Blackmail for beginners

Filmmaking brothers Joel and Ethan Coen must have felt expectation nipping at their heels after the critical and artistic breakthrough that was the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men. But with their followup, Burn After Reading, they’ve sidestepped the what-next? pressure altogether by aiming low, or maybe medium-high. No, they will not go deeper into the mesmerizing metaphysical trauma of No Country, but will retreat instead to the less challenging, more comfortable mash-up of comedy, violence and irony that they do so well, and often. Burn After Reading is the Coens in buffoons-and-bloodshed mode. (Best variation: Fargo; worst: Intolerable Cruelty.) It’s minor, but not meaningless, a screwball comedy that contains a few mini-truths worth divining.

Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand, eyes glued open) is a middle-aged clerk at Hardbodies gym looking to "reinvent" herself. Schooled in self-help, she spouts some vague talk about positive thinking, but mostly, improvement means plastic surgery, and plastic surgery means cash, of which Linda is a tad short. When her gum-chewing gym-bot colleague Chad (Brad Pitt) finds a CD-ROM that may (or may not) contain classified CIA documents, the two detect a potential windfall. These bumblers are not exactly natural blackmailers, especially when up against the disc’s owner, Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), an alcoholic, newly fired CIA analyst who has never met a negative emotion he hasn’t instantly expressed.

The film is set, not accidentally, in Washington, D.C., a place of old bridges and beautiful houses with ugly people inside. This is the symbolic America as the Coens see it today: rampant individualism, a me-first site of collusion and collision.

In the district of service, citizens serve only themselves: Cox’s wife (Tilda Swinton, subtly hilarious with a pursed look of total revulsion and irritation) is sleeping with a married federal marshal (George Clooney ). He’s a cheerful libido-slave with a penchant for anonymous lunchtime rendezvous and trips to Home Depot. Clooney, in a relatively small part, is exuberantly ego-free as a dimwit whose good looks (even without any of Clooney’s real-life charm) have been more than enough to get him by for a lifetime. Pitt, Icon #2, isn’t so assured; as a comedian, he flaps and flutters too needily.

Of course, the blackmail plot spirals into disaster, with bodies piling up in the most unlikely places, and bewildered CIA agents (headed by Juno’s J.K. Simmons) scratching their heads at the mess. The incompetence of people is matched only by the incompetence of institutions.

In the eye of the storm is Linda, a character lucky to be in the hands of McDormand. The actress not only wrings laughs from Linda’s narcissism, but makes her loneliness palpable. When she first sees Clooney, an unusually fetching internet date, the look that slowly moves across her face is hilarious, and touchingly optimistic: Jackpot! Linda’s gung-ho hopefulness smacks a little of Olive, the girl in Little Miss Sunshine, another film about the limitations of this historical moment’s rah-rah, create-your-own-happiness cult of ignorance. "I need a can-do person!" says Linda, oblivious to the romantic overtures of the one authentic person in her hemisphere, her pockmarked boss (the wonderful Richard Jenkins). McDormand’s Linda is a simpleton, not an idiot, but she’s losing herself. By the film’s bloody climax, she is totally gone, given over to her pettiest side.

Without Cormac McCarthy’s text to deepen their dark instincts, the Coens don’t seem as in touch with the potential poetry of their work. It’s not beautiful or transcendent, but Burn After Reading still reveals effort, taking careful comedic aim at stupidity and avarice. Malkovich, who uses his windbaggy fury to great effect, delivers a rant about the "culture of idiocy." You can hear the Coens in his voice — appalled, but mostly laughing.

Burn After Reading opens Sept. 12.

Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCNews.ca.