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‘Burn After Reading' has the perfect characters

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I meant to write my review of “Burn After Reading” before now, but time seems to have caught up with me. As a fan of the Coen brothers, I looked forward to the film, starring Frances McDormand, George Clooney, John Malkovich and a very funny Brad Pitt. Actually, the entire cast pleases, and while the dark comedy is asininely wacky to a fault, it all makes weird sense and I loved it.

One of my all-time favorite films is “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and while the Coens have proven their skill and mastery as filmmakers time and time again - as in “No Country for Old Men” and “Fargo” - they, in my opinion, do dark, quirky comedy best. “Burn After Reading” follows that same bizarre plot and lovable character trend and it works wonderfully.

While the film's main focus may be comedy, it is an exceptionally dark one, in which broken, lonely individuals unwittingly collide with one another - causing a ripple effect that is both wildly hilarious and insanely shocking. Although very funny, it is remarkably gloomy as well.

We meet a charming but needy and sex-hungry philanderer, Harry Pfarrer (Clooney); a gym manager, Linda Litzke (McDormand), who frequents online dating services and who imagines several plastic surgeries will help her find love; the boss, Ted Treffon (Richard Jenkins), who loves her without her notice; a personal trainer, Chad Feldheimer (Pitt), with an Elvis hair-do and the enthusiastic innocence of a child; a self-important snob, Osbourne Cox (Malkovich), with a bone to pick after being ousted from the CIA; and his acerbic doctor wife, Katie Cox (Tilda Swinton), who is preparing to leave him, and who is sleeping with Clooney's character on the side.

The cast is exceptional, no doubt about it. Pitt and McDormand play off each other beautifully as Litzke and Feldheimer, who attempt to blackmail Cox after finding a computer disk which appears to contain CIA secrets, when in fact it is just the beginnings of Cox's memoirs. Meanwhile, Pfarrer is sleeping with Cox's wife, and soon even bedding Linda.

The coincidences do not end here and I don't want to offer any spoilers, but the net of connections that the Coens weave is crazy amazing and train-wreck interesting.

Clooney once again shines in this role as a goofy, paranoid womanizing husband, who believes he is under government surveillance - after all, his main mistress is the wife of a former CIA man, so why not? He gets wide-eyed and jittery at all the right moments, making him ultra-believable in the role and honestly, excellent fun to watch.

Swinton and Malkovich, too, are exceptional - I can't see any other actors doing as well with such roles. They master pretentiousness. Malkovich is particularly malicious, but all the while oddly funny. There is drollness about his character that makes him oddly mesmerizing. It is his tale that ultimately drives the whole wild web of happenstance and treachery.

Jenkins, who everyone knows I loved in “The Visitor” but hated in “Step Brothers,” wins back my admiration in “Burn After Reading.” Even if his role is somewhat small, it is highly significant.

Still, while I truly enjoyed each and every actor in the film, I delighted in Pitt's performance. He is seriously the epitome of a dumb blond - lovable, but not the sharpest tool in the shed, if I may be cliché.

“Burn After Reading” rightly rated-R, while certainly a dark comedy, stands as an odd testament to the hazards of infidelity, vanity and greed. I laughed at some aspects, until I almost cried. But I was also taken aback by the sheer gloominess of its underlying themes. The more I mull it over, the more impressed I am with the brothers' writing and directing than ever before. Theirs is a gift. They smartly include in their story Cox's former CIA supervisor (J.K. Simmons), who as news of various strange goings-on are reported to him, attempts to make sense of the outlandish happenings. He serves both to explain what is going on and to put things into a humorous perspective - masterful storytelling, that could have turned off as a mishmash of idiocy.

Is ‘Burn After Reading' perfect? No, not really. But, it is flawlessly entertaining, with perfect players and it is wonderful in its interesting presentation of what appears to be an excess of chance encounters that lead to peculiar and dire conclusions. More importantly, its mature messages are undoubtedly clear. I will watch it again, if for nothing more than the curiosity, but also because I want to look for what I missed in the mayhem and madness the first time around. I am placing a B+ in my grade book. I am seeing it, at least at this point, in my top ten list this year.

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