Katie’s having an affair with married federal marshal Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney); in addition to his affair with Katie, Harry’s been trolling an internet dating site looking for more women to fill his spare time, of which he seems to have an abundance. Katie, of course, doesn’t know about Harry’s side affairs, and now that her husband has left his job and is thus, by her estimation, even more of a loser than he previously was, she’s ready to ditch him for Harry. Her lawyer advises her to make copies of all her husband’s financial records, so she copies his computer files to a disk.

Meanwhile, out in the suburbs, Linda Litzke (Coen frequent flier Frances McDormand) is desperately seeking love on the internet, and she’s obsessed with having multiple plastic surgeries to reinvent herself. Like so many older women in our youth-obsessed culture, Linda’s convinced herself that her tragically flawed love life is something that can be fixed with a nip here and a tuck there. Her manager, kind-hearted, bumbling Ted (Richard Jenkins) pines for Linda from afar, while Linda, relentlessly self-immersed in her quest for medical science to heal flaws that don’t really exist, while ignoring those that do, fails to see the love that’s right in front of her.

Linda’s desire for superficial self-improvement escalates to obsession when her company’s HMO refuses to pay for her surgery. When the CD containing all the files of former CIA agent Cox falls into the hands of Linda and her chipper, can-do coworker Chad (Brad Pitt), Linda enlists Chad’s help in a quest to blackmail Cox for “reward” money, thereby securing the needed funds.

The Coens intertwine all these separate lives into one piece of storytelling that’s quickly paced, twisted and often laugh-out-loud funny. With their deft understanding of human nature, the Coens create characters who tread close to being caricatures with enough humanity to keep them grounded in reality. We can see bits of ourselves in each of them, and this has the effect of making us laugh at the people in the story we’re watching, while perhaps uncomfortably wondering if we’re laughing a bit at ourselves as well.

Perhaps in part because the script for Burn After Reading was written specifically for the actors the Coens wanted to work with, the performances are all top-notch. Malkovich, working for the first time with the Coens, brings a manically funny vibe to his ex-CIA guy on the verge of unraveling, while Swinton, as his bitter wife who’s disappointed in him, her life, and perhaps most of all herself, is all razor edges and sharp corners, while underscoring Katie with a wry humor that lets us peek at the sadness and desperation beneath the angry surface.

The Coens once again have written Clooney a role as vapid, addle-brained everyguy. Harry has so few original thoughts in his head that he keeps recycling the same lines and stories over and over again with every woman he meets; hey, it works, Harry seems to think, so why reach beyond what you know? But for all his bravado about being a federal marshal with killer instincts, when he’s faced with realities that don’t fit his carefully constructed script, he falls apart; Clooney’s scenes in the latter half are some of the best in the film.

McDormand, of course, had her first role with the Coens in their first film, Blood Simple, and they keep casting her in their films for a simple reason: she’s just a fantastic actress. She imbues this role with so much that’s true about people searching desperately for that one thing that will make everything better; when Linda’s browsing internet dating ads, she methodically ticks men off as losers while never looking beyond her own sags and bags to address the real baggage that’s keeping her from genuine happiness.

As for Pitt, this is his first time working with the Coens after years of wanting to be in one of their films, and this role’s brought out the dorky little kid in him in a delightful way. He plays Chad as an effusive man-boy, whose entire life up to until the intrigue takes place has revolved around working out, biking, hydrating with bottled water and Gatorade, and bopping around to his iPod. There are countless Chads biking around the streets of L.A., New York, Seattle, and all points in between, blissfully unaware of their lack of self-awareness. Pitt lends Chad’s vapid distraction an air of purity and innocence that nicely foils Linda’s obsessiveness. He’s like an obedient Golden Retriever puppy following her around and eagerly fetching the bones she tosses, and he’s funnier than we’ve ever seen him.

