Browsing Internet dating services, Linda thinks she needs extensive “work” on her face and arms and tummy, so that she can meet better guys. Her Linda Litzke, an administrator at the Hardbodies gym, provides a plot motor of sorts. But it’s hard to sense much laughter behind “Burn After Reading.” Even Frances McDormand, the salt-of-the-earth actress who has warmed so many of the Coen brothers movies, falls into a queasy dead zone. The Coens have often worked out their private sense of amusement and disdain onscreen: in the baffling gangster jargon and reversals of loyalty in “Miller’s Crossing” in the bizarrely punitive disasters that beset the left-wing-prig screenwriter in “Barton Fink” in the openmouthed idiocies of the three escaped cons in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” In those movies, one could detect the brothers laughing at a world of fools who never understand what’s happening to them and mess everything up. No one in the movie responds to anyone else. The father, however, has had a stroke and can’t respond. analyst who has been canned for drinking, unburdens himself to his father. The Coens dramatize their point of view in a brief scene in which John Malkovich’s Osborne Cox, an irascible, Princeton-educated C.I.A. The one person who falls truly in love gets nowhere. They throw themselves into adultery but get little pleasure out of it, not even the excitement of betrayal. The characters-Washington types, in and out of government-are all egotists who think they know how the world works yet miss the most obvious signals. “Burn After Reading” has plenty of momentum-short, tight-knit scenes of people arguing, driving, screwing, fighting-and, if you listen hard, you may hear echoes of a portentous old Capitol Hill drama like “Advise and Consent.” But those echoes are stifled by a farce plot so bleak and unfunny that it freezes your responses after about forty-five minutes. The new Coen brothers picture, “Burn After Reading,” is a very black comedy set in a blanched, austere-looking Washington, D.C.-an uninspiring and uncomfortable place in which everyone betrays everyone else, and the emotional tone veers from icy politeness to spitting rage and back again.
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