Burn After Reading

Directed by Ethan and Joel Coen, starring George Clooney, Frances McDormand, Brad Pitt

John Malkovich stars as Osbourne Cox, a CIA agent who is summoned to the office of his superiors and sacked, apparently for having a drinking problem; the accusation comes from a priggish and religious colleague at whom Cox fires a tremendous comeback zinger.

His woes do not end there. He is married to Katie, played by Tilda Swinton, a pediatrician with an icy, uptight attitude who is nonetheless conducting an adulterous affair with Harry Pfarrer, a married federal marshal played by George Clooney.

In a spirit of revenge for his job loss, Cox writes a lid-lifting memoir of his time at the agency's Balkan desk, and a CD containing the top-secret manuscript winds up in the hands of Linda Litzke and Chad Feldheimer, played by Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt. They are brainless bozos who work at a gym and figure on selling this document to the Russian embassy to pay for Linda's longed-for cosmetic surgery.

Playing the knuckle-headed fitness freak Chad, Brad Pitt is at least unfamiliar. He is so clean-shaven and moisturized as to resemble a baby seal. There are laughs to be had in realizing that this is super-cool Brad Pitt we're watching, pretending to be uncool.

I am not one of the people who believe that the Coens should stay away from broad, straight-ahead comedy. Far from it. I was a fan of their little-loved screwball effort Intolerable Cruelty, whose constituent elements seemed to gel much more satisfactorily. But Burn After Reading is just too frantic, too frenzied. It goes up in smoke.