I expect critics who favor the Coens when they’re working in the realm of the heavily artsy, ala No Country for Old Men, will like Burn After Reading, but it won’t be their favorite Coen film. For me, I would rank it up there with my two favorite Coen films,Fargo and O, Brother Where Art Thou?. Burn After Reading is a sharply written film that revolves around intrigues and deceptions, where most of the darkly comedic moments happen when a character’s flaws collide with reality; most of all, its a fun ride down the roller coaster of the dark side of human nature as only the Coens can explore it." - Kim Yovnar

“This is a man practiced in deceit,” says one character of another in Burn After Reading. “It’s almost his job.” Deceit is very much the job of the new film from Joel and Ethan Coen. It’s as if, after winning two fat Oscars (best picture and director) for their fairly straightforward adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, the brothers needed to reassert their old capricious cunning, their weasily larkishness, their independence from easy acclaim. “Just because you agree with the Academy that we made the best film of 2007,” they seem to be warning their fans, “don’t think you’re any closer to figuring out our motives. We’re still tough to get. Deceit is our job, our pleasure and your challenge.”

In this desultory spy caper — which had its world premiere as the opening night selection at the Venice Film Festival, and will play the Toronto Film Festival later this week — they take George Clooney and Brad Pitt, those modern icons of sex and savoir-faire, drop them in the world of Washington, D.C., espionage, then keep ratcheting down their emotional IQs. They turn Frances McDormand (Mrs. Joel Coen off-screen) into a mad-man loser with a severe self-image problem. The characters’ lives get more desperate as the camera style retains its affectless sheen.

So the viewer’s fun, such as it is, comes from guessing where the movie is headed and why it’s going there. The ultimate question, from this admirer of virtually all the brothers’ work, from the early Blood Simple and Miller’s Crossing to their previous Clooney collaborations O, Brother, Where Art Thou? and Irreconcilable Differences, is a plaintive “What the heck kind of film is this?”

As close to an answer as you’ll get here is that Burn After Reading is an essay in the cocoon of ignorance most of us live in. It pushes the old form of movie comedy — smart people saying clever things — into collision with today’s dominant model of slackers whose utterly unfounded egotism eventually worms its way into an audience’s indulgence. Which is to say that most of the people here seem like bright lights but are actually dim bulbs. They’re not falling-down stupid; they radiate the subtler variety of idiocy that can be mistaken for charm, decency or even brilliance.

That’s certainly true of the CIA analyst played by John Malkovich. Osborne Cox: his very name is steeped in two denominations of old money. After decades at the Agency, he has perfected the look and the attitude of a career spook. He wears a smart dark suit and that inevitable flourish of the house eccentric, a bow tie. Osborne’s Olympian contempt for his superiors, his overcareful pronunciation of French words (”mem-wah”), the modest shock value of a Princeton man spicing every sentence with the f-word — all these mark him as hailing from that generation and class of American spies who considered themselves more knowledgeable, hard-thinking and highly pedigreed than the politicians they worked for, yet who managed to miss the collapse of the Soviet Union, the international ambitions of al-Qaeda and the existence in their midst of Soviet-paid moles like Aldrich Ames.

At the start of the film Cox is summoned to his boss’s office and told he’s to be cashiered from the CIA and transferred to a low-clearance post at the State Dept. As he spits out retorts with majestic acerbity, you think for a minute that he’s right and the Agency is wrong — that he knows too much or has dug too deep. But by the end of the scene his bluster has revealed Osborne as a malingerer, a rummy and a jerk; his prickly panache is simply the spy’s cover that everyone who works with him has long since seen through.

Harry Pfarrer looks much more successful. After all, he is played by last-matinee-idol Clooney, has been screwing Cox’s icy-beautiful wife (Tilda Swinton) and recently emerged from 20 years in the Secret Service “without ever discharging my weapon” — which is as sure a clue at the firearm of the wall in the first act of an Ibsen play that Harry’s gun will be fired. He has the patter down pat, but something, maybe his fascination with the floors in the houses he visits, tells you that this Clooney smoothie is following the dictum the Coens laid down for all their actors: “to channel your inner knucklehead.”

