Life on thin ice

Frozen River
Review by Nathan Weinbender

The first time we see Ray, she is sitting in her car smoking a cigarette. She’s in the passenger-side seat with the door open, her feet in the snow, wearing a bathrobe and slippers. Her hands are shaking. It is in extreme close-up: Her face fills the screen, wearing an expression of heartbreak and neglect, and we can see the deep lines in her face and the dirt underneath her fingernails, and she silently begins to cry.

It is a powerful opening moment, and “Frozen River” goes on from there to become a story of surprising depth and humanity.

Ray, played by veteran character actress Melissa Leo, lives in New York near the U.S.-Canada border. Her husband has just walked out on her, she has two young sons, she’s desperately trying to make ends meet working part-time at the dollar store. She is saving up to buy a new double-wide trailer home, one that’s insulated so the pipes don’t freeze in the winter, but when they deliver it on a big flatbed truck, she doesn’t have the down payment. She can’t afford food, either, serving her kids microwave popcorn and orange Tang for dinner.

One day, as she’s driving past a bingo hall on the Mohawk Indian reservation, she sees her husband’s car in the parking lot. She sees a young Native American woman get into the car, and Ray follows her to a tiny trailer in the middle of the woods. The woman’s name is Lila (Misty Upham), and she says she found the car abandoned with the keys still in the ignition. “The guy driving it got on a bus,” she says—to Buffalo, most likely, or Atlantic City.

Lila wants to buy Ray’s husband's car. Ray says no; she needs it. Lila persists, saying she’ll give Ray twice what the car is worth. It has a push-button trunk, which helps her, Ray soon discovers, in smuggling illegal immigrants across the Canadian border, traversing an iced-over river tucked away on the reservation. The job pays $1200 a run, and when Ray finds herself being held at gunpoint, driving over the river with illegals in her trunk, she decides that the money will help her get her life back in order.

Ray’s relationship with Lila burgeons in unexpected places. Lila doesn’t trust white people, but she learns that police aren’t as likely to stop a Caucasian. Ray doesn’t trust Lila, either, until she learns that Lila is also a mother, an infant son whom she is not allowed to see, and has also been abandoned by the baby’s father. Are they friends? No. Business associates? Not really. They have found themselves partnered out of necessity—they soon discover that neither can survive without the other.

“Frozen River” marks the debut of Courtney Hunt, and she has created characters that seem remarkably real. She finds poignancy in the minutiae of everyday life—there’s a touching moment when Ray, exasperated, re-records her voicemail greeting over and over again, as though she doesn’t believe that the hollow, shaky voice on the line is her own.

There are other terrific scenes that take on a quiet, moving humility, as when Lila sits in a tree, watching her son through her mother-in-law’s window. And when Ray’s fifteen-year-old son (Charlie McDermott) deals with the fact that his little brother has no presents under the Christmas tree.

The performances here are remarkable. Melissa Leo, who has worked on TV and in low-budget films since the ‘80s, is a revelation. She is tenacious and resourceful, yet fragile at the same time, and Leo conveys so much with her face that we can understand where she’s coming from just by looking at her.

Misty Upham, in her first starring role, isn’t quite as assured as Leo, but she certainly holds her own, and her performance feels genuine. In a particularly tender moment, she sees her son in a fast-food restaurant, and she handles the scene just perfectly.

Made for just $500,000 and with a cast predominately made up of amateurs, Hunt has made a truly memorable first picture. “Frozen River” is a great example of no-frills independent filmmaking—had it boasted bigger stars or a larger budget, the movie probably would have lost its intimacy and its sense of realism.

It is a film about desolation and regret, and the stark, wintry landscapes and sparse dialogue reflect that. But the movie never wallows in the sadness or sorry dispositions of its characters, and it ends on a note that, although far from sunny, is more or less hopeful.

“Frozen River,” which won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, is now playing in limited release.

Grade: A-

Directed and written by Courtney Hunt. Starring Melissa Leo, Misty Upham, Charlie McDermott and Michael O’Keefe. R; 97m.

