Latest Coen brothers film goes up in flames

In "Burn After Reading," the brothers deliver a mesh of all their past oeuvre compressed into a single, two-hour extravaganza. The ingredients of a typical Coen brothers film are all here. Someone in need of money for a petty reason who succumbs to devious ways to attain the coveted dollar signs in his bank account? Check. Stereotypical idiots played by actors that appeared in the directors' previous movies? Check. Nepotism in the form of Frances McDormand (Joel Coen's wife), though, with her talent, it's pretty justified? Check. An accidental murder that soon descends into a mindless hacking of human beings just 'cause it's a freakin' Coen brothers movie and just 'cause it's cool to see blood projecting from the human cranium? Check.

The chaotic film begins with a hackneyed use of a zoomed-in, satellite aerial view of CIA headquarters. (Aha! The CIA probably watches everyone on the planet, but through this movie and Google Maps, we, the average citizens of this globe, can now survey them! Clever.) Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) has just quit his CIA job after being demoted significantly because of an alcohol problem. Cox descends into a tirade of profanities, stomps out of the office and returns home to have another drink, coming to the epiphany that a memoir should be his next project. Unbeknownst to him, his frigid wife Katie (Tilda Swinton) is having an affair with treasury agent Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney). To serve Cox with divorce papers, Katie has copied all his personal files onto a disk, setting the plot in motion.

The disk somehow ends up at a gym, where Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) and Chad Feldheimer (played to utter moronic perfection by Brad Pitt) work. Chad, with the help of Linda, a middle-aged woman desperate to finance four individual plastic surgeries, decides to blackmail Osborne. And everything just spirals out of control. Amid this mayhem, Linda meets Harry the Casanova through an internet dating service, and they embark on a relationship as well. Harry's wife is divorcing him and is also - do you detect a strange uncanniness? - with another man. Basically, this movie is like a massive incestuous college orgy, where almost every other character is getting some, while bald Malkovich is getting none. By the end, a few people have died magnificently in a pool of crimson blood, and the CIA director (J.K. Simmons, in another barking superior-type role) surveys the damage, only to come to the conclusion that the lesson learned is to never let what just happened happen again. Now if only anyone could understand what actually just happened...

"Burn After Reading," with its generous use of blood and the presence of idiotic characters in outlandish circumstances, might seem to be a pretty standard Coen affair, but alas, the pressure of weaving each eccentric character into a conceivable plot is too much to handle. Even as the end credits start to roll on screen, the direction of the movie is quite impalpable. This is, no doubt, the intention of the film, but when one has more than 500 pages of a book to read by the next day, the conclusion can be quite frustrating, as it seems like time has just been wasted on a petty chase of cat and mouse in which the mouse is nonexistent.

Apparently, the roles were written with the actors playing them in mind, except in the case of Swinton. No kidding: The result is that most of the actors fall back on their comfortable acting archetypes. Malkovich is his usual cinematic self, portraying his standard verbally vicious, F-bomb-slinging, malicious character. Clooney is once again cast as an idiot with a superb smile in a Coen brothers movie after similar roles in "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" and "Intolerable Cruelty." Pitt puts his good looks to good use by playing the stereotypical all-protein, no-brain gym instructor. Simmons is again the growling boss, and after seeing him thrice in Spiderman as Jonah Jameson, you do start to get bored of his bellowing antics. McDormand, meanwhile, wears the most ridiculous Edna Mode-like blonde wig and has an irritating speech mannerism that makes me want to strike her across the face with a hatchet every time she speaks (a compliment, I might add).

The few small parachutes on this movie that probably saved it from hitting the ground and exploding into a mushroom of incinerating mush were Pitt, who is delightfully funny with his combination of over-the-top, vaudevillian hilarity and profound naivete, some memorable quotes from Cox that saw the movie's F-word count increase 10-fold every time he spoke, a well-placed Putin photo in the Russian Embassy and Harry's ridiculous sex toy. But other than that, the movie was a confused, absurd mess. Is "Burn After Reading" more like "Burn After Seeing"? In some ways, yeah.

Three out of five stars.