McDormand’s Linda Litzke, assistant manager at a D.C.-area gym, is at the opposite end of the esteem spectrum. Primally troubled by her sagging derriere, and by “a gut that swings back and forth in front of me like a shopping cart with a bent wheel,” she obsesses on the plastic surgery she thinks will give her some kind of a life. The ruck of men she’s found through online dating services don’t offer much. One of them takes her to a movie comedy and doesn’t laugh; to dinner and doesn’t talk; to bed and he utters not a word before falling asleep. Next to this troglodyte, Harry seems like man-meat from heaven.

The final piece of this puzzling jigsaw is Linda’s gym assistant Chad Feldheimer, played by Pitt with a blithe goofball goodness. Outfitted in Spandex, and getting around with a walk that suggests less a guest on Dancing With the Stars than a heretofore unclassified creature on Animal Planet, Chad-Brad is the least troubled character in the film. He’s never thought hard enough to consider how other people might think of him; he has no special dreams to defer, no ambitions to be crushed. For him, the unexamined life is the only one worth living.

Chad does have a plan. He’s come across a disc containing Cox’s notes toward a mem-wah, and he brings Linda into the notion of calling Cox to return the disc; maybe the grateful owner will give them a small reward. Cox misinterprets Chad’s call as blackmail, and rears up to snort and neigh at the do-gooders. That brings Harry into the plot, and things devolve from there.

I have the sinking feeling I’ve made Burn After Reading sound funnier than it is. The movie’s glacial affectlessness, its remove from all these subpar schemers, left me cold and perplexed. I did appreciate the nicely modulated turns from Richard Jenkins as Linda’s sweet-souled boss and J.K. Simmons as the head of the CIA. But for me, the surest laughs came from the portentous percussion in Carter Burwell’s wonderful underscoring; it pile-drives an expectation of suspense that the film never delivers.

Except for the suspense about the brothers’ aims with their latest movie. Film critics aren’t supposed to confess bafflement at the end of a review, but that’s what I feel here. Either the Coens failed, or I didn’t figure out what they’re attempting. I must be like Harry or Osborne, pretending to a sophistication I lack. Burn After Reading is a movie about stupidity that left me feeling stupid. - Richard Corliss, Time.

He shakes his head and asks an agent, “Report back to me” — he pauses with a frown — “when it makes sense.” - Kirk Honeycutt, Hollywood Reporter”

“After their triumphant dramatic success with “No Country for Old Men,” the Coen brothers revert to sophomoric snarky mode in “Burn After Reading.” A dark goofball comedy about assorted doofuses in Washington, D.C., only some of whom work for the government, the short, snappy picture tries to mate sex farce with a satire of a paranoid political thriller, with arch and ungainly results. Major star names might stoke some mild B.O. heat with older upscale viewers upon U.S. release Sept. 12, but no one should expect this reunion of George Clooney and Brad Pitt to remotely resemble an “Ocean’s” film commercially.

A seriously talented cast has been asked to act like cartoon characters in this tale of desperation, mutual suspicion and vigorous musical beds, all in the name of laughs that only sporadically ensue. Everything here, from the thesps’ heavy mugging to the uncustomarily overbearing score by Carter Burwell and the artificially augmented vulgarities in the dialogue, has been dialed up to an almost grotesquely exaggerated extent, making for a film that feels misjudged from the opening scene and thereafter only occasionally hits the right note.

Ironically, said curtain-raiser shows the CIA actually getting something right. Career analyst Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) is shoved out, and his subsequent obscene tantrum demonstrates he has all the decorum and self-control of a 5-year-old. Lying to his wife, Katie (Tilda Swinton), that he quit, Osborne sets about writing an explosive memoir, while no-nonsense Katie now seriously begins considering leaving her unhinged husband for her happy-go-lucky lover Harry (Clooney), a federal marshal none too committed to wife Sandy (Elizabeth Marvel).

