Only the Coen brothers could assemble a spy movie without any of the logic of a typical Hollywood spy thriller. Burn After Reading is a brilliant joke about a staple Hollywood genre. It is a surreal satire about spy thrillers. Indeed, the spies and thrills don’t add up at all. The plot is a total mistake. The characters are madly absurd. The film shouldn’t work, but it does.

John Malkovich is a CIA expert on Balkan affairs. He is summoned to a bunker in Washington and sacked because absolutely no one likes him. No one actually knows what he does. His wife is a shrill English ice-cube, played by Tilda Swinton, who couldn’t care less. She is having an affair with a ghastly married lech played by George Clooney. But Clooney, who is addicted to internet sex, is also having an affair with a needy secretary on the wrong side of 50 played by Frances McDormand.

She is desperate to raise cash for phantom surgical improvements. The comic result is that all these exquisitely awful people flip-flop grotesquely across each other’s storylines. According to the publicity notes, the Coen brothers asked their ludicrously glamorous cast to seek out “the knucklehead within”. The actors have done this with a vengeance.

Brad Pitt is stunning as a bubble-gum air-head who works as a trainer at the gym where McDormand works. He go-go dances in a tight red T-shirt in almost every scene he’s in. He thinks he’s discovered “top-secret shit” when a floppy disc containing Malkovich’s mad Balkan memoirs is discovered in the changing rooms. McDormand tries to sell it to the cultural attaché at the Russian embassy for preposterous amounts of cash. Malkovich is just magnificent as the deranged ex-civil servant who can’t work out why two profoundly thick employees of a local gym are trying to blackmail him.

The CIA can’t work out why people are shot, or axed to death in the street. They can’t work out why gym employees are trying to sell a weird and illegible rant to the Russians. J. K. Simmons is terrific as the CIA boss: “Report back to me when . . . oh, I don’t know . . . when it makes sense.” It’s a peach of a line that nearly explains all.

I can understand why audiences may balk at the symmetry of the plot and the serendipity of the cast. Burn After Reading is a fabulously witty company of characters who are sublimely self-obsessed. It’s not as questing or philosophical as the Coen brothers’ usual experiments with Hollywood genres. But simplicity is bliss. The film is a rude and welcome swipe at blinkered ignorance and political paranoia.

15, 95 minutes

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