Burn After Reading confirms that Minnesota’s No Country for Old Men Coen boys, Joel and Ethan, have scuttled their dry Midwest irony, not only for awards, but also for box office. Contrast character names for Frances McDormand, who played the understated, happily married and pregnant good rural police chief Marge Gunderson in Fargo, with motor-mouth for-laughs bubblehead blackmailer Linda Litzke in this newest offering, a “comedy spy thriller” about government intelligence and adjacent adventurer misfits.  

Shown at the Toronto Festival after a world première on Venice’s opening night, it got lots of audience yuks at an all-media screening in New York, but that was from the gut without any of the distancing which provokes thought or humor for the head. Balanced satellite zeroing in, and at the end out, calls up American Beauty, but whereas the Sam Mendes début was sad, funny and understanding, the current parody is merely easy cynicism. Does anyone care for these characters, who are lying schemers and scammers -- each with his tag word or mannerism, leeringly overacted, cartoonish one-dimensional?

Foul-mouthed among foul mouths, drunk among drinkers, Central Intelligence Agency Balkans analyst Osborne “Ozzie” Cox (John Malkovich) is not precisely fired but transferred and demoted, and in righteous anger he resigns, or so he tells icy wife Katie (Tilda Swinton), to write a tattletale memoir. A pediatrician sporting a Wicked Witch of the West manner with patients, she has already consulted a divorce lawyer (J.R. Horne), anyway, and is about to change locks on their Georgetown townhouse and empty their bank accounts. She pushes to marry longtime lover Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney) as soon as that federal marshal who packs a virgin automatic pistol divorces his children’s-author wife Sandy (Elizabeth Marvel).

SPOILER ALERT

Harry doesn’t suspect that Sandy, too, plans divorce, maybe for her Seattle book-tour lover (Patrick Boll), for he is too busy jogging, talking a mile a minute and seducing a swath through the capital.

Cox, whose alcoholic interests are seen in an extraneous Princeton old boys’ reunion, joins Hardbodies Fitness Center manager Ted Treffon (Richard Jenkins) and trainer Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) as the only characters not led by libido. For some reason a former Orthodox priest, Ted is self-effacing and quiet in unspoken love for employee Linda, while, his hair two-toned, Pitt hams up the latter as a finger-popping, health- and iPod-freak lightweight sucked in by Linda.

Surfing everywhere for a man, Linda turns even shallower when her insurance company refuses to pay for cosmetic procedures discussed with a smug surgeon (Jeffrey DeMunn). The combinations of affaires will converge in a series of coincidences, with resolution more or less set in motion via that old standby of misplaced files. The CD of Ozzie’s book draft is found at the gym by Manolo (Raul Arañas) and mistaken by Linda and gum-chewing stooge Chad for top secret stuff that can bring in blackmail or national insecurity money. They are not choosy which.

Acting stupidly and motivated by selfishness, the characters play their parts to the bitter, meaningless end. Only, oddly, the CIA head officer (J.K. Simmons) keeps a cool head while all about him are losing theirs. "What have we learned?" he asks, then answers himself. "Not to do it again, but we don’t know what we did, so pay it," he orders his underling. Yes indeed, pay it -- and cover it up, this mean movie misanthropy.

(Released by Focus Features and rated “R” for pervasive language, some sexual content, and violence.)