Star rating: 4/5

One of the year’s best films so far, Burn After Reading is a deftly written black comedy from the Coen brothers about what happens when a piece of unclassified information falls into the lap of an imbecile—worse, an imbecile who thinks he’s smart.

In a pitch-perfect performance, Brad Pitt takes on his most buffoonish, un-heroic role to date as Chad, a fitness trainer at a local gym who chances upon a CD containing what he thinks to be high-level secret CIA information. Egged on by his desperately single colleague Linda (Frances McDormand in top form), they ambitiously try to milk their find for all its worth by means of blackmail. The data, in fact, is nothing more than a memoir by an egocentric CIA analyst Osbourne Cox (a deliciously manic John Malkovich), on the verge of losing his grip on life and his wife, who happens to be having an affair with a serial lothario played by a sparkling George Clooney. Propelled by the abject flaws of each character, their idiocy takes on a life of its own, leaving an insidious path of death and wreckage in its wake. A satirical final scene on the inner workings of top bureaucrats caps off the shenanigans in the wry, disarmingly honest manner that only the Coens can pull off.

The plot is outlandish, the convergence of characters contrived, and there is an alternate universe-feel to the visuals. However, in more ways than one, it is a biting piece of realism that mirrors much of what is going on today. There is the aggrandizing self-importance and presumptuous folly of the characters. The sham that marriage has become in modern society. And whilst we laugh at the characters as they run around like headless chickens, when we consider the political and economic chaos going on in the world today, it suddenly becomes a little less funny and more foreboding. For all its snide humor, this is a movie for modern times, and a brilliant one at that. Yong Yung Shin.