In an utterly unrelated orbit of D.C. life, desperately middle-aged Linda (Frances McDormand) is pissed that the insurance company for the fitness center where she works won’t cover the extensive plastic surgery she urgently wants done. So antic and frantic you wonder if anesthesia would ever work on her, she suddenly steps into merde with gym trainer Chad (Pitt), who’s even more hyperactive than she is, when the latter finds a disc they think is loaded with ultra-classified information.

With frosted blond hair, and appearing so dense he may as well have his low-double-digit IQ pasted to his forehead, Pitt’s Chad is what passes for a riot here. Film’s funniest scene may be that in which Chad, having traced the disc to Osborne, phones the latter in the middle of the night to initiate the blackmail scheme that will net Linda the coin she needs to transform her bod. Pitt slices the ham very thick indeed, but uniquely emerges as endearing in doing so.

Coincidentally, Internet dater Linda starts shagging Harry, who, amusingly, likes to go for long runs after sex, and just past the one-hour mark, one major character gets blown away in an accident, a development that’s supposed to be funny as well as startling.

The Coens’ script, which feels immature but was evidently written around the same time as that for “No Country,” is just too fundamentally silly, without the grounding of a serious substructure that would make the sudden turn to violence catch the viewer up short. Nothing about the project’s execution inspires the feeling that this was ever intended as anything more than a lark, which would be fine if it were a good one. As it is, audience teeth-grinding sets in early and never lets up.

Incidental niceties crop up, to be sure. The Coens’ economy of storytelling is in evidence, as is their unerring visual sense, this time in league with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki; a low-angle shot of Harry, knife in hand, lingers especially. The date montages are cute, and the facial reactions of JK Simmons, playing a CIA boss more dedicated to avoiding fuss and bother than to getting to the bottom of things, are once again priceless. But on any more substantive level, “Burn After Reading” is a flame-out.” - Todd McCarthy

Following that most un-Coen of eventualities, an Oscar triumph, at first glance you might see their latest as an effort to paddle away from the threatening currents of the mainstream and back into the reassuring calm of the left bank - although, given it was made prior to the release of No Country For Old Men, that would require some nifty clairvoyance on their Brillo-haired behalf. Perhaps they just wanted to reawaken the zany in their filmmaking. Compared to the moody poetry of that classy neo-Western, Burn After Reading has the wild abandon of a punk-rock song - it’s all jibs and jabs, the rope-a-dope moves of a boxer. A slighter, less obviously showy piece that will grow and grow with repeated viewing.

So what’s the rumpus? Ozzie Cox (John Malkovich), a low-level data analyst at the CIA’s voluminous headquarters at Langley, has quit in a fit of pique. He didn’t take too kindly to being demoted. Truth be told, he doesn’t take too kindly to anything. However, a disc of what appears to be his hastily penned revenge memoirs turns up in the ladies’ changing room of Hardbodies Fitness Center. Naturally, personal trainer Linda (Frances McDormand), desperate to fund her forthcoming surgical work, together with her eager-beaver underling Chad (Brad Pitt), decide to sell the intelligence to the Russians. Did we mention overly horny Harry (George Clooney), currently schtupping Ozzie’s wife Katie (Tilda Swinton) and soon preying upon lonely Linda through the avenue of internet dating? We should. He’s relevant. All of it is played at the amphetamine pace of Raising Arizona.

