The Coen brothers’ follow up to the dark and nihilistic No Country for Old Men may be hilarious and almost farcical but it is no less determined to present a vew of humans as subject to the destructive and meaningless whims of fate and their own vanity and ignorance. All of the screwball characters may be charming and funny but they are all caught in their own lack of self-knowledge and personal ambitions. The marriages are shot through with deceit, the CIA is full of the most unintellegent men and Hardbodies Gym is staffed by losers (one of whom reveals he used to be a Greek Orthodox priest for 15 years). Right at the end the Chief of Intellegence looks to the camera and asks ‘Well, what have we learnt here?’ ‘Not to do it again, I suppose – but what did we do?’ Clearly nothing has been learnt from this almost Jacobean catastrophe of subterfuge and mass death at the end. So the vision is bleak but really the film is hilarious with a fantastic centre-stage performance from John Malkovitch, charicature coldness from Tilda Swinton and beatuifully crazed stupidity from Frances McDormand. The film starts and ends with majestic zooms in and out from and back to space, as if the events of this bunch of idiots is just one of the many stories that could be told of humanity all probably equally as vain and meaningless – at least on the continent that we see from our high vantage point. Burn After Readig on IMDB