‘Burn After Reading’: Contrived Coens or deceptive deviation?

With the release of “Hudsucker Proxy” in 1993, Ethan and Joel Coen garnered immediate praise as both masters and imitators. Entertainment Weekly famously remarked, “How can a filmmaking team be this smart and clever, this restlessly, vivaciously imaginative, and this soulless?” The point was well taken. The Coen Brothers spent the rest of the ’90s sharpening their style, and thus, found themselves continually walking the fine line between sardonic brilliance (“Fargo”) and sloppy pastiche (“The Man Who Wasn’t There”). Their common problem is not that we do not get the meta-fiction and irony, but rather that it’s too apparent and deliberate.

“Burn After Reading” is a return to the Coen brothers’ earlier habits. The film admits its own irrelevance while finding entertainment and convincing viewers to keep seated.

The premise is a simple one, but as any true Coen fan knows, it will end up as anything but.

Osborne Cox is a CIA agent who is fired from his job due to “politics and bureaucracy.”

Osborne chooses to write his memoirs and discovers that a copy of them have fallen into the hands of two devious gym employees, Chad (Brad Pitt) and Linda (Frances McDormand). Soon the film spirals into a dangerous limbo, involving the hysterics of Osborne’s wife’s lover (George Clooney), and an intersection of entanglements, romances, and deceit.

The Coens know this is contrived and choose to pull as many strings as they can-a move reminiscent of the later moments of Fargo.

The acting is uniformly good. Brad Pitt is unabashedly geeky as Linda’s partner in crime. He “plays the hair,” as is such a common remark about his knack for idiosyncratic supporting roles. But this has been a year of devilishly appropriate caricature; Heath Ledger’s Joker being the best example. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for McDormand, whose character is attempted sympathy but ends up as farce. Her moments of sullen romanticism feel lost in a film concerned more about frolic than retreat. The film’s brightest point is George Clooney, who, for once, plays into his own charm, using its excessiveness to boldly declare his perversions (the film’s funniest moment involves a quite inexplicable perversion). John Malkovich seems to have resurrected another enjoyably laconic depressive, but he is too drowned in booze half the time for it to really come out.

The film has some entertaining sequences; the most impressive being a moment involving Clooney and an intruder. But these are far and few in between. I’m reminded of Walt in “The Squid and the Whale.” Compensating for his lack of literary aptitude, he channels his father when he suggests to a girl that “This Side of Paradise,” a book he hasn’t read, is a “minor Fitzgerald.” “Burn After Reading” is a minor Coen-that much I am sure. Of course, with its transience and divergence from truth – and its eerily appropriate title – I can’t be sure that I’ve experienced it as well.