TORONTO -- In the 2001 movie Spy Game, Brad Pitt plays a novice CIA agent mentored by Robert Redford's old-school operative. He is a classic conflicted movie spy, a handsomely chiseled man of action who is troubled by the consequences of his missions.
It's kind of fun to consider that character when seeing Pitt in the role of Chad Feldheimer in Burn After Reading.
Chad is a gym employee at a fitness franchise called Hardbodies. His idea of action is bouncing medicine balls to his customers, or irreparably damaging a client's leg during a stretching exercise.
When he and a fellow employee (Frances McDormand) discover a disc containing what they think is classified information, Chad lets no thought cloud his attractive visage as he embarks on a blackmail campaign that sets in motion disastrous consequences for almost everyone concerned.
And when Chad is put on the spot by the blackmail victim, ex-spook John Malkovich, you can practically see the rusty turning of the wheels in Chad's head when the only thing he can think of to say is: "Appearances can be ... deceptive."
"The leading-man role is the guy who has got all the answers. He can figure things out. He can defuse a bomb. He's all-experienced," says Pitt at a Toronto press conference for Burn After Reading earlier this week. He might as well be talking about his Spy Game character, a photogenic package of wounded nobility.
"That's pretty good for the ego sometimes," admits Pitt. "But it's much more fun to play the guys who make the wrong choices, have limited experience and make the wrong assumptions.
"That's were all the fun is."
It's considerably less fun to delve into the deeper meaning of Burn After Reading. Written and directed by fraternal filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, Oscar winners for last year's No Country for Old Men, the film was born from the brothers' desire to make a movie set in the realm of the Washington intelligence community.
"We sort of wanted to do a spy movie. It didn't exactly turn out that way, but that was one of the original ideas," Ethan says.
In actuality, the movie is very much of a piece with every Coen film since their 1984 debut feature, Blood Simple. Like that film, Burn After Reading is a mystery story without a sleuth. Acts of greed, vanity, lust or stupidity set off a chain of events, and when the smoke clears, no one, not even a CIA chief (J.K. Simmons), can figure out what just happened.
Given the current Washington regime, you might think the Coens might have intended a satiric barb aimed at members of the Washington intelligence community.
"But it wasn't a specific lampoon of anything," Ethan says. "It's not meant to be a comment on anyone, or on politics or Washington or anything.
"It's just really about these particular characters."
Nor did the brothers intend to make a lighter comedy to offset the feel-bad heaviness of No Country.
"We don't relate one movie to another with our movies; it's just whatever we're working on," Ethan says. "Yeah, they're different movies, they feel different, I guess, and to the extent that they feel different, that's good. Certainly you don't want to repeat yourself."
The brothers do cop to the fact that they write scripts for specific actors. The part of Chad was written specifically for Pitt, as were the roles for Clooney, McDormand (Joel's wife), John Malkovich and Richard Jenkins (who plays Pitt and McDormand's soulful boss).
"Sometimes we know an actor and we want to work with them and sometimes we write a part without anyone specifically in mind, and that's what happened in this case (with Tilda Swinton being cast later)," Ethan says.
But beyond that, the Coens stay doggedly oblique about the movie's place in their eccentric milieu, and Ethan offers no apologies for their reticence to analyze their own films.
"You make a movie because you find something about the story and the characters to be compelling and think the film should speak for itself, and you don't have anything to say beyond that because you don't think about it in other terms," he says.
"But then, here you are one day, sitting in front of a bunch of journalists, and they're asking you to say something that isn't self-evident from the movie and you're stumped, and sometimes they think you're being coy or elusive, but the fact is you just don't have anything else to say."
And indeed, the Coens don't reveal much else about the film, beyond the film itself. And if any reporters were thinking the Coen brothers, flush from their Oscar success, looked like they were finally going to open up about their work, well, appearances can be ... deceptive.
Burn After Reading starts today.
randall.king@freepress.mb.ca
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