Now on DVD: Robert Downey Jr. and Jason Segel are Stark, naked

Iron Man
Review by Nathan Weinbender

“Iron Man,” based on the long-running Marvel comic book series, is a very good superhero film, and the key to its success is the ever-dependable Robert Downey Jr. Yes, the movie’s special effects are impressive. Yes, the action sequences are thrilling. Yes, it features a foreboding villain, a pretty girl, a devastating crisis of worldwide proportions that needs to be remedied in the course of two hours.

“Iron Man” is everything you’d expect it to be—a loud, fast-moving action-adventure spectacle—but at the core of the film is Downey, who is cool, collected and meditative, and whose performance is almost better than the movie requires.

He plays Tony Stark, the CEO of a billion-dollar weapons manufacturing company that was instituted by his father. He’s a boozer and a notorious ladies man—his private jet has a full bar and pole-dancing flight attendants—as well as a prodigious electrician and programmer (we’re told he built his first computer mainframe when he was six).

When he travels to Afghanistan for a demonstration of a stealth missile, Stark’s Army escorts are attacked and he’s kidnapped by terrorists who order him to build them his latest weapons system. Instead, Stark constructs a nearly indestructible suit of armor, which he uses to escape.

Now he’s Iron Man, and when he returns home he perfects the suit and dedicates himself to stopping the warfare from which he once profited. Stark’s personality transformation from purveyor of destruction to protector of peace is actually believable, mostly because Downey keeps the character grounded in reality.

Nobody has ever played a superhero the way Downey does here: His smarmy, off-the-cuff delivery is nothing new, but it’s made refreshing when viewed within the context of this role. Few actors can convey good-natured cynicism quite the way he can—it’s a genius casting decision.

Despite his standout performance, Downey doesn’t really chew the scenery, and he allows the supporting actors to make an impression as well. Gwyneth Paltrow is surprisingly good as Stark’s personal assistant Pepper Potts, and she and Downey have a snappy chemistry that’s racked with sexual tension.

A hardly-recognizable Jeff Bridges plays Obadiah Stone, the staunch second-in-command at Stark Industries, who resents Tony’s decision to cease manufacturing weapons and, quite inevitably, becomes the film’s villain.

Terrence Howard, as Air Force colonel James Rhodes, isn’t given enough to do, but, based on the character’s history in the comics, he’s bound to have a bigger role if the film develops into a franchise.

Tony Stark is a dynamic character, flawed but engaging, and Downey and director Jon Favreau could work wonders with him in whatever sequels are to follow. “Iron Man” doesn’t have the originality and spirit of the early “Superman” films or the pathos of the first two “Spider-Man” pictures, but it works on its own terms as pure special effects-driven entertainment.

Grade: B+

Directed by Jon Favreau. Written by Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, Art Marcum and Matt Holloway. Starring Robert Downey Jr., Terrence Howard, Jeff Bridges, Gwyneth Paltrow, Leslie Bibb and Shaun Toub. PG-13; 126m.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall
Review by Nathan Weinbender

What I appreciate most about the films of Judd Apatow—and those of his many subsidiaries—is that they are, above all else, endearing. It’s a quality that is missing from so many modern comedies, which are crass and mean-spirited all the way through before tacking on manufactured sentimentality at the end.

“Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” which Apatow produced, is effortlessly endearing. It’s funny, yes, and although it’s hard to be funny, it’s even harder, I think, to make a sweet, good-natured film that never feels artificial or cloying.

It has been written by its star, Jason Segel, who has the looks of an average Joe but the appeal and charisma of a major movie star. He plays Peter Bretter, a struggling musician who scores a popular crime show that stars his actress girlfriend, Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell).

When Sarah breaks up with Peter after a six-year relationship, Peter is devastated, and he escapes to a Hawaiian resort in an attempt to keep his mind off his romantic troubles. Unfortunately, in a coincidence that could only exist within the confines of a screenplay, Sarah and her new boyfriend, British pop sensation Aldous Snow (Russell Brand), just happen to be staying in the same hotel.

Segel plays the role of the brokenhearted loser with great conviction and aplomb—like Steve Carell and Seth Rogen before him, he's perfectly cast as the lovable schlub. Mila Kunis is surprisingly good in the thankless role of the pretty hotel desk clerk who falls for Peter, and Russell Brand, as Sarah’s preening goon of a boyfriend, brings a droll sensibility to his vacuous character, and he walks away with some of the movie's best one-liners.

