She Likes to Watch

Spy Story: The Coen brothers are back with “Burn After Reading”

For a movie about espionage, blackmail and extramarital affairs, “Burn After Reading” is rather pleasant.

The Coen brothers’ latest foray is not a somber serial killer thriller like “No Country for No Old Men,” nor a psychedelic freakout like “The Big Lebowski.” No, this twisted spy tale resembles one of the filmmakers’ lighter, sillier comedies — say, “Intolerable Cruelty” — complete with snappy dialog and a couple corpses, of course.

“Burn” opens with the firing of a CIA systems analyst named Osborne Cox (John Malkovich).

As luck would have it, snobby Osborne has a lot of enemies in Washington D.C. — including his cold wife (Tilda Swinton) and her self-absorbed lover (George Clooney). But his greatest nemeses may be two dimbulb gym employees (Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt), who discover a computer disc containing Ozzy’s state and financial secrets and see it as the answer to their wildest dreams.

That’s when the plot really gets rolling.

As Chad and Linda try to find a way to make their discovery pay (blackmail Ozzy? sell it to the Russians?), the middle-aged lovers struggle with problems of their own — the sticky kind of situations that arise when you play “musical beds.” There’s talk of cosmetic surgery. Internet dating dalliances. And, like any good spy movie, suspicious suit-wearing men in black cars.

The Coens have assembled a mature, familiar cast for “Burn After Reading,” most of them well-versed in the brothers’ brand of madcap comedy, unexpected violence and dizzying word play.

Brad Pitt, the youngest major castmember at age 43, is one standout.

He’s positively adorable as Chad, a sweet-tempered trainer with more brawn than brains. (Every so often, I see a flick that makes me appreciate Brad Pitt as an actor, not just another pretty face. “Fight Club” and “Babel” were two such films. “Burn” just joined the list.)

The rest of the cast performs admirably, if predictably.

Malkovich plays another of his delightfully loathsome jerks, and Clooney stars as a guy so vain he contemplates whether he can “get in a run” immediately after coitus. As for Francis McDormand, she’s back in “Fargo” territory — playing a meaner, more selfish version of the amiable Midwesterner.

It’s said that the Coen brothers wrote parts of this film — their first original script since “The Man Who Wasn’t There” in 2001 — while working on “No Country for Old Men,” and “Burn” certainly has that flavor. It’s a pleasant diversion about unpleasant people, a sharp-edged little comedy that conjures up its share of solid laughs.

We — like the bemused and befuddled CIA — can only sit back and wonder.

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Lest I forget: “Burn After Reading” has a Central Coast connection.

In one scene, Brad Pitt’s character slurps down a jumbo smoothie courtesy of Jamba Juice — the very company originally created as a Cal Poly senior project and founded in San Luis Obispo. Coincidence? I think not.