine). Clooney gives yet another performance displaying just the kind of range he has as an actor, standing in strong contrast to both his portrayal of Michael Clayton and Danny Ocean.

As you’ve by now noticed the stage is set for things to get confusing and ugly, and they do indeed. But they also manage to stay funny, amusing, and downright shocking, as the Coen brothers rampage through yet another deceit-filled bloodbath, with even a quite brutal axe-murder thrown in to sweeten (or is that disturb) the plot. The film does not fully resolve things, but this is merely a slice in the life of a CIA cluster-f*ck, as one character rightly states, and it is entertaining as hell.