Canadian humour in an American Movie

Rating: 7/10 (16 November 2012)

The first thing to understand about his movie is it is a comedy. It did not dawn on me until I was well into the movie. I debated whether I should consider revealing this fact a spoiler. I am used to very broad humour in American movies. This was more subtle leg-pulling Canadian style humour. There is a comedy show on CBC Radio called "This is That" in Canada where every week they suck new listeners into thinking it is a legit soft news show interviewing eccentric people. Listeners phone in to express their outrage at the things the interviewees are proposing. Burn after reading is like the movie version of This is That.
I saw the cast including Brad Pitt and George Clooney and expected them to play roles highly charming to females. But Pitt plays a character as strange as Dustin Hoffman's Ratzo Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy or Raymond Babbit in Rainman. He is handsome and sexy as only Brad Pitt can be, but with so many strange verbal and kinetic tics and hair styled by Peewee Herman, he creeped me out.
Nearly everybody sleeps with nearly everybody else. It takes great effort to figure out who is married to whom, who is lovers with whom, who is angry about their partner's infidelity and who is not. It is like a kaleidoscope of partners shuffling.
You have to keep track not only of the plot twists, but what each character thinks is going on. It is as complicated as a French farce.
To add to the complication, John Malkovich and J.K. Simons look somewhat alike, so I sometimes got them confused too.
Simons is the perfect actor for the role of CIA chief. He can say anything with a straight face and make it sound completely reasonable and sober. They gave him the final scene. No matter what happens, he takes it in stride. The preposterous of this builds and builds as the situations get more and more insane. Then suddenly I twigged at the utter absurdity of it all and collapsed in laughter.
It is a very cleverly constructed movie where the humour sneaks up on you.