'Burn After Reading'

The Coen brothers are going to be remembered for comedy as much as style. Their forays into genre are always done with a comic book-like tone and cartoonish characters. The results are always funny, but rarely enough to make one laugh out loud (with the exception of 'Raising Arizona'). I was afraid the Coens would follow their immortal 'No Country For Old Men' with another 'Big Lebowski'. Like their "'90s post- 'Pulp Fiction' crime caper" (which is enjoying the ten year anniversary treatment this year) 'Burn After Reading' has a mysterious-by-way-of-inconsequential plot arc. Unlike 'Lebowski', it is often hysterically funny.
If there is one thing we call agree on, it's that the Coen's love the locations they shoot in. This time they take us into the crisp, D.C. neighborhoods where two fitness gym employees find a CD they decipher as top secret stuff. In reality though, it's a rough draft of a recently fired C.I.A. agent's autobiography. The pair haphazardly try to blackmail the disgraced agent for money to finance one gym rat's multiple cosmetic surgery procedures. Meanwhile, the agent's wife is plotting to leave him for a former colleague of his, who spends his downtime trolling the internet for as much casual sex as he can get. During his post-coital jogs, he starts to notice he's being followed. Something is going on here: nothing.
Like just about all Coen bros. films, this is a story about painfully common people who get in over their heads. This time though, they're honest enough to point out the pointlessness of it all. J.K. Simmons makes a fantastic cameo at the end as an agency head who shrugs at the outstanding chain of events as they are explained to him. It is one of many welcome performances. I've always thought of Brad Pitt as the most overpaid, yet hardest-working model in history. He is a decent enough actor, but one who's excessive fame is based completely on his good looks. Here though, he disappears behind the frosted-tipped hair and mile-a-minute rambling to give us a committed performance as an idiot fitness instructor who's random enthusiasm leads him down a random path. It's probably his most convincing performance since Michael Rappaport's stoner roommate in 'True Romance'. Pitt has always seemed like a cool enough guy, it's about time he left behind a little vanity. George Clooney hams it up to mixed results as the cad who becomes inexplicably involved in it all. In all fairness though, it's hard to compare to John Malkovich; who often seems as if he were genetically enhanced in order to play characters so unhinged and hilariously desperate. Watching him drink himself apart after being disgraced by the C.I.A. and abandoned by his wife becomes funnier with each scene. I guess some men were just born to say, "What the fuck"? The only sore spot here is Frances McDormand. Her usually exceptional skills as an actor are no match for her goofball sensiblities, which almost ruin her performance as the lonely heroine in the center of it all.
Great acting isn't the only thing helping the Coen's, but there's little else to credit them with. Some "Coen-esque" violence feels random and out of place. There's an underlying spy genre feel here, but 'Burn After Reading' is little more than great looking slapstick. It's a good thing it turned out so funny.