Burn After Reading

Our entourage liked the Coen Brothers' new film "Burn After Reading," mostly because the actors worked so hard to make us laugh. And we did. Even my husband laughed out loud. We were all exhausted from a week of too much work and far too much anxiety. It isn't the best Coen Brothers' film. Personally, I am a devoted fan to "The Big Lebowski," which I just watched again for the upteenth time in celebration of its tenth anniversary. But "Burn After Reading" succeeded in characterizing an attitude of government that pretty much says it all.

The plot of "Burn After Reading" is silly, complex, and full of compulsive sex and working out. Briefly, Linda, played by an impeccable Frances McDormand, wants four plastic surgery operations to keep herself viable for finding a husband. She works in a gym called Hardbodies. She hoodwinks her co-worker Chad, emphatically played by Brad Pitt, into helping her raise the funds by blackmailing a deposed CIA analyst Osborne Cox. A cd with Cox's financial information is found in the gym and misinterpreted as national security secrets. That CIA analyst is the character created by John Malkovich, and every time I see him in anything, new or old, I long for him to return to acting. His character is filled with rage, Malkovich has absolutely no vanity, so his portrayal of rage is the heart of the humor of the film. At one point, dressed in a bathrobe and boxer shorts, he grabs a hatchet and shouts into a cell phone that he is coming over to his former marital home with the "new keys."

His estranged wife is Tilda Swinton who brings new dimensions to the chilly wife genre. She is having an affair with George Clooney, a career Federal Marshall, whose bad caps make his smile almost swampy swarmy. He compulsively sleeps with women he finds on the Net and compulsively ends each tryst by going for a run. A day without working out actually brings him to tears. We never see him working, only screwing around during the day, another comment about government. What do they do?

Only Brad Pitt seems truly happy, perhaps because he goes through life with his iPod connected directly to his brain. And he is delightfully dumb.

But the cleverness of the film isn't the plot, which anyone can follow, although at a crucial moment, there is a terrible editing cut. The cleverness is the dialogue within the CIA as the slapstick turn of events get reported back to Agency higher ups. This is why the film works. The attitude of the CIA captures our belief that nothing in government, especially this government, is working. At one point, the Agency manager tells his division chief, Palmer, to come back "when everything makes sense."

That captured it for me: come back to me when everything makes sense.