So, what to do the week after TIFF rolls out of town? Well, hit the theater to catch one of the flicks missed at the big fest, of course. You can’t shake off the tendrils of a beast this huge all that easily, you know, and the release schedule for the next couple months is glutted with titles that used Toronto as a launching pad into public releases and Oscar campaigns. This week? The Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading.

Be warned, though the trailers for this one make it out to be a big, go for the gut sort of comedy it’s actually a whole lot slyer than that. Rather than a return to the line-a-minute quotability of The Big Lebowski, the Coens here give us clever asides and knowing winks, a brilliant inversion of the big Scott Brothers spy flicks so perfectly parodied in the opening sequence. Fantastic? You bet, but it’s a smaller film than you might expect and one that relies on being clever more than being laugh out loud funny.

So, basic story. Take a deep breath. John Malkovich is a CIA agent with a drinking problem who opts to quit rather than taking a demotion and returns home saying ‘fuck’ a lot determined to write a tell-all expose of his time in the service. Awaiting him at home is his ice-queen wife Tilda Swinton, angry because he didn’t buy the cheese they need for that night’s dinner party, a party attended by her secret lover, a twitchy Federal Marshal played by George Clooney. Clooney, incidentally, will – and does – sleep with anything that moves. Swinton is prepping to divorce Malkovich and prepares a CD of financial documents for her lawyer, accidentally burning her financials on the same CD that includes Malkovich’s partly finished manuscript. The lawyer’s secretary drops the CD in the locker room of the local gym where it ends up in the hands of utterly brainless Brad Pitt and plastic surgery obsessed Frances McDormand, who also ends up sleeping with George Clooney. The gym rats think they’ve got something bigger than they really do and try to blackmail Malkovich for the disc’s safe return. The CIA overlords watching all of this are just generally confused.

Plot: there’s a lot of it and that’s kind of the point. Burn After Reading is all about taking a huge rip at the intelligence community, a community full of supposedly smart people running around chasing after shadows. There is no actual intrigue here any deeper than who is sleeping with who but you’d never know it from the way everybody is carrying on, from the number of surveillance units following people around and from the number of bodies that pile up in the pursuit of all this nothing. Satire is a tricky art, very few are better at it than the Coens when they’re on their game, and they are most certainly on their game here.

Making the film go is the stellar cast. The Brothers Coen do a fantastic job of balancing actors playing their stereotypes to the hilt – Swinton and Malkovich – against those playing wildly against their image – Clooney and Pitt. Pitt, in particular, is hysterically funny every time he’s on screen, the sight of his personal trainer character Chad trying so hard to think and yet failing so very miserably is one that I could watch over and over again. The one that really elevates the film, though, is McDormand, who seems to get the Coen aesthetic better than any other actor and consistently lands their plum parts, probably because she’s married to – and sleeping with – one of them. In McDormand’s hands Linda – Pitt’s gym cohort – becomes a tragic figure, one completely caught up in trying to achieve physical perfection believing that will make somebody love her, and she takes the film to a whole different level.

So, what do you know … after a couple of dogs that had people wondering if they’d gone the way of Woody Allen, the Coens have come back with two of the strongest films of their career, back to back. And, hell, even Woody Allen’s gone and made a good film. Life is good in movie-land.