Leave it to those wacky Coen brothers to defy expectations and move in a direction no one would ever quite expect. After finally winning the Academy Award for Best Picture with their dark, brooding, somewhat nihilistic and starkly bleak treatise on aging and fate No Country for Old Men, the duo switch gears completely with their freewheeling coal black comedy Burn After Reading.

Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand in Focus Features' Burn After Reading

While not for every taste, this one is as playful (if still bitingly acerbic and frigidly icy cold) as anything the filmmakers have ever done, and while not quite rising to the level of say Raising Arizona or The Big Lebowski to say it’s on par with something like say Intolerable Cruelty wouldn’t be too far off the mark. It’s a deliciously venal throwaway, and while the film does attempt to make some pointed comments about the declining mental acumen of American society overall this one is pointlessly diverting fun and really nothing else.

It all starts in the gym. After health club employees Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) and Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) find a computer disc belonging to ex-CIA agent Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), the delightedly dense couple decides to live out their spy movie fantasies blackmailing the guy in hopes of gaining some quick cash. As things spiral more and more out of control, fellow CIA rube Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney) – who just so happens to be having an affair with Cox’s cranky pediatrician wife Katie (Tilda Swinton) – finds himself also getting involved (especially with Linda) in the shenanigans, all of them wondering what the heck it actually is they’re actually doing.

Everyone here is great (even veteran Coen stalwarts J.K. Simmons and Richard Jenkins), but it is Pitt and McDormand who make the biggest impressions. Both of them knock it out of the park, each appearing to be having such a fantastic time taking their respective characters to both of their logical extremes it becomes increasingly difficult to take your eyes off of them.

I love the fact the filmmakers take all this silliness so seriously, the movie shot, paced and edited like it were some classic 1970’s spy thriller like Three Days of the Condor or The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. I also adored that everyone involved, save maybe Clooney (who, I hate to say, treats this one more like O Brother Where Art Thou than he probably should), goes out of their way to cement all the wackiness in a modern reality that’s actually fairly believable.

What I don’t like is just how thin and predictable much of it is. This is one of those crazy mixed up multi-character mysteries that aren’t anywhere near as surprising as it obviously thinks that it is. Like a lot of vintage Coen material, it’s not so much about being innocent as it is about being sly tenacious, and those most egotistically in tune with their own wants and desires are probably going to be the ones emerging unscathed about the time the bodies start flopping against the linoleum. 

Yet this movie is a total hoot. Better, it’s not remotely boring, the whole thing so much energetically sinister fun I almost can’t remember the last time I sat in a theater enjoying myself more. While definitely not going to meet the same success as far as Oscar is concerned pardon me if I don’t remotely begin to care. Burn After Reading is a smashingly entertaining success, this lightly frothy winner as close to pure bliss as anything September will probably offer. 

Film Rating: êêê (out of 4) 

Additional Links:

-  Burn After Reading Theatrical Trailer