![]() ![]() The plot, which ambles pleasantly through Washington, DC and its Virginia and Maryland suburbs, consists of a series of neatly interlocking missteps and misunderstandings surrounding a disk that contains the spy memoirs of one Osborne Cox (Malkovich). For fans of the Coens, though (and I consider myself one), it suggests, especially on the heels of No Country for Old Men, that they have rediscovered their cinematic vision after several lean years. This is a film whose idiosyncratic vibe will not appeal to everyone, a work that does not conform to expectations but rather requires expectations to conform themselves to it. The characters in Burn After Reading may be clowns, but they are largely recognizable ones, whose failures (and, in more than one case, fatalities) are not played strictly for laughs. Even as American comedy has become almost wholly Apatowized and Ferrellified, growing louder and crasser and more self-consciously buffoonish, the Coens have gone the opposite way, ratcheting back their own zaniness. But the Coens are operating in a different key here. Such types would have fit in easily among the broad caricatures and grotesques that populated such Coens comedies as Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski (to say nothing of weaker efforts such as Intolerable Cruelty and their atrocious remake of The Ladykillers). Specifically: a sweet but needy and sex-addicted philanderer (George Clooney) a gym administrator and patron of online dating services who imagines a vast surgical makeover will help her find love (Frances McDormand) the boss who has love to offer her if only she would notice (Richard Jenkins) a personal trainer who combines the pompadour of a '50s crooner with the eager innocence of a Labrador Retriever (Brad Pitt) a self-important preppie furious at having been drummed out of the CIA (John Malkovich) and the caustic pediatrician wife who is preparing to leave him (Tilda Swinton). Although very funny, it is unexpectedly sad as well, a King of Comedy in which half a dozen Rupert Pupkins vie for attention. Burn After Reading may be a comedy, but it is an exceptionally dark one, in which damaged, lonely souls collide but rarely make real contact. But the movie's subsequent evolution was less radical than you might guess from the giddy, pop-inflected trailers that advertise it. We sort of wanted to do a spy movie," Ethan Coen recently explained, discussing his and his brother Joel's latest film, Burn After Reading.
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