NUMBSKULL SKULDUGGERY

The movies of the brothers Coen—Joel and Ethan—often resemble meandering shaggy dog stories, especially the comedies. So does their new one, Burn After Reading, until it hypes itself into a frantically lethal farce. It’s also the nearest to a topical spoof of all their films, the object of the send-up being the American intelligence agencies, and the mindset of their members. The Coens don’t actually probe very deeply, and they don’t seem to have brought much of a point of view to these proceedings. They seem more intent on keeping their expanding intricate movie and its cast of grotesques, goofs, delusional narcissists, and largely clueless conspirators in spiraling and intersecting motion. Along its wayward course, it offers a number of sharply funny sequences and bits of business, without ever really resolving itself into a richly comic design.

Brad Pitt in Burn After Reading

The animating incident in the Coens’ movie is the job termination of Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), a fuse-blowing, belligerently superior CIA analyst whose boss suggests Cox’s drinking and personality would be more appropriately transferred to a post in the State Department. In a rage, Cox quits and returns to his Georgetown row house to mutter about bureaucratic nincompoops and to write his memoirs. And to drink.

Meanwhile, his peevishly impatient pediatrician wife (Tilda Swinton) is having an affair with a cheerfully coarse US marshal (George Clooney) with an abiding fascination in flooring materials. And elsewhere—literally and sociologically—is an assistant manager at a DC gym (Francis McDormand) who fanatically believes her happiness is only a face and body lift away. When her half-bright gym trainer pal (Brad Pitt in a surprisingly loose and engaging performance) chances on a lost computer disc containing Cox’s memoir writing, these two incompetent intriguers mistake the contents for state secrets, envisioning a handsome payoff and the price of her plastic surgery.

The evolving series of encounters and clashes between these and a larger set of characters is densely and swiftly elaborated. The Coens are impressively proficient at maintaining tempo and manipulating visual and aural elements. The editing and camera compositions are nearly always efficient, and sometimes striking. And the Coens have obtained fine, stylized performances from their large cast.

Still, their movie doesn’t actually resonate much, taken as a whole. And here and there, there are some arbitrary, inconsistent plot and character bits that seem to have been inserted just because the Coens think the incongruities themselves are funny—Swinton’s dyspeptically unlikely pediatrician, for example. The movie just trails off at the end, after some of the Coens’ business-as-usual gratuitous bloodshed. There’s an underlying bleakness to the enterprise.

The closest thing to a comic insight is the world-weary, let’s-just-keep-a-lid-on-things posture of J.K. Simmons’ CIA official. In this movie, the most rational, cautious people are the professional spies. That’s good, but it’s not enough to spark this movie to a more memorable level.