As a follow-up to their Best Picture-winning No Country For Old Men,"" Joel and Ethan Coen did the only thing that made sense: make a movie that is completely the opposite. Sure, ""Burn After Reading"" explores the same dark themes as ""Old Men"" - murder, blackmail, intense games of cat-and-mouse - but where their previous movie was filled with eerie thrills and suspense, this latest film substitutes satire, absurd humor and good old-fashioned idiocy.
The plot is fairly complex: Dim-witted gym employees Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) and Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) discover a disc in the women's locker room that contains the secret-filled memoir of a former CIA agent, Osborne Cox (John Malkovich). Naturally, Feldheimer and Litzke try to outsmart and blackmail Cox. Cox's wife (Tilda Swinton) is having an affair with Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney), a federal marshal, but Pfarrer is having several other affairs of his own. The attempted blackmail and various entangled relationships make the entire movie, as J.K. Simmons' character sums it up, a ""clusterfuck.""
The movie is basically a satire of typical CIA espionage thrillers, in which all of the usual characters seem too stupid to be able to do their jobs, but the real fun of the film is watching the A-list cast try to out-idiot each other.
Frances McDormand is at her best as Litzke; you can almost see her wheels turning as she tries to outsmart the CIA. When the documents are found, she immediately recognizes the financial potential to pay for all of her desired cosmetic surgeries and reasons, ""You either slip on the ice outside a fancy restaurant, or there's this.""
Pitt's Feldheimer is the ultimate Coen brothers character. Yes, better than Anton Chigurh, even The Dude or any of the other hundreds of memorable characters they have created. The role is also possibly Pitt's best performance to date. Dancing carelessly through the movie to his iPod only he can hear, he has far too few scenes but runs away with every one of them. Paired with McDormand, the duo steamrolls through the movie, providing some of the most memorable and hilarious scenes.
Of course, something must be said for the rest of the ensemble: Clooney appears to have had way too much fun playing a caricature of his tabloid, dreamy self, and he is extremely entertaining in his despicably womanizing ways. Swinton perfectly captures a woman who seems to hate everyone and everything, particularly in one scene in which she berates a toddler. Malkovich goes blow-for-blow with the intimidating team of Pitt and McDormand in several scenes, and the amount of swear words, insults and threats he manages to scream in only a few minutes is commendable. While J.K. Simmons says everything the audience is thinking with his trademark deadpan delivery that kills in every scene.
That being said, this movie is definitely not for everyone. Don't be surprised if you laugh uproariously throughout the whole thing while the person next to you, who can't understand why anyone would find this crap funny, stares you down.
Grade: 4 out of 5 classified CIA documents... B
