Burn After Reading

In the world according to Joel and Ethan Coen, humans are driven, at base, by two equally powerful and equally dangerous character traits: greed and stupidity. Almost every character in the vast and ever-expanding Coen-verse is defined by their possession of these attributes. The only way to be a hero in a Coen brothers movie is to be stupid without being greedy: I'm talking, of course, about the Dude, here, but also noble idiots like Norville Barnes and H.I. McDougnah. These heroic dunderpates have no opposite number: there aren't a lot of smart but greedy people in the Coen pantheon. Greedheads like Carl Showalter and Jerry Lundegaard are as dumb as you please. This goes to support another central Coen premise: greed makes you stupid.

That premise is on glorious display in the brother's new movie. Two gym employees, the stupid-but-joyful Chad (played by Brad Pitt) and the stupid-and-desperate-for-money-to-pay-for-an-extreme-makeover Linda (Francis McDormand), stumble across a computer disk full of gobbledegook from the harddrive of a recently fired CIA analyst played with vertigious arrogance and seething rancor by John Malkovich. Their bone-headed attempts to extort the analyst and/or sell the "raw intelligence shit" on the open market ripple through the Georgetown townhouses of government middle management, ensnaring, among others, George Clooney's federal marshal, who brings a welcome addition to the Coen cavalcade of character types. Stupid and greedy, meet stupid and horny.

Not to sound too much like Jeff Daniels in The Squid and the Whale, but Burn After Reading is decidedly minor Coens. None of the characters (save Malkovich) make an impression beyond their outsized comic stupidity. The performances are generally amusing. Clooney, in particular, seems to have perfected portraying "smug and oblivous." Brad Pitt is the exception, giving a painfully labored attempt at carefree vapidity that leaves you swearing you can see the flop sweat glistening in his pompadour. The farcical plot machinations lack any sense of forward momentum, with the clockwork seeming to wind down rather than speed to a satisfying conclusion. Part of this is by design: the comedy comes from observing the vast chasm between what the individual characters think is going on and what the audience knows is going on. What seems world historic to them is laughably slight to the observer. But the ramshackle plot reinforces the sense that the whole movie is an undercooked goof, a chance for the Coens to put on screen some random bits of comic business that wouldn't fit in any other project.

Still, it's a wonder that even when the Coens are sipmly having fun with genres and over-the-top mugging by A-list stars, they still manage to inject toss-offs like Burn After Reading or The Ladykillers with a singular, and singularly cynical, worldview. McDormand's character in particular has a tragic edge to her bufoonishness. Her single-minded pursuit of life-altering plastic surgery is what starts off the whole bloody debacle, and there is a great sadness in this that McDormand smartly suggests between her moments of thundering stupidity. Linda Lipske wants to be loved, and only way she thinks that is going to happen is if she mutilates herself into a grotesque parody of the women she sees on television. Like all the ill-fated dim-bulbs who come to grief while scrambling for money in Coen brothers movies, she's making a desperate grab for a cruelly illusory and wholey destructive American dream. Give it up to the Coens: whether it's Granny Smith or carmel-coated, the apple always has a razor in it.

Score: 7.5