'Burn After Reading'

Rating:

BY RAFER GUZMÁN | rafer.guzman@newsday.com

September 11, 2008

PLOT Two clueless gym employees blackmail a former CIA agent with unintended results. (R)

CAST George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton.

LENGTH 1:36.

PLAYING AT Area theaters.

BOTTOM LINE Another brutal and fitfully hilarious farce from the Coen Brothers, though the nagging nihilism sometimes cancels out the comedy.

No one makes movies like Joel and Ethan Coen, which might be a good thing. After all, someone has to make us feel like life is more than a sick joke.

After nabbing several Oscars with last year's brutal, nihilistic crime-drama " No Country for Old Men," the Coen Brothers return with the brutal, nihilistic comedy "Burn After Reading," which opens tomorrow. The film opens with a cosmic view of planet Earth, a satellite-style image that foreshadows the coming themes of surveillance and skulduggery but also signals that the Coens are once again playing God - and not a merciful one.

This time the writhing humans include slovenly CIA analyst Osborne Cox ( John Malkovich) and his emasculating wife, Katie ( Tilda Swinton), who's secretly sleeping with neurotic federal marshal Harry Pfarrar ( George Clooney, a Coens regular, and for good reason).

When Osborne begins writing a tell-all memoir, a draft somehow winds up in the hands of two dim-bulb gym employees, bubbly Linda ( Frances McDormand) and the even bubblier Chad ( Brad Pitt).

Chad merely hopes for a small reward, but Linda, whose big dream is to pay for a series of cosmetic surgeries, decides to play hardball. As in any Coen Brothers romp, complications ensue.

This sprawling, fitfully hilarious mess of miscommunication and murder doesn't stand up to "Fargo" or "Blood Simple" (still the Coens' most perfect film), but it's a chance to watch some top-notch actors jump their rails and head into terra bizarro.

Malkovich winds himself into several spit-showering rages; Clooney plays an oversexed weirdo (wait'll you see his prized possession); and the glamorous Mr. Pitt is in rare comic form as an ebullient idiot, the kind of bouncy dude whose fingers are always shaped into friendly pistols.

Much of the violence takes place off-screen, but just as much is jarringly visible - and near the end it all gets a bit disheartening.

Then again, these are the Coen Brothers, whose motto could be: It's not funny until someone gets hurt.