Kooky Coens At It Again with Dark Screwball Paranoia Comedy

Rating: 9/10 (25 September 2008)

Winning Oscars hasn't kept Joel and Ethan Coen from their tradition of switching back and forth between comedies and dramas. The brothers have followed up the brilliant Western noir NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN with the funnier, less bloody but no less wickedly anarchic BURN AFTER READING (BAR), reuniting actors who've worked together in and out of previous Coen Brothers movies. Set in Washington, DC and environs (portrayed brilliantly by New York and New Jersey :-)), BAR is a screwball paranoia comedy about people who work in intelligence, pitted against people who lack intelligence. :-) When Osborne Cox (John Malkovich, proving he fits right in with the Coens' loopy repertory company) loses his CIA job, he decides to write his memoirs. A disk found at the Hardbodies Gym with what ditsy trainer Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) suspects is "sensitive s**t" belonging to Cox builds a chain of nutzoid misunderstandings, violence, and other paranoia-fueled shenanigans. Those drawn into the insanity include Chad's co-worker Linda Litzke (the ever-wonderful Frances McDormand, her blue-green eyes communicating as much as her dithery yet determined voice. She's also wearing Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh hairdo, but it looks better on McDormand :-)), hoping to finance her extreme plastic surgery makeover by getting money from Cox; reward or blackmail, it's all the same to Linda and Chad. (Without giving away too much, love-starved Linda ends up an unwitting femme fatale, in every sense of the term.) Then there's womanizing Treasury agent Harry Pfarrar (George Clooney, doing a frantic comic version of his Oscar-winning SYRIANA role right down to the beard), a man who needs to run after sex (literally and figuratively) to stay in a good mood and is never without an oddball choice of words: "I have lactose refluxDoes that contain shell food?"; Tilda Swinton as Katie, Cox's tightly-wound pediatrician wife; Richard Jenkins as Ted Treffon, Hardbodies' manager, who's secretly in love with the clueless, self-absorbed Linda; and J.K. Simmons and David Rasche as CIA men who have to sort out the increasingly crazy mess. The whole cast is terrific, but if anybody steals the show, it's Brad Pitt with his two-tone hair and smilingly bumbling attempts at extortion. Like our household faves Max von Sydow and Anjelica Huston, Pitt knows when to have fun with a role, and his delight in playing Chad is infectious. Even BAR's little details are a hoot, like Cox hiding out on his houseboat and keeping in shape by exercising to FitTV's GILAD'S BODIES IN MOTION (I've used the show to further my own fitness efforts :-)); Harry singing "My Eyes Adored You" and "Born Free" in the shower (alas, we only see this from the viewpoint of Chad, who's hiding in the closet :-)); and Linda using the (fictional) romantic comedy COMING UP DAISY, starring Dermot Mulroney and Claire Danes, as a litmus test for the dates she meets online. (There's even footage of Mulroney urging the unseen Daisy to get down from a tree. Maybe Mulroney did it as a favor to his buddy Pitt.) Between his affairs and 5-mile runs, Harry finds time to be a hobbyist; without spoiling anything, I can only say the contraption he builds gets my vote for Best Performance by an Inanimate Object. I'll admit BAR may not be for all tastes, but to quote James Thurber, if you like this sort of thing (and obviously I do), it's the sort of thing you'll like!