"So, what have we learned?" well, the Coens know convoluted/cracked comedy for one

Rating: 10/10 (13 September 2008)

And casting, let's not forget that. The Coen brothers, usually writing with specific actors in mind, have placed some of Hollywood's biggest and some of the plain best actors around in parts in Burn After Reading that test them to how far they can take the material before it spontaneously combusts. Maybe it does. While their film does start a little slow, if not too much so, their plot soon requires all of the actors- some Coen regulars big and small, some new- to act stupid, angry, confused, wacko, desperate, going nuts, and generally in characteristic form of a Coen comedy, which is far and beyond a distinct step above a lot of other zany/dark comedies. Thankfully, they all meet the challenge.
Burn After Reading is about as convoluted as Alfred Hitchcock lost in a jungle-jim screaming for Mommy while the spiked edges of the metal scrape his noggin. And like Hitchcock, they use star George Clooney for great use as their own quasi-Cary Grant (a friend mentioned that Grant never died, he just became Clooney) as a treasury agent who is having not only an affair with a (now) ex-analyst John Malkovich's wife Tilda Swinton, but with internet-date seeker Frances McDormand. And yet, this is just a small part of the screwy-relationships angle of the picture that unfolds, which includes divorce and not-secret longing and even a home-built chair with a springy dildo.
The Coens main concern here, as with Big Lebowski, is just tossing in a plot thread that is about as true a MacGuffin as possible: Malkovich's ex-analyst character starts up his memoirs, and they somehow get on a disc and wind up in the gym locker room at the Hardbodies fitness center, and McDormand and Brad Pitt's dim-witted "good Samaritan" character devise a scheme to muck with Malkovich's documents. From here it becomes a "cluter-fuck" as one character says (or maybe more than one), and there's a string of paranoia running throughout for Clooney, McDormand, and even Malkovich. And without spoiling anything, mayhem and violence ensue.
That last line could also apply to the Coens previous No Country for Old Men, only this time (and not-too-oddly enough this was written off-and-on while that written), in Burn After Reading we soak up all of this with a kind of permission-slip to laugh our heads off. Sometimes it's very dark and nihilistic, and just darn right unexpected- one death especially had me and everyone I was seeing the movie with slack-jawed for a few seconds before suddenly going hysteric for five minutes- but it never really strays from being true to the wacky formula the Coens are used to. This doesn't mean every second will be totally crazy like Raising Arizona, but as it builds it becomes clear it's one of the best of the brothers' comedies, loaded with inspired and cleverly insipid dialog (once again Clooney's character, as in O'Brother, has one certain obsession-tic), and some fine outrageousness. Did I also mention its the funniest work Pitt's done in who knows how long, or that you'll have to stay through the end credits just to be able to laugh at the song?