Until last week, I must confess that the only other Coen brothers' film I had seen was "The Big Lebowski." I am not a Coen brothers' groupie, or even a modest fan of their films. But I liked the look of their most recent work, "Burn After Reading," so I decided to trek down to the Eveningstar Cinema. I was not disappointed.
The movie opens at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where Osborne Cox?played by a drunken and enraged John Malkovich?has just been "demoted" because of his drinking problem (or so his Mormon colleague tells him). As Cox cleverly puts it, everyone has an alcohol problem compared to his more sober colleague, and with the excuse of his demotion, Cox decides to leave the agency completely.
The next shot in the film shows that Cox does indeed have a drinking problem; he prepares what appears to be one of too many whiskeys. His irate and cold wife?played by ice queen Tilda Swinton?walks in and demands to know if he picked up the cheese for the dinner party tonight. Before Cox can explain to her about his awful day, she's out the door to get the cheese since her idiot of a husband couldn't remember to pick it up. Somewhat surprisingly, Swinton plays a pediatrician in the film.
At the dinner party we meet Harry Pfarrer, a paranoid sex addict played by George Clooney who is cheating on his own wife with Cox's. Both women think the other is cold and demanding but Harry doesn't mind as long as they're both at his beck and call. Harry is convinced, however, that Cox knows about his escapades with Cox's wife on Cox's own boat, and the successive shots of Harry being tailed convince both Harry and the viewer that the CIA (or Cox) is having Harry followed.
Harry has a bigger sexual appetite than two women, and so enters Linda Litzke, an image-obsessed woman who works at HardBodies Gym and wants the perfect body in order to "reinvent" herself?and to find a man on an Internet dating site that is not a "loser." Linda meets Harry through this dating Web site and is delighted to find an attractive man who has a sense of humor and is interested in her.
Linda gets herself and her co-worker Chad (played by a foolish and effervescent Brad Pitt) into trouble when her desire to have plastic surgery leads her into blackmail and treachery. She and Chad find a CD with supposedly top-secret CIA information on it in the women's locker room of the gym; Linda decides to use that CD to get the money she so desperately needs to pay for her surgeries. She and Chad try to blackmail Osborne Cox (the owner of the CD) into giving them a reward for the CD but when Cox doesn't play ball, Linda gets frustrated and her greed triggers a string of events that leads to death and destruction.
From the twisted plot line comes a story that ends up tight, clear, and humorous. The most endearing character in the movie is Pitt's Chad, since in his naivete, he tries to play the spy (like a ten-year-old boy infatuated with James Bond) but instead gets caught up in a grand game of blackmail and deceit. Interestingly enough, these "games" seem serious not to the people involved, but to the black-suited white men sitting in the concrete Langley Headquarters; it's no big deal?not at all.