EVER SINCE Ocean’s Thirteen, the relationship between George Clooney and Brad Pitt has had the feel of an inside joke. Pitt, now a settled father with more of a life off-screen than on, is edging nearer to Clooney’s age demographic than to his bad-boy Fight Club days. The era of Achilles is over. And he’s clearly enjoying his off-screen friendships with the family men, hinted at and parodied in his family-life discussions and wink-wink buddy-buddy status with Clooney in Ocean’s Thirteen.

The same cheeky aura fogs up Burn After Reading, the Coen brothers’ first post-Oscar exercise. Though Clooney and Pitt have virtually no on-screen interaction, it seems their new directors and the rest of the star-studded cast—John Malkovich, the icy, also post-Oscar Tilda Swinton, Joel Coen’s wife Frances McDormand—seem to have been invited in on the joke. Burn After Reading is little more than that: a darkly comic joke on the audience that, fortunately, eventually lets all but the self-serious join the fun by the end of its relatively brief running time.

Superficially set in the Washington intelligence sector, Burn After Reading opens with the firing of a Osborne Cox (Malkovich), a C.I.A. analyst who’s in denial of his (eventually obvious) drinking problem. Cox arrogantly informs his wife (Swinton) that he quit because the agency is a bureaucracy-teeming institution without the sense of mission it once had. He becomes an alcohol-soaked fixture of his plush recliner, dictating “tell-all” drivel about his career into a voice recorder. That’s pathetic enough, but it’s the high point of this movie—from there the characters burn themselves out in a downward spiral of self-absorption. Which is the point, but I digress.

Mrs. Cox, a hard-edged, ambitious type herself, immediately considers divorce. But as it turns out, she has ulterior motives: she’s mixed up in a tangle of affairs centering around Harry Pfarrer (Clooney), an obsessive sex addict who gets off by leading on several women at a time. When Osborne Cox’s incoherent memoir falls into the hands of two bumbling idiots (McDormand and Pitt) from a local gym called HardBodies, the strands of motive and betrayal become so hopelessly knotted that even the C.I.A. won’t bother trying to untangle them.

This dim view of humanity is, of course, natural Coen material. Burn After Reading, if they intended it to be taken as seriously as some have read it, supposedly satirizes self-serious intelligence dramas like the Bourne franchise or Breach or The Good Shepherd, what with their hand-wringing over ethical dilemmas and high moral quandaries. The truth is, the bumblings of the Coens’ dolt cast seem to say, they’re all hardened, self-interested embarrassments to the human race. The only problem with this angle of criticism is that it requires so little effort—it’s a swiping generalization somewhat akin to saying that all politicians are corrupt. But I’m willing to assume that the Coens aren’t that obtuse, and that their ultimate point was something far less earth-shattering than their radical admirers would like to believe.

Terms like “farce” and “screwball” have been kicked around, and each has its level of appropriate application. From the opening titles—a throwaway, overdramatic camera descent from the Earth’s atmosphere into the C.I.A. headquarters—there’s no question that all sense of plausibility and common sense have been discarded, just as carelessly as Clooney’s character tosses a dead body into the Potomac. Every character is an exaggerated, absurd caricature—from Malkovich’s short-fused drunkard to Pitt’s hyperactive gym trainer—and the actors obviously relish the task. With a cast of garishly-painted cardboard cutouts, it’s difficult to imagine that the Coens thought this film had much to say about reality. It’s a farce in terms of form, but not so much of one as to challenge our notions of its object—human self-interest. So then is “screwball” more apropos?

Perhaps, and perhaps not. That characterization invites comparison to David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees, a largely unscripted comedy in which a huge list of A-listers (Jason Schwartzman, Mark Wahlberg, Dustin Hoffman, Lily Tomlin to name a few) skitter around the screen exchanging absurd existential pontifications and hilariously inane ripostes. Burn After Reading recalls Huckabees in its attempt to play a joke on the audience—purporting to be something it’s not, and waiting to see if the crowd will fall for it. Those who did—angsty left-wingers, mostly—hated Huckabees, which, rather than offer any food for highbrow thought, hijacked intellectual language to spear the philosophical set’s absurd pretentions. Burn After Reading tries to do the same, but it is hardly crazy enough to distract from its own trickery: ten minutes in, it is already apparent that the story will go nowhere, that we’re just expected to watch the stars act insane and say funny things. The Coens’ film lands awkwardly in between the carefully constructed and the recklessly unscripted: neither screwy enough to be screwball, nor sharp enough to be truly farcical.

But to its salvific credit, Burn After Reading does not collapse under the weight of its pretentions, precisely because it doesn’t have many. It is not memorably witty, but still outdoes most of the garbage that passes in America for comedy. Perhaps most endearingly, it gives abundant hints as to its creators’ point-of-view, even mocking the absurdity of its own plot (a senior C.I.A. officer played by J.K. Simmons repeatedly shrugs off the situation, telling his inferiors to bring the case back when it makes sense). Here, we catch the Coens taking a breather, not bothering to say much at all. But they’d like us to think they are. If we do, we don’t get the joke.