IF you’re the sort of filmgoer who thinks of the Coen brothers as American cinema’s most nihilistic, misanthropic double threat, tittering behind their movie camera at the duncery and pointlessness of human affairs, you’ll find vindication aplenty in Burn after Reading, the sibling act’s 13th film and easily one of their most unpleasant. As for those of us who prefer to think of the Coens as misunderstood humanists whose taste for the absurd and the grotesque obscures their underlying moralism-well, there’s nothing to be done after a film like this except slink off to our dens and slip Raising Arizona or even Fargo in the DVD player, in the hopes that the bighearted charms of H. I. McDunnough or Marge Gunderson will wash the sour taste of Burn after Reading from our palate.
This is not to say the brothers’ latest effort is without its pleasures. Critical accolades seem to inspire the Coens to pursue parody: The much-lauded Fargo was followed by The Big Lebowski, a shaggy send-up of a Raymond Chandler whodunit, and now they’ve followed up last year’s much-garlanded No Country for Old Men by taking aim at the D.C. spy thriller. All the familiar elements are in place-the Langley corridors, the gliding black cars, the Georgetown gunshots, the A-list stars (George Clooney and Brad Pitt), and of course the much-prized, much-pursued disc encoded with top-secret information. Except that the information on the CD is worthless, the A-list stars are playing dolts, the guns go off by accident, the gliding cars are carrying process servers, and Langley doesn’t have a bloody clue what’s going on.
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