Counter Intelligence: Burn After Reading probes deep into dumbness

Book-ended with zooms in and out of Washington from outer space and scenes in windowless rooms and hallways somewhere deep within CIA headquarters full of essentially hapless, incoherent, bumbling government employees casually making life and death decisions, Burn After Reading isn’t exactly what you might call satire. The ostentatious placement of the nest of American intelligence in what’s made to feel here like the centre of the universe might give us reason to panic if writer/directors Joel and Ethan Coen were very interested in learning something about how the CIA works, or even had anything to say about it, however broadly critical. But this isn’t that sort of movie, which may be all for the best. What we get instead is the Coens at their most disposable and slaphappy, a characteristic jumble of wacky characters, reversals, and milieus as you’d likely find in any feature film.

Like so much of what we encounter in Burn After Reading, Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) feels like a creature of urban myth, the embodiment of a tabloid headline: LONELY SUBURBAN TRAINER SELL GOV’T SECRETS TO FUND NEW BODY, FACE. The lynchpin of this gleefully labyrinthine narrative, Linda’s failed attempts to cover her multi-tiered cosmetic surgery by credit card overdraft alone promises to be redeemed when her co-worker Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) takes it upon himself to blackmail a recently fired CIA Balkans expert named Ozzie Cox (John Malkovich) after a disc containing what’s either Cox’s memoirs or financial data or both is accidentally left behind in Hardboides, the gym where Linda and Chad work and work out, a locale doubtlessly named in honour of the 1984 “sexy comedy.”

There’s actually some sexy comedy, or at least sex-related comedy, to be found in Burn After Reading as well, what with the twitchy, ever-smiling US Marshall and semi-discreet pussyhound Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney) banging both Cox’s humourless doctor wife (Tilda Swinton) and, eventually, Linda. Though he’s shooting his load left and right, he proudly declares more than once in the film that he’s never had to fire his weapon even once in over 20 years of service, an ominous detail made more ominous by other little details fussed over by the Coens, like the painting of a rifle hanging from the bathroom wall beside Harry as he fusses over his beard in the mirror. We are, naturally, just waiting for that gun to go off, and when it does things quickly turn—as they often do in Coen Brothers movie—from silly and perplexing to morbid and perverse.

You could say that Clooney’s gotten a bit of a raw deal with the Coens, starring in O Brother Where Art Thou?, Intolerable Cruelty and now this, not a one of them being amongst the finest films in the brothers’ prolific body of work. But Clooney’s uncanny knack for stylized comedy isn’t often utilized elsewhere, and hey, at least Burn After Reading is better than The Ladykillers. And as shallow as Harry is, at least he gives Clooney some diverting business to attend to—not a claim you could make about Ozzie, who only lets Malkovich, looking eerily rubbery and gray, blow a major gasket in scene after scene, or Chad, a character that’s largely about synthetic mock-necks, frosted tips and forwarding the plot in any way possible and probably not very well cast, though Pitt for all his limitations looks like he’s having some fun, especially when rocking the treadmill. McDormand, for her part, seems to always come closest to striking the best balance between emotional realism and utter mania.

But perhaps the bigger concern here is whether or not the Coens were even sure they were making a comedy. You could argue that several of the Coens’ movies are genre hybrids—though not as many as you’d think—but the problem isn’t whether or not we can identify the genre but whether or not we feel as though we should bother investing any feelings in the characters. For all the hi-jinx, the air of paranoia and intrigue peppered throughout the film—and soaking Carter Burwell’s deliberately boilerplate score—compels us to try and generate some deeper interest in Linda, Chad, Ozzie and Harry, or at least their high-stake plights, as does the numerous subplots of romance and longing, such as that between Linda and her lovestruck boss (Richard Jenkins). But whatever emotions are built up in the film’s first two-thirds make the abrupt, goof-off ending feel that much more like a slap in face for even caring. My advice would be not to bother caring, but still see the movie. It’s pretty slight, adds up to very little, but nonetheless features enough inspired non-sequiters to entertain.