With Burn After Reading the Coen brothers finds room for George Clooney, Brad Pitt and John Malkovich - along with Tilda Swinton who, improbable as it may seem after all those years slogging it out for low-budget avant-gardists like Derek Jarman, Sally Potter and John Maybury, is now supping at the high table of Hollywood aristocracy. And the Coens themselves are new enough to the big leagues for them to still feel they are blinking owlishly in the spotlight.
The film itself may be a bit of an afterthought down here on the Lido. Clocking in at a crisp 95 minutes, Burn After Reading is a tightly wound, slickly plotted spy comedy that couldn't be in bigger contrast to the Coens' last film, the bloodsoaked, brooding No Country for Old Men. Burn, in comparison, is bit of a bantamweight: fast moving, lots of attitude, and uncorking a killer punch when it can.
Set in Washington DC, at the heart of America's political establishment, it moves in four directions at the same time. Osbourne Cox (Malkovich) is a superannunated CIA analyst who is given the push and rancorously starts writing his memoirs. A computer disc containing his alarming-sounding background material falls out of a bag in a gym locker-room, where it ends up in the gormless clutches of Chad Feldheimer (Pitt) and Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) who run the place; their instant reaction is to try a little blackmail. The cosmetic surgery-obsessed Litzke is also scouring internet dating sites and starts something with serial adulterer Harry Pfarrer (Clooney), who has an unspecified job in the Treasury dept, but is overly proud of his past in "PP" (that's "personal protection" to the likes of us). But he is already having an affair with Cox's wife Katie (Swinton) - and it's the latter's sneaky investigation of her husband's financial resources as she gears up for a divorce that triggers the whole information-loss plot-thread.
With such a profusion of attention-grabbing performers, it's hardly surprising that the first narrative motor - the fools-after-money trope of which the Coens appear so fond - is swiftly subordinated to backstabbing emotional shenanigans; we soon find ourselves watching a particularly murderous account of marital high-jinks among moneyed social elites. (In this regard, the Coen film it most resembles is the divorce-lawyer comedy Intolerable Cruelty.) It's also stuffed with the usual throwaway brilliancies: McDormand, for example, has a running gag with a computerised switchboard that can't recognise she is speaking English, while Swinton does a very subtle bit of eye-acting to suggest she's actually turned on by the thought of rooting through her husband's bank records. Pitt, in fact, gets the best of the funny stuff, but has by some way the least screen time of all the principal cast.
Where does this film leave the Coens? Their unique position, as darlings of both the Hollywood set and the festival circuit, is unchanged. What they have managed to come up with here, somehow, is a light-as-fluff flipside to hardcore "insider" films like All the President's Men, Michael Clayton or, indeed, The Insider: it paints the powers-that-be as goofy, chaotic and definitively non-sinister. This lot, you feel, couldn't bug their way out of a paper bag.
Burn After Reading may also go down as arguably the Coens' happiest engagement with the demands of the Hollywood A-list - but this bit of career development may also be contributing to a diminishing of their particular film-making strengths. Or perhaps they are simply evolving. The highly-wrought grotesqueries with which they made their name seem well in the past; stars find it difficult to merge with the scenery. For better or worse, their films are now more simply natural to look at and experience. Whether it will pay off again at the Oscar ceremony or box-office remains to be seen.