"Burn after Reading"

Burn after Reading **½

If you’re looking for No Country for Old Men, last year’s screen triumph from the Coen brothers, then look away. Burn after Reading isn’t the film for you.
In fact, it’s genuinely difficult to place Burn after Reading among the Coen’s previous efforts. It’s hardly a screwball comedy in the same vein of, say, Raising Arizona or The Big Lebowski. And it’s difficult to compare it to their more mature work, like Barton Fink or Fargo.
As one of the weaker links in the Coen’s otherwise admirable body of work, Burn after Reading is in a class by itself. But it’s more like a remedial class, as opposed to the doctoral-level seminar that produced such masterpieces as Miller’s Crossing and No Country for Old Men.
Written and directed by Ethan and Joel Coen, Burn after Reading masquerades—at least, at first—as if it were going to be an exercise in zaniness. Yet the filmmakers’ obvious interest in portraying their characters’ empty human misery quickly overshadows their attempts at sustaining humor of any stripe.
Set inside Washington, DC’s much-vaunted corridors of power, Burn after Reading stars John Malkovich as Osborne Cox, an alcoholic intelligence analyst who drinks his way out of the CIA. Meanwhile, his wife Katie (Tilda Swinton) is carrying on an extramarital affair with Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney), a brain-addled security official with the Treasury Department.
As if matters couldn’t get any worse, Osborne’s top-secret memoirs fall into the hands of Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) and Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt), a pair of brainless gym staffers who figure that they can make a quick buck by blackmailing the former CIA agent.
While Chad’s motives for bilking Osborne remain vague, Linda has no doubt about how she intends to spend her ill-gotten booty. Linda dreams of changing her body—and her life—by financing a series of expensive plastic surgeries. “I’ve gotten about as far as this body can take me,” she quips.
But, of course, in the world of the Coen brothers, nothing is easy. And Linda and Chad are in way over their heads. Before you know it, the plot is swirling uncontrollably, dragging Katie and Harry into its murky orbit—not to mention, a host of private detectives, secret agents, and officials from the Russian embassy.
Yet for all of its madcap energy, Burn after Reading is remarkably un-funny. With the exception of Pitt’s surprisingly hilarious turn as Chad, it’s just a sad movie about sad people desperately trying to trump their unbearable sadness before it’s too late.