What one can expect from a Coen Brothers Movie

Rating: 6/10 (5 November 2011)

This film begins and ends in the CIA headquarters at Langley Virginia. It begins with a mid level CIA analyst Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) being demoted and ends with his superiors left bedazzled at the 'shit storm' that they had just managed to avoid. In fact, the entire movie is practically a comedy of errors. At first I found it slow and painful to watch (namely because Cox is a born loser whose wife is having an affair and is planning on divorcing him after she steals all of his money). Actually, all of the characters in this movie are losers, and in the end one just simply laughs at their stupidity.
This is not a movie with any over arching theme that one can explore. Rather it is a black comedy like many of the Coen brothers films (and they do black comedy very well). The thing is, you don't sympathise with the characters, you just shake your head and wince as the movie progresses. Many of them end up dying, though Linda Litzke, the gym worker who is obsessed with getting enough money to be made beautiful, gets her wish in the end. Chad (Brad Pitt), Linda's co-worker, who discovers Cox's memoirs lying in the gym's locker room, sees money in his eyes, but he also ends up dead, and it is one of those classic scenes that you never see coming. Osborne Cox is simply raging at a world that he believes is treating him unfairly. We don't really see too deeply into Cox's personality, so we don't really know if what the CIA says about him is true (that he has a drinking problem), but we do know that he does develop one.
As for Harry Pfarrer, we know absolutely nothing about him. Well, we know what he tells us, but we learn that we cannot believe a word that he says. All we know, in the end, is that he flees to Venezuala because the US does not have a extradition treaty with them (and the CIA doesn't care about him anyway).
What started off as a painful movie, actually turned out to be a very good movie about the pointlessness of existence (therefore it would fall into the category of existentialism). While having a definite beginning and an end, there is not overarching plot moving the movie towards a definite conclusion. Rather, we are catching a glimpse into a period of time in the lives of a group of disconnected people who are stumbling around the world trying to make something of it. In the end it works out fine for the CIA, because everything has been swept under the carpet. While Cox's memoirs were nothing to get excited about, at least, to the CIA, the problem is gone. Did they learn anything from it? Probably not, but then that is the nature of black comedy.