But, somehow, it's not.
Oh, there are laughs - Brad Pitt steals the show from a cast of highly decorated co-stars with his role as a lunkhead exercise instructor who tries to blackmail a disgruntled CIA man (John Malkovich).
But "Burn After Reading" has no after burner - the movie raises expectation of something great just around the corner, a corner it never quite turns. And the Coens contend with an old bugaboo here - the feeling they might identify a little too closely with Malkovich's character, who declares that he's surrounded by a "legion of idiots."
Malkovich plays a career analyst who's asked to leave his CIA post because he's a temperamental drunk. He doesn't get much sympathy from his icy wife (a perfectly cast Tilda Swinton) and we get the idea their marriage is far from perfect.
Ditto for Harry (George Clooney), a pompous U.S. marshal married to a writer of children's books. We see marriage is a loveless vacuum, and throughout "Burn" there is the idea of romantic dissatisfaction, and it always leads to trouble.
Frances McDormand, for instance, plays a single woman who gets involved in the blackmail scheme to fund cosmetic surgery she hopes will improve her prospects in online dating (even though her lonely hearts boss, Richard Jenkins, is clearly in love with her).
As expected, the plot-savvy Coens find devilishly clever ways to link these disparate stories. They're less successful in finding a tone to connect them. The pitch of the performances is off, or mismatched. Clooney and McDormand are too broad, Malkovich too operatic. Only Swinton is right on, and as mentioned, Pitt is a howl in an uncharacteristically bubbly role.
TV ads zero in on Pitt's performance, promising zany fun. But "Burn After Reading" is darker, more somber, often brooding, complemented by a Carter Burwell score that sounds like a dirge.
And the ending is a puzzle. It punctuates a running joke about CIA men (J.K. Simmons, David Rasche) surveying the whole, sorry mess, at a loss to explain the venal behavior of the people caught up in it.
In the final moments, as a spook briefs his boss on the fate and disposition of everyone involved in these shabby, intersecting conspiracies, we realized it's all been resolved off camera.
It's as if the Coens themselves decided the lives of their own characters weren't worth the trouble of further dramatization. *
Produced, written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, music by Carter Burwell, distributed by Focus Features.