Cut from similar cloth to Fargo and Lebowski, this is not quite a thriller, and not fully a comedy, but it is very funny and plotted to within an inch of incomprehensible - just like their beloved Chandler. God knows, it errs on the dark side, but the noir is bleached out in the leafy sprawl of Washington DC. Members of the anti-Coen club (unresponsive to the Muncie song, indifferent to bowling) tend to cite the superficial glaze of their art; the tart, unlikable characters; and the smug self-satisfaction at their own cleverness. There will be no swaying even the floaters this time round. If anything, Burn After Reading plays right into the calloused hands of the naysayers. It lacks the immediate charm of classical Coen: there’s no Marge or Dude - good-natured if unconventional counterpoints to the monopoly of jerks, saddos and crazies. Here it’s pretty much just jerks, saddos and crazies.

Ethan, always the more talkative of the brethren, would remind us that most of the characters were written with exactly these actors in mind. Malkovich’s pouting arrogance is a perfect fit for huffy clown Ozzie. McDormand’s disjointed smile and genius for body-language are ideal for nervy, jabbering Linda. Swinton’s snooty grace is primed for Ozzie’s untrustworthy spouse. Out of the crowd, however, it’s the pretty boys who enjoy themselves the most, defiantly mocking their swish Ocean’s Umpteen images. Pitt uncorks his hyperactive loon, blissfully ensconced in the hollow brain-space of a gym-cute bubble-head bounding into the world of espionage like a puppy. Clooney has a wonderful line in smarm he reserves for just these Coen-arranged occasions. Harry is a true-blue sleazebag - wait ’til you see what he’s got in his basement - who emerges out of the chaos as near enough the leading man.

This is precision-built madness. Beneath these chattering lunatics and the pinballing plot lies an intricacy worthy of Kubrick. The sound-editing alone is exquisite: the squeak of a wardrobe door triggering a blast of violence; the hallways of Langley reverberating to the clip-clop of fraught footsteps, rhythmically muffled by carpeting in sonic tribute to The Shining’s zooming trike. Regular cinematographer Roger Deakins may have been on his holidays, but replacement Emmanuel Lubezki (a real person) proves adept at tight, shapely frames and creepy angles.

True Coen fanciers can take solace in such familiar comforts as astonishingly bad highlights in Pitt’s sticky-up hair, the smart-aleck language (although it’s got nothing on the charged patter of Fargo or Lebowski) and a leading character wielding an axe in his dressing gown. And, as is the Coens’ curious wont, the film never quite fits its assumed reality: while we’re darting about contemporary Washington, concerned with such recent preoccupations as social networking and gym regimes, it has the lean, grumbly look of ’70s cinema and the dotty bedlam of trouser-plunging British farce, as if Seven Days In May had been rewritten by Alan Ayckbourn. It is also one of those movies that won’t leave you alone. Percolating away in your brain, its off-centre wit will take shape. The day after, even a week later, one of its peculiar set-pieces will spring to mind.

Ethan might remonstrate, but there runs a theory in certain circles that all Coen films are ultimately about American foreign policy. While it takes work to figure out exactly how that fits The Ladykillers, it is written through Burn After Reading like a stick of rock. Curiously, it’s the schmoes rather than the bureaucrats in the firing line. The CIA suits (led by a too-brief appearance from J. K. Simmons) are benign, bemused and rather gormless; it’s the knuckleheaded plebs who are out of control. America’s troubles, it titters, are of their own making.

As Linda tries to offload the improbable secrets to the very confused Russians, the Agency is baffled. Why the Russians?

The idiots simply can’t think of anywhere else. Farce by its nature is a matter of escalation: each stage of the ever-increasing anarchy is entirely logical, but the net result is insanity. What is Iraq, if not a great, big, terrible farce? Then again, it could just be a big joke on celebrity. There’s nothing that tickles those pesky brothers more than casting a gaggle of gigantic Hollywood stars - including one’s wife - as total nitwits. It’s a high old tale about unintelligent intelligence. That’s the Coens for you.

Verdict
If No Country For Old Men was vintage port, Burn After Reading is a shot of tequila: eye watering and hard to swallow, but the after-effect is terrific. - Ian Nathan