From its crash and burn debut at the Venice Film Festival to its slightly more positive but still definitively mixed reception here at the Toronto Film Festival, people who like to spend a lot of time bitching have spent a lot of time bitching that the Coen Brothers‘ Burn After Reading is at the very least a “disappointment” as a follow-up to No Country For Old Men, and is maybe even Exhibit A to the charge that this is a disastrous year for American pseudo-indie film. The former might be true, if one was of the mind that No Country as a masterpiece … which I was not. The latter might be true, if one was of the mind that a star-studded festival entry with little to no chance of impressing the stodgy middlebrow fetishists of the obvious of the Academy is synonymous with failure…which I am not. Burn After Reading may not have the sparse majesty of No Country––it may not go out of its way to tell you that We Are Getting Deep Up In Here––but in its own way its even more brutal assignation of moral confusion.

Saying too much about the plot here won’t do any of us any good, but to sum up: the trouble starts when Osbourne Cox (played by John Malkovich, who should really do more comedies) gets fired from what appears to be a not particularly impressive position at the CIA for being a loose canon and an alchie. “Fuck you,” he tells his now former boss. “You’re a Mormon, next to you everyone has a drinking problem.” Then he goes home and fixes himself a drink.

That night, at a cocktail party thrown by Cox’s uptight pediatrician wife Katie (Tilda Swinton), we learn a few things: Cox is considered an outcast and a creepazoid by the upper middle class DC nouveau society in which his wife plays; his wife is having an affair with Harry (George Clooney), a marshall who brags about carrying a gun which he portentously insists he’s never used; and, with a single flick of the eyes, it becomes clear that Harry’s wife knows about the affair but Harry doesn’t know that she knows. When Katie finds out that Osbourne has been fired and intends to while away his remaining years moving cocktail hour further up the clock while ostensibly producing memoir on his less than spectacular career, she sees this as the out she’s been looking for to run off with Harry, and copies some files off her husband’s computer so that a divorce lawyer can assess his financials. These files end up in the hands of Chad and Linda (Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand), two bumbling fitness instructors––or so they appear to be, but as Chad reminds us several times, “appearances can be deceptive”––who swiftly determine that a little blackmail is in order. Chaos, paranoia, and a number of surprising deaths ensue.

There’s a randomness to the violence here; the cause-and-effect tether that decides who lives and who dies in classic works of genre just isn’t there. This makes Burn one of the most extreme sojourns into the land of (a)moral relativism that the Coens have ever taken. If No Country was set in a world divorced from the notion that bad people get punished and innocent people don’t, a world where the fates of middle class lives were in the hands of a single source of calculated evil, Burn removes that calculation. It turns a mirror on a contemporary culture in which the players are too self-interested in the extreme to actually, actively try to hurt anyone else, but instead accidentally inflict pain and instigate tragedy when their respective single-minded pursuits of pleasure become all-consuming to the point of mania. You can’t stop what’s coming––not because it’s so mysterious, but because it’s so mundane.

In the end, nobody on screen gets what they want and their tangled storylines resolve themselves in such a way that it’s easy to question whether or not the Coens have played a dirty trick in sucking you in. This has led to a good deal of frustration amongst festival circuit journalists, who rarely have time to sit and let a film sink in, especially at Toronto where even the biggest “hits” drift in and out of the spotlight in a single 24 hour news cycle. If I had written about Burn After Reading immediately after seeing it last weekend, I would have focused on the performances (particularly from Brad Pitt, who has created an iconic Coen character for the ages) and on the several handfuls of infectious one-liners––not since The Big Lebowski has a Coens film been this quoteable––while admitting that on the whole, it left me feeling unfulfilled. And yet with a few days perspective, I see the film differently. Burn After Reading has what it takes to become a cult comedy classic, the stuff of Halloween costumes and fan festivals, but it’s also a searing critique of the pursuit of happiness in an age of near end-times anxiety.