Burn After Reading

The mixed reviews for Joel and Ethan Coen's Burn After Reading just go to show that there's no telling what one person will think is funny and another not. I, for one, laughed often and merrily during this film, which is a souffle compared to the brisket that was No Country for Old Men. And lest you think I'm just a sucker for the Coens, well, not always--I thought Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers were dreadful.

As I sat in my seat, at about the halfway mark through the film, I realized, much to my amazement, that I had no idea where it was going, and therefore will reveal as little as possible about the plot. The script, an original by the Coen boys, concerns a disgraced CIA agent (John Malkovich), his harridan wife (Tilda Swinton), a dimwitted personal trainer (Brad Pitt), his colleague, a woman keen on undergoing several thousand dollars worth of plastic surgery (Frances McDormand), and a vain bodyguard with a knack for constructing elaborate sex toys (George Clooney). Watching how these characters end up crossing paths is both a giddy delight and a primer on screenplay construction.

To overuse a phrase, the "McGuffin" in this piece is a disc containing some files that is somehow appropriated from Malkovich and ends up in the hands of Pitt and McDormand. Set in a paranoid Washington, D.C., where everyone seems to be wearing an ear-piece, the resulting cloak and dagger stuff is distinctly in a light-hearted tone, though there is some serioius mayhem that results. But hey, these are the same guys who induced chuckles at having Steve Buscemi put through a wood-chipper.

Manohla Dargis, in her dispirited review, censured this film for having a lack of heart, to which I profoundly disagree. Yes, there is hardly a sympathetic character in sight (I think the only one is Richard Jenkins, the gym manager who has a crush on McDormand) but the zeal of the characters' emotions are palpable. Malkovich is a man who suffers at the hands of fools (at one point he proclaims that he is against a "league of morons" and brandishes the F word as if it were an epee. Pitt clamps onto his character like a dog with a bone, almost to the point where you can smell the brain-smoke as he tries to formulate a plan. I don't remember an actor getting so many laughs just from the simple act of sucking his drink through a straw, a vacant expression on his face. Clooney has some of the best opportunities, and seems to relish playing a complete cad, a man who carries his own foam wedge to sexual assignations (if you don't know what those are, you've clearly never studied the ads in the back of Playboy).

The humor in this film is as black as the ace of spades, and could be mistaken for a novel by Elmore Leonard or Carl Hiaasen, as the stupid and venal are punished with alacrity. Unfortunately, some of this is doled out off-screen, in wickedly humorous briefing scenes with CIA agents played by David Rasche and J.K. Simmons. It's as if the Coens had given themselves a time limit and the sand ran out just before the film's end. On the other hand, perhaps it's best that we contemplate these sorry figures dealing with the repercussions in our own imaginations. It's far less bloody that way.