Burn After Reading shows lighter side of Coen Brothers

Following the success of their Academy Award winning and considerably darker film No Country for Old Men, the brothers Coen bring to the cinema a witty and wisecracking comedy/thriller entitled Burn After Reading.

Boasting a cast of A-list actors and frequent collaborators including George Clooney, Frances McDormand, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton and Brad Pitt, Burn After Reading is a highbrow spoof on the spy genre as well as the current state of American values.

It's a return to form for the directors whose past comedic ventures included cult classics O, Brother Where Art Thou?, The Big Lebowski, and the North Dakota-set crime drama peppered with comedic undertones, Fargo. Its great thing to see for any fan of their previous work that they didn't leave behind their funny side altogether.

Burn After Reading chronicles the life of Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), a recent dropout of the C.I.A. with a drinking problem and half-baked plan to write a memoir of his life. The embittered veteran is left to wallow in his failures as his wife is more and more hostile towards him as the film bears on.

His wife Katie (Tilda Swinton, Michael Clayton) is already planning on leaving her husband for her longtime lover, D.C. philanderer Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney). Pfarrer, a married Federal Marshall with an eccentric hobby for lackluster inventions and a penchant for picking up women, loves sex, jogging and meandering his way through life with a completely aloof sensibility. Among the women he has romanced is Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand), a middle-aged Hardbodies Fitness Centers employee, desperate for several plastic surgeries and for a long-term life partner via the endless subpar options on the various dating sites she is a part of.

Her world is turned upside down when a CD copy of Osborne Cox's memoirs are found on the floor in the women's locker room by her coworker and dim-witted friend Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt).

Chad, a muscleman trainer with an IQ lower than a toddler's, decides to team up with Linda to extort money from Osborne for his "highly classified" information and thus sparking an interlocking web of violence, intrigue and folly on the streets of the nation's capital.

The film's tagline "Intelligence is Relative" is the ongoing theme of a film that has characters on all levels of the American capitalist food-chain that are all linked by their circumstances and their stupidity.

It is truly hard to point out any one performance as a standout, since everyone is performing at the top of their game. However, it must be noted that the so-called blackmailer team of Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt are so inherently funny that in several scenes I laughed so hard that I was brought to tears.

Especially in the scene when they first call Osborne Cox over the phone to let him know that they are in possession of his precious writing, the scene is an instant film classic where both actors display perfect comedic timing and chemistry. Burn After Reading may not be the best film produced by the Coen brothers, and it is not their best comedy. But in comparison to the rest of recent cinema, it just displays how ahead of the curve they really are that one of their lesser films is the most unique, original and intelligent movies running in the Cineplex this September.