David Wilcox / The Citizen

"Burn After Reading" is as perfect a follow-up to "No Country for Old Men" as I can imagine.

Joel and Ethan Coen's spy farce, which I watched last week on Blu-Ray, is an empty-headed complement to the ultra-heady "No Country." Whereas the Coens' Best Picture-winning 2007 film calculatedly mused on themes of fate and chance, "Burn" bears no such aspirations. Its characters are not vessels of profundity - they're insecure, paranoid buffoons.

"Burn" centers around ousted CIA agent Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich), who decides to punctuate his disgracefully ended career with a memoir. His wife, Katie, meanwhile swipes Osbourne's top-secret files as leverage for a pending divorce case. After Katie's lawyer's receptionist misplaces the disc containing the files at a gym, a scatterbrained clerk named Chad (Brad Pitt) picks it up and plots to blackmail Osbourne. As he sets up his first scheme of this sort, Chad's fellow gym worker Linda (Frances McDormand) pushes him to pour some of Cox's hush money into several plastic surgeries she needlessly seeks.

Add in George Clooney as a philandering U.S. Treasury agent with as many facial tics as female companions, and you've got a deliciously blackened comedy. Pitt stands out most, not for his hideously frosted hair, but for the surfer-dude zeal with which he quests after Cox's money. When his oblivious goofballing finally meets Cox's CIA graveness, the result is the most hilarious scene in the film.

The story takes some sharp, alarmingly unfunny turns at times. And the absence of grandeur or theme in a film boasting so many big-name stars may lead viewers to think they're missing something. If they squint hard enough, they may decrypt a message that the spy game is a whimsical and inscrutable affair even to its players, who share the same superficial concerns as the rest of us. But as long as audiences sit back and delight in the black absurdity of "Burn," they'll get the Coens' picture.