![]() 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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