The basic premise follows the groundwork set by all Apatow-related romantic comedies: Down-to-earth guy is unlucky in love, ends up in a relationship with an enchanting girl who is way out of his league, finds himself in a predicament where his relationship is put in jeopardy, everything turns out okay in the end.

But in the case of “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” (and it was true of both “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” and “Knocked Up”), it’s not the film’s premise that makes it memorable but its colorful characters.

Grade: B+

Directed by Nicholas Stoller. Written by Jason Segel. Starring Jason Segel, Kristen Bell, Mila Kunis, Russell Brand, Bill Hader and Jonah Hill. R; 112m.

Par-annoy-a

Eagle Eye
Review by Nathan Weinbender

This has to be some kind of record. “Eagle Eye” marks the second film so far this year in which a bomb is set to detonate during a big concert attended by the President. The first movie to use this contrivance was “Get Smart,” and the explosion was to come as the final notes of “Ode to Joy” were played. Here, the Capitol Building will be destroyed when the symphony hits the high F near the end of national anthem.

In the case of “Get Smart,” the bomb was smuggled in the grand piano. In “Eagle Eye,” the bomb is hidden in the piping of an eighth grader’s trumpet. Can you guess which of these films was intended as a comedy? The answer, obviously, is the prior, but seriously? In the kid’s horn? That sounds like something right out of “The Naked Gun.”

That “Eagle Eye” is completely without a sense of humor certainly isn’t its main problem, although I suppose a little subversive wit may have distracted me from how muddled and frantic the script becomes. It is credited to four different writers, and it shows: This movie goes off in so many weird directions that, by the end, you’ll have forgotten what it originally intended to be about.

The opening scenes star Shia LaBeouf as twenty-something Jerry Shaw, who starts getting strange phone calls from a mysterious woman who gives him orders like, “The police are on their way—you have thirty seconds to evacuate.” Why are the police after Jerry? Well, they think he’s a national security threat, which likely stems from the fact that his apartment is filled with military-grade weapons and explosives.

Jerry honestly doesn’t know where the weapons are from—he came home, they were in his room, that strange woman is on the phone and the feds are beating down his door. The source of the explosives remains unknown, although it seems unlikely that anyone would deliver so much ammonium nitrate to a small apartment in the middle of the city.

Anyhow, through a series of complications too, well, complicated to detail, Jerry escapes from police custody. Following the detailed instructions from the female voice over the phone, he bumps into a woman named Rachel (Michelle Monaghan), who, good heavens, is also being given strange orders via cell phone. If she doesn’t do as the woman says, the train her son is traveling on will derail.

How could all of this be possible, you ask? How could a person, or even an isolated group of persons, control two peoples’ fates so effortlessly? I’m afraid I don’t have the answer—and I don’t think the movie does, either.

I do not know, for instance, how someone could program the film’s numerous high-speed car chases so that the bad guys’ vehicles are demolished and our heroes get away unscathed (they escape this movie with hardly a scratch, despite leaping from high places, being jostled down airport luggage chutes and encountering a runaway subway train and out-of-control junkyard equipment).

Or, for that matter, how anyone could know exactly where and when Jerry and Rachel will end up and what props—i.e. ID badges, guns, serums that slow their heart rates so their bodies require less oxygen, etc.—will be required of them. Even when it is revealed who (or, rather, what) has masterminded this series of events, it still doesn’t explain how such an operation could have been executed so seamlessly.

I know, I know, I’m not supposed to question. I know I’m not supposed to let logical suppositions even cross my mind. But the action sequences in “Eagle Eye,” which take up a majority of the running time, are deadening—one particular scene involving a speeding SUV and a military jet in a freeway tunnel is shot so murkily and edited to frenetically that it’s unintelligible—so I was given little else with which to entertain my brain.

If you happen to see the movie, my advice is to ignore the story and simply pay attention to how the script throws logic to the wind and beats common sense to a pulp. You’ll probably enjoy it more that way.

