Reel To Reel: Burn After Reading

Sex, lies, and incompetent espionage.

How It Rates: ***
Starring: George Clooney, Frances McDormand, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton, Brad Pitt, Richard Jenkins
Rated: R
Red Flags: Strong Language (many f-bombs), Brief Strong Sex Scenes including a working "sex machine" -- I kid you not!

Burn After Reading is how the Coen Brothers kick back after their Oscar-winning triumph No Country For Old Men. Yet they hold on to some of the darkness and create an espionage thriller comedy blending the DNA of Robert Ludlum and Elmore Leonard.

The film's serpentine plot involves a CD of sensitive information belonging to ex-CIA official Osborne Cox (Malkovich) which winds up in the hands of two gym employees, love-challenged Linda Litzke (McDormand) and dopey dude Chad Feldheimer (Pitt). Litzke is trying to reinvent herself, dating through an online match site and frustrated with her HMO's refusals to pay for plastic surgery. I kept waiting for somebody to tell Litzke that no insurance plan on the planet pays for elective cosmetic operations. Litzke, however, can't hold on to a boyfriend any more than her no-bad-vibes version of reality. When Feldheimer comes across the CD, the two formulate a plan to extort money from Cox.

Cox doesn't need any more headaches. Pushed into retirement over his drinking, he doesn't know his wife Katie (Swinton) is cheating with Treasury Department agent Harry Pffarer (Clooney), a married, smooth-talking serial womanizer, fitness buff and handyman. Cox is the angry aging spook left with nothing to do except empty the liquor cabinet and pen his memoirs, if he can ever spit them out into a tape recorder.

The scheme to blackmail Cox starts awkwardly and spirals out of control, as Chad bumbles a meeting, leaving Litzke to sell the secrets to the Russians while ending up in a match with Pffarer, not knowing anything about their scheme or his role in touching the whole mess off by fooling around with Mrs. Cox, a cold calculator who made the CD as a first step towards divorce.

Enough convolution. The film starts out disjointed, but brings itself together quickly while maintaining the pace of a spy thriller. It plays surprisingly heavy and violent at times, almost as if the Coens were re-mixing their first major film -- Blood Simple -- for laughs. It derives the bulk of its humor from people who think they can pull off anything but refuse to come up for air when they get in over their heads. Then again, some people don't even know they're in over their heads.

Let me put it this way: you wouldn't laugh at an Olympic gymnast falling off the parallel bars, but what if that gymnast was a thirtysomething ex-model looking for redemption and approval, a person who insists on competing even if she's doomed never to crack a score of 5? That's the sort of empathy one feels for Linda, who just wants a man to marry before her biological clock runs out. Too bad she's surrounded by idiots and incompetents, albeit well-written ones, all the way up to the CIA, which sorta knows what's going on but would rather not mess with it:

CIA Officer: We'll ... interface with the FBI on this dead body.

CIA Superior: No, no. God no. Burn the body. Get rid of it.

CIA Officer: Okay.
Quotes courtesy imdb.com

I can only hope life doesn't reflect art.