Burn After Reading
After a dark spell, Coens swing back to comedy with 'Burn'
Over the years, the Coen brothers have become the movie equivalent of an inconstant lover. They’re almost always charming and witty and creative, and sometimes they come through with a ‘‘Fargo,’’ so for a second you think there might actually be a long-term relationship there. But then they’ll stand you up at a restaurant and laugh at you for getting mad, and you realize that whatever matters to you, it sure doesn’t matter to them.
‘‘Burn After Reading’’ stands us up at the restaurant — and things were going so well, too. After being richly rewarded for the dark, uncompromising vision that was last year’s ‘‘No Country for Old Men,’’ the Coens have returned to what they like best, which is goofing around with their buddies.
The new film, a slapstick farce in which a number of big Hollywood stars play middle-class boneheads, is set in Washington, D.C. This has led some to seek a political interpretation in the pratfalls; I assure you, no such interpretation exists. John Malkovich plays Osborne Cox, a rageaholic ex-CIA functionary who has written his memoirs, hoping they’ll burn Langley down. Instead, the disc containing the manuscript ends up in the possession of two idiot health-club employees, Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) and Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand).
They decide to shake Osborne down, threatening to take the information to the Russians if he doesn’t play ball. (The vaguely embarrassed expression on a cultural attache at the Russian embassy is one of the movie’s better jokes.) Working at cross-purposes to these three are Osborne’s unhappy wife (Tilda Swinton) and her macho twit of a boyfriend (George Clooney).
The computer disc is a MacGuffin, as is the entire plot, really; the entertainment here lies in watching these dumdums twist in their own wind. ‘‘Burn After Reading’’ is a character comedy, which means everyone behaves like a character. McDormand does rabbity things with her teeth, turning Linda into a self-obsessed, oversexed nerd who can’t stop thinking about the plastic surgery she thinks she needs. Clooney, meanwhile, acts with his throat; his character isn’t sure what foods he’s allergic to and keeps teetering phlegmily on the verge of anaphylactic shock.
Malkovich bellows and swears (he’s been given Steve Buscemi’s speech patterns from ‘‘Fargo’’), while Swinton plays an ice-cold control freak — nothing new there. Richard Jenkins, as McDormand’s boss, pines for her with sad-clown eyes, or perhaps he’s missing his role from ‘‘The Visitor.’’ Pitt — well, actually, Pitt’s hilarious. Chad is the one person here not stomping around in a foul mood only because he’s too stupid to get angry. Each new idea seems like the first idea Chad has ever had; the act of thinking itself fills him with awe.
Pitt’s also the only performer here whose shtick seems to rise from character rather than the other way around. ‘‘Burn After Reading’’ is shallow and proud of it, an antic cartoon that lacks the comic inspiration to go the distance. The biggest laughs don’t even come from the main characters but from a pair of deadpan CIA suits (J.K. Simmons and David Rasche) who regularly brief each other on the increasingly preposterous goings-on. They could be the Coens themselves snarking away at their characters. In a way, that’s the real show.
I suppose the filmmakers have earned a break. Heck, after ‘‘No Country,’’ we’ve earned a break. But the difference between ‘‘Burn After Reading’’ and much better Coen comedies like ‘‘Raising Arizona,’’ ‘‘Fargo,’’ and ‘‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’’ is that the brothers’ smugness has finally gone over the top. Perhaps winning acclaim and Oscars will do that, but never has one of their movies seemed like such an inside joke. ‘‘Burn’’ is a party to which the audience isn’t invited, its unheard soundtrack the Coens’ nervous hermetic giggles.
Way back when they got started, with 1984’s ‘‘Blood Simple,’’ the Coens were able to take a dinky story of greed and ineptness and spin it into an epic. ‘‘Burn’’ manages the opposite: Despite the D.C. setting and international-espionage backdrop, the film’s pointless enough to make you suspect the artistic maturity of ‘‘No Country for Old Men’’ may have been just another pose. Whatever talents the Coens possess, ‘‘Burn After Reading’’ reminds us that ‘‘meaning it’’ may never be one of them.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/movienation.
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