What does a review say to a movie where what's bad is what's good, and where what elements appear middling and underdeveloped actually aren't because they're essential to the thematic coherence of the film? Exhaustingly and absurdly mundane, "Burn After Reading" considers the convolutions of the disconnected modern condition. In one telling scene, the film's only dynamic character faces the firearmed state suit who threatens, "You represent the idiocy of the modern world." "I represent nothing," he replies before the bullet enters his shoulder and the hatchet his head.

Set in Maryland, home to CIA headquarters at Langly, the film records the private lives of those same agents and politicians, as well as their lawyers, lovers and gym store employees-trouble is, their lawyers, lovers, gym store employees and state secrets keep tangling up in one another. Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich), bald and bowtied in a three-piece, loses his job over a drinking problem and doesn't take it well, yelling, "Fuck you Peck, you're a Mormon. Next to you we all have a drinking problem!" He resolves to write a memoir but then drinks his way into divorce proceedings with his bitter, frigid, pediatrician wife Katie (Tilda Swinton). She leaves him for treasury field marshall Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney), whose ADHD, scan the room, get-me-the-hell-out-of-here eyes only add to his charm-charm used to seduce awkward Internet daters. On one such date, Harry meets Linda Litztke (Frances McDormand) who, with Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt), her fellow Hardbodies gym employee, incidentally finds a disc containing the financial information and incomplete memoirs of Cox. Amid the surveillence of legal papers and government spooks, driven by Litzke's insecure desperation for cosmetic surgery, any sense soon degenerates into a bloody Fargo fuck-all.

The Coen brothers abandon the landscaping long-shot so effective in their other films for a densely claustrophobic view. Watching the private lives of individuals watched in their private lives implicates the viewer in the act of survellience. The shots are filmed most often in small confines-offices, bedrooms, bathrooms, tightly-staircased brownstone houses. Rarely do more than two characters share the screen. When the camera pulls back, it most often shows a black-car, tinted-window spook. The film positions the viewer as both the spook and subject, splayed across the fragmentary understandings of the characters. Where the long-shot injected coherence into the film, the close-up, piecemeal shot presents an enlightening narrative of convoluted completeness expressive of the characters' own connundra.

This round of Americana from the Coen brothers focuses on the superficiality of directionless lives shared by leaders and losers alike. Brad Pitt embodies this persona as the literally hairbrained Chad, moronic with a 90210 coif. His gum-chewing innocence highlights the ideal type; each character thereafter adulterates the model with cruelty, arrogance or vanity, all tempered by failed insecurities. The lives of the characters are so purposeless that not even their sexual indiscretions or violent murders register a consequence; the CIA covers it all up as insignificant and easily buried, like Internet dating profiles or half-used corporate gift-cards, the condition of this modern age. On first impression as vapid as this condition, "Burn After Reading" reveals itself to be more compelling and critical than that-a commentary on the age, good for all the bad reasons.