Steven Spielberg is listed as an executive producer for “Eagle Eye,” and there were sequences in this movie that reminded me of a particular moment in his sci-fi masterpiece “Minority Report.” Recall, if you will, the scene in that film in which Samantha Morton leads a wanted man, played by Tom Cruise, through a shopping mall being patrolled by the police.

She’s a clairvoyant and knows exactly when Cruise needs to duck, when he should stop and start, what direction he needs to travel in so that he’s always conveniently out of view. There’s more grace and excitement in that five-minute scene than there is in the entirety of “Eagle Eye.”

Grade: C

Directed by D.J. Caruso. Written by John Glenn, Travis Adam Wright, Hillary Seitz and Dan McDermott. Starring Shia LaBeouf, Michelle Monaghan, Billy Bob Thornton, Rosario Dawson, Michael Chiklis and Anthony Mackie. PG-13; 118m.

The dead need love, too

Ghost Town
Review by Nathan Weinbender

“Ghost Town” doesn’t play a note that we haven’t heard before, but it works nonetheless. It is predictable, yes, but it finds charm and warmth in its predictability, and its performances are so good that I imagine they could brighten even the densest script.

It is a Capra-esque comedy starring British comedian Ricky Gervais as Bertram Pincus D.D.S., the very definition of misanthrope. He is not a people person, which is why he loves being a dentist: If someone is annoying him, he can just shove cotton into their mouths. Awkward and humorless, he considers people to be impediments that he has to inconveniently maneuver around.

After a routine colonoscopy goes unexpectedly wrong, Pincus dies for a few minutes on the operating table. When he’s revived, he can communicate with ghosts; they appear in inconspicuous places and ask him for favors. Whereas most people would be amazed at the sudden procurement of a sixth sense, Pincus is annoyed—Gervais takes situations that would normally require reactions of horror or shock and plays them with a perpetual roll of the eyes.

The head ghost is Frank (Greg Kinnear), who was an adulterer and philanderer in life. His widow is named Gwen, played by the vivacious Téa Leoni, an Egyptologist who is about to marry a man who gives Frank bad vibes. After all, he’s a humanitarian lawyer, a connoisseur of the fine arts, an honest-to-God gentleman—there’s gotta be something wrong with him.

Pincus doesn’t want to cooperate with the dead, who are constantly bothering them with their problems, but Frank makes him a deal: If Pincus can get Gwen to drop her engagement, those pesky ghosts will go away. So Pincus takes the offer, strikes up a relationship with Gwen and, not unpredictably, his pompous exterior begins to crack.

We seem to get the curmudgeon-turned-sweetheart premise about once a month (last month it was “Henry Poole Is Here,”) but “Ghost Town” is the first one in a long time to be done right. The director is David Koepp, who has written a dozen or so hit screenplays—“Jurassic Park,” “Mission: Impossible,” “Spider-Man.” He no doubt knows that the script follows a well-trodden path, and he trusts his actors, who are all very good, to steer the ship.

Ricky Gervais is not well known in the States, which is a shame, because he can play idiots and degenerates better and inflict his performances with more poignancy than any American comedian. Consider his performance as the bumbling, pathetic manager in the British version of “The Office,” which is not only very, very funny, but also unabashedly heartbreaking.

He is perfect as Pincus, and he finds the right balance between boorishness and misery: We don’t resent him so much as feel deeply sorry for him. His transformation in the end seems surprisingly believable, mostly because Gervais is innately likeable even when he’s playing a jerk.

Tea Leoni, too, is wonderful. She’s a criminally underused actress, with steely eyes and a throaty laugh, and we actually buy it when, whaddaya know, she starts to fall for Pincus. Her fiancée is good-looking and successful, but he hasn’t a sense of humor, and she likes Bertram for his barbed wit and his no-nonsense approach to everything. Plus he forgets to cut off the retail tags from his new dress shirts, which is sorta cute.

Movies like this remind me of a comfortable set of pajamas—warm, cozy, familiar, the type of film that you can curl up in front of. I prefer to be challenged when I go to the movies, to be provoked, to see things I’ve never seen before. But every once in a while a film like “Ghost Town” sneaks up and charms the hell out of me.

