You've got to hand it to the Coen brothers. They never met a genre they couldn't completely eviscerate. With Fargo they turned a folksy character piece into a bloody noir, with The Man Who Wasn't There they turned a noir into an existential character piece, and with their most recent Oscar winner, No Country for Old Men, they took a western and an action movie, slammed them together and somehow pulled out a thoughtful and elegiac melodrama. Now, with their latest star-studded ensemble, Burn After Reading, they've gone one step further and created an entirely new genre of their own - call it screwball nihilism.
The movie opens with a gorgeous zoom, Google Earth-style, from the sky right down into the corridors of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where the low-level analyst Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich) is moments away from being fired. From this seemingly harmless event, the narrative spins swiftly outwards into a wildly intricate Fibonacci spiral that somehow links the hyperactive yet dim gym instructor Chad (Brad Pitt); his best friend, the cosmetic-surgery obsessed Linda (Frances McDormand); her new boyfriend, the serial dater and federal marshal Harry (George Clooney); and his other lover, the current wife of Osbourne Cox, Katie (Tilda Swinton).
Cox, finally free to fulfil his ambitions as a novelist, writes a rough-drafted memoir that is discovered, on a CD file, by Chad on the changing room floor of Hardbodies Fitness Center. Mistakenly interpreted as a cache of top secret CIA information, the file is used to extort money from Cox that will pay for Linda's impending surgery. However, when the increasingly erratic Cox refuses to pay, Linda panics and takes it to the Russians, and Chad keeps Cox's house under surveillance. Katie begins divorce proceedings, and Harry and his loaded gun kick off a third act of surprising violence and unexpected intensity that will leave most viewers shell-shocked.
Though the plot may be zany and labyrinthine, it hardly constitutes the real substance of the movie. Instead, this is a film about character. And here there's a certain stinging bleakness (like there is in much of the Coens' best character work) that many US reviewers found unsettling (though at $45 million [Dh165 million] box office returns so far, the film is something of a triumph). Each character, in other words, is plagued by a particular form of 21st century narcissism that doesn't make for easy viewing. Linda is undignified and neurotically obsessed with her ageing flesh. Osbourne's conceitedness and vanity are overwhelming and best evinced in the faux academic way he pronounces the word "memoir" as "mem-wah". Harry trawls dating websites for women, resulting in some of the harshest scenes the Coen Brothers have put on screen in their careers so far.
Rather than flinch in the face of this screwball nihilism, the viewer should instead embrace it. For there's a maudlin undercurrent to the nefarious activities of our protagonists (all, it must be acknowledged, flawlessly played - Clooney in particular takes huge swipes at his playboy status) that suggest a group of people, perhaps a culture or society even, has lost its way. At his lowest ebb, for instance, after a shock manslaughter, Harry phones his wife, Sandy (Elizabeth Marvel), a successful children's author, and weeps down the phone to her, wishing things could go back to the way they were.
But of course they can't. And as such the movie, like previous Coen classics, is a morality tale and a warning against the misplaced belief that a bag of money or a shot at the big time will heal all human ills and ultimately fill that nagging existential hole at the centre of modern being. It's hardly surprising, then, that the film, once the particularly brutal finale is complete, ends with a reverse zoom - a mirror of the opening - outwards to the skies, space, up to the heavens, and to judgement.