Comedy of Errors.

Rating: 5/10 (23 December 2009)

John Malkovich is a mid-level CIA bureaucrat who is fired for misbehavior. "A DRINKING problem?," he shouts wildly. "You're a MORMON. Next to you we ALL have drinking problems!" Propelled by revenge he begins to write a tell-all memoir, saving it to disk. He loses the disk at a gym, Hardbodies, where it's found by the empty-headed employees Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand, who try to sell it to the Russians, who aren't interested in it because it's "drivel." McDormand meets womanizing ex-Secret Service agent, George Clooney, who is schtupping Malkovich's wife. The disk full of "secret" information is forgotten about and there follow all sorts of permutations on misidentification, paranoia, murder, and confusion.
Of these, the trump is confusion. The CIA is trying to keep track of all this but is constantly being surprised and left bemused by new and inexplicable coincidences. So is the viewer.
The humor doesn't depend on the plot, which is nonsense, but on twists and inversions of the conventions of the spy movie, and maybe movies in general. It's a comedy with some very funny moments, and other moments that clunk like a fumbled bronze mallet. Example of funny moment.
Brad Pitt wants to confront Malkovich and demand money for the lost disk, so he breaks into Malkovich's house. Malkovich himself is out, but his wife's lover, Clooney, comes in and makes himself at home while the terrified Pitt hides in a bedroom closet. Clooney comes upstairs to the bedroom, takes a shower, casually puts on a robe, whistling and singing to himself. Then he opens the closet door.
We expect to find Pitt cowering behind the clothes. Instead, there he is, right up front, greeting Clooney with a silent grin full of glistening white teeth, as if he were selling magazines on the doorstep. We only see his face for an instant -- before Clooney makes a reflexive grab for his gun and blows Pitt's head off.
That's one of the more amusing scenes.
The performances are okay. Nobody flubs it and, in fact, Brad Pitt is outrageous in his enactment of a comic role. The direction itself has its smiles. I do wish more effort had gone into plotting a story that had more opportunities for laughs, that didn't depend so heavily on cute moments and characters with pointless quirks.