It’s sweet and pleasant and never smarmy in its intentions. And I hope the American public finally gets wise to Ricky Gervais, who here proves that he could carry a feature on his talents alone.

Grade: B

Directed by David Koepp. Written by Koepp and John Kamps. Starring Ricky Gervais, Téa Leoni, Greg Kinnear and Billy Campbell. PG-13; 102m.

Now on DVD: Fatboys and Leatherheads compete in hit-or-miss comedies

Leatherheads
Review by Nathan Weinbender

It’s clear that George Clooney studied screwball comedies from the ‘30s and ‘40s before he plopped down into the director’s chair for “Leatherheads.” He more than likely wanted the audience to watch his film and remember the rat-a-tat dialogue of Preston Sturges, the polish of Frank Capra, the slapstick nonsense of the Marx brothers.

And he no doubt wanted us comparing him to square-jawed straight men like Gary Cooper, and Renée Zellweger to whip-smart blondes like Claudette Colbert in “It Happened One Night.” Unfortunately, “Leatherheads” doesn’t even come close to capturing the thousand-watt brilliance of those early talkies, and compared to the breezy sophistication of the films it desperately hopes to duplicate, it comes across as flat.

The movie begins in 1925, before pro football was legitimatized. Clooney plays Dodge Connelly, the star quarterback of the Duluth Bulldogs, who spends his nights in fisticuffs at speakeasies and likes the fact that his sport has very few rules. College football, on the other hand, is a booming industry, and the biggest name on the circuit is Carter Rutherford (John Krasinski from “The Office”), whom Dodge enlists as the Bulldogs’ newest player.

Enter Zellweger as no-nonsense newspaper reporter Lexie Littleton, who, on covering Rutherford’s rise to fame, starts to fall in love with the rough-and-tumble Dodge. This incenses the envious Rutherford, who goes ga-ga whenever Lexie steps into the room. The plot culminates lifelessly, as Lexie discovers that a war story Rutherford once told is likely fictional, but by that point we don’t much care.

Clooney and Zellweger spout off a lot of back-and-forth zingers, none of which are particularly funny or exceptionally well-written; Clooney can’t make his one-liners crackle the way Sturges could. (Take, for instance, this lousy exchange: Meeting in a bar, Zellweger tells Clooney, “I thought you had to be 21 to get into these places.” “I am 21,” he says, to which she quips, “I was talking about your I.Q.” Buhhh-zing.)

“Leatherheads” isn’t so much a period comedy as it is a document of A-list actors playing dress-up. Clooney’s attempts to reproduce the charms of films like “Sullivan’s Travels” and “His Girl Friday” fail because he approaches those movies as if they’re cute little artifacts that can be easily imitated. Not so—“Leatherheads” actually feels more old-fashioned than anything that Sturges or Capra ever did.

Grade: C

Directed by George Clooney. Written by Duncan Brantley and Rick Reilly. Starring George Clooney, Renée Zellweger, John Krasinski, Jonathan Pryce, Stephen Root and Wayne Duvall. PG-13; 114m.

Run Fatboy Run
Review by Nathan Weinbender

Nothing particularly surprising or especially hilarious happens during the course of “Run Fatboy Run,” but it’s a harmless, charming movie nonetheless. It’s a routine story, predictable from beginning to end, yet it’s the presence of star and co-writer Simon Pegg (from “Shaun of the Dead” and “Hot Fuzz”) that makes the film watchable.

Pegg plays a low-life department store security guard named Dennis, who, five years prior, left his pregnant fiancée Libby (Thandie Newton) at the altar. Now she’s engaged to a hotshot American businessman (Hank Azaria) who runs marathons for charity. Naturally, Dennis decides that he has to run a marathon as well, hoping his perseverance will pay off and Libby will come back to him.

You’ll be able to see exactly where the script is going at every moment, yet Pegg, with his genuine shaggy-dog appeal, keeps the movie’s basic conflict compelling: It’s a testament to his performance that we end up rooting for such a self-centered schlub. “Run Fatboy Run” is nothing to write home about, but here’s hoping that Simon Pegg gets some more work in the near future.

Grade: C+

Directed by David Schwimmer. Written by Michael Ian Black and Simon Pegg. Starring Simon Pegg, Thandie Newton, Hank Azaria, Dylan Moran and Harish Patel. PG-13; 100m.

Also available on DVD today is “Sex and the City.” I decided to skip that one—I wasn’t feeling particularly masochistic.

Now on DVD: The winter of our discontent

Snow Angels
Review by Nathan Weinbender

David Gordon Green’s “Snow Angels” is a movie that buzzes with tension and importance. It begins with two gunshots, heard off in the distance, and then works backward until we discover the origin of those shots, and the personal history behind them.

As the picture plays out, its conclusion seems foregone, but Green pulls back the layers of his story, and of his characters, until we are completely mesmerized: This is not a film about who kills whom, but rather about what motivates the crime and why it eventually occurs.

It’s also an intriguing snapshot of helpless, hapless people struggling to make amends in their life, desperately trying to keep the dark secrets of their past from leeching onto the present, about how an isolated event can send ripples through a community, striking everyone nearby like some kind of emotional shrapnel.

The movie, based on a novel by Stewart O’Nan, is set in a small, presumably East-coast town in the middle of winter. It is, we assume, present day. We peek in on a world already in progress, meeting characters that are either disintegrating before our very eyes or who are picking up the pieces of their broken lives.

One such soul is Annie (Kate Beckinsale), a single mother who works as a waitress at the local Chinese restaurant. Her ex-husband is Glenn (Sam Rockwell), who was a drunkard and an abuser, and who has stopped drinking and has embraced Christianity in an attempt to win back Annie’s affections.

They have a young daughter, whom Glenn sees once a week. He’s sweet and accommodating to the girl, but there’s always a quiet sense of unease whenever we see them together: He does not seem quite stable enough to have children entrusted to him.

We’re also introduced to a high school sophomore named Arthur (Michael Angarano), who is sweet and awkward and plays trombone in the marching band. He begins to fall for the new girl in school, Lila (Olivia Thirlby), who wears retro horn-rimmed glasses and is enamored with photography—in a town where everyone is more or less the same, she’s a breath of fresh air. They kiss near the bleachers at the football field, and she tells him that she loves him. He says he loves her, too.

But Arthur may not understand what love truly entails, considering the state of his parents’ dissipating marriage. They shuffle around the house and sullenly ignore one another; when his father (Griffin Dunne) announces that he’s leaving for work—he teaches plant biology, and he observes fungus samples as if he can relate to their existence—his mother (Jeanetta Arnette) doesn’t bother looking up from her frying pan.

These lives begin to intersect, and we draw nearer to the truth behind those gunshots. A lesser film would have focused on the crime, would have treated this material like a whodunit, would have been overbearing and aggressively melancholy, but “Snow Angels” has been written and directed by Green and performed by its cast with a grace and an intelligence that keeps it from pounding us over the head with symbolism and grief.

In a film filled with good performances, Sam Rockwell, one of modern cinema’s most underrated actors (see him in the overlooked “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind”), is particularly superb. It would be easy to embody Glenn as a nutcase, but Rockwell’s work here is subtle and haunted. He plays Glenn as a man who has rehearsed everything he says and does but still can’t get it right.

When he suspects that Annie may be seeing someone, he is devastated, but carefully watch Rockwell’s mannerisms, very faint but very effective—how he attempts, and fails, to overcome his grief, to exhibit a resilient visage, and how that devastation quickly evolves into a silent fury behind his eyes.

David Gordon Green is only 33 and has five features under his belt, all very different—take, for instance, his debut, “George Washington,” another small-scale portrait of adolescence and death, and compare it to the antics his most recent movie, the stoner comedy “Pineapple Express.” Green has already proved that he’s one of the most talented and interesting filmmakers working outside of the Hollywood system today, but “Snow Angels” is his best film yet—it’s assured, mature and difficult to shake.

Movies like this are often referred to as “downers.” Some will find its depiction of small-town turmoil too pessimistic. The film deals with weighty issues, but it does so in a thoughtful way. It is a downbeat, somber picture, but it is in no way nihilistic toward its characters, nor dishonest in how their fates play out.

These characters exist on a set of fixed points—there may be a glimmer of hope at the corners of their lives, but we know that their destinations are likely to be disappointing. “Snow Angels” is certainly not an easy film to watch, but it is a haunting, expertly-crafted film, and one of the best of the year.

Grade: A-

Directed and written by David Gordon Green. Based on the novel by Stewart O’Nan. Starring Kate Beckinsale, Sam Rockwell, Michael Angarano, Jeanetta Arnette, Griffin Dunne, Olivia Thirlby, Nicky Katt and Amy Sedaris. R; 107m.

The Idiot Plot done right

Burn After Reading
Review by Nathan Weinbender

The plot of “Burn After Reading,” the newest from Joel and Ethan Coen, resembles a cat’s cradle, with strands twisting and turning and colliding every which way.

It’s a goofball espionage comedy in which all of the characters are either bumblers or fumblers, and the Coens send their story off in so many different directions that they’ve included scenes (no doubt echoing their writing conferences) in which two CIA operatives survey the damage of the screenplay and try and figure out exactly what is going on. “Call me when you’ve figured everything out,” one of them tells the other.

The Coens have always reveled in the idiocy of their characters, and they like to put dunderheads in impossible situations and watch them flounder. In “Burn After Reading,” a group of moronic gym employees discover a CD containing files that they assume are top-secret CIA documents. When they blackmail the owner of the disc in hopes of obtaining a serious ransom, nothing, as do most things in the Coens’ universe, goes quite as planned.

Linda (Frances McDormand) and Chad (Brad Pitt) are the gym employees, and when they discover who encrypted the material on the CD, they call him up. He’s Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), a former CIA agent, now a drunken sledgehammer of a man. He wants to know who the callers are. He’s told that they’re “good Samaritans.” Chad demands money. Cox won’t pay up.

Meanwhile, Cox’s wife Katie (Tilda Swinton), is having an affair with a former Secret Service agent named Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney), a sex addict who, while trolling internet dating sites, meets up with Linda and begins a relationship with her on the side. As those CIA operatives I mentioned earlier surmise, “Everyone seems to be sleeping around with each other.”

As all this transpires, misunderstanding piles atop misunderstanding, everybody’s identity becomes a mistaken one, unexpected bursts of violence occur and dead bodies start to turn up. And a number of questions begin to bubble to the surface, namely what’s the mysterious device Harry is constructing in his basement? I won’t reveal the secret, but let’s just say it seriously brightens Linda’s demeanor.

Since their debut with the magnificent “Blood Simple” in 1984, the Coen brothers have consistently alternated between brilliantly-crafted thrillers and off-the-wall comedies, which have ranged from demented to breezy to, in the case of “Barton Fink,” damn near apocalyptic. “Burn After Reading” comfortably straddles both of their favorite genres, and, like their masterpiece “Fargo,” its complications come from planting know-nothing simpletons in the midst of chaos and violence that they’re not equipped to handle.

I have yet to mention the performances, which are excellent. I especially love Frances McDormand as a woman who wants nothing more than companionship, but who is too dense to realize that her soft-spoken manager (Richard Jenkins) carries a torch for her. And what will she do with Cox’s ransom money? Well, she tells herself that she desperately needs liposuction, which seems a bit extravagant for somebody who has full disposal of exercise equipment.

Brad Pitt is the stand-out here, terrific as Chad, the airhead fitness fanatic, and he gets the movie’s few big laughs. He desperately tries to appear mysterious and diabolical, yet when he first meets with Cox, he comes on his bike. And when Cox doesn’t appear to be intimidated by him, Chad tells him, “Appearances can be…deceptive.”

I’ve been deliberately vague in describing the plot of “Burn After Reading,” because one of the film’s pleasures is watching as the script heaps on complications and dodges down unexpected alleyways. But there is, dare I say, a certain, unexpected sadness lingering at the corners of the picture. As the storyline becomes more and more tangled, we come to realize that no matter what these characters do, no matter how they act, no matter where they end up, the catalyst of their fates has been one colossal misinterpretation.

To sum it all up in the words of those befuddled CIA guys: “No biggie.”

Grade: B+

Directed and written by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen. Starring George Clooney, Frances McDormand, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton, Richard Jenkins and J.K. Simmons. R; 96m.