[WARNING: After a few paragraphs, there are spoilers here; if you're looking at the full post, be ready not to breeze past where the jump is unless spoiling is okay.]

I’m really glad I got to see Burn After Reading at a screening before it opened, because aside from a couple of festival reviews (and who knows what to make of those, right?), I hadn’t read much about it before I saw it for myself.

As you probably know by now, the movie is being roundly…not panned, exactly, but kind of sighed over, like, “This isn’t as good as No Country For Old Men,” or, for people who have a bit more of a clue, “This isn’t as good as Raising Arizona.” The thing is, it’s very different from those movies. Burn After Reading is a comedy, but not like Raising Arizona. It’s more complicated than that. I told a couple of friends before they saw it that I considered its tone exactly halfway between Raising Arizona and Fargo.

What you have to understand about this movie is that being fun to watch is its entire purpose for existing. Critics have found in it messages about paranoia or the moral bankruptcy of our civilization, but honestly, I think those things are, at most, very small parts of the intended message of the movie. The movie is intended to be fun to watch.

The casting reflects that fact. All five of the main actors — Clooney, Pitt, McDormand, Malkovich, Swinton — have moments of broad ridiculousness, and in fact, the first four of those five do a certain amount of mugging. That’s right, mugging. And good mugging, too. Broad, weird, and frequently hilarious, it’s not a punchline comedy. It’s a constant comedic hum, and if you’re not used to that, you can feel like you’re supposed to be waiting for jokes, and the jokes often don’t come.

Burn After Reading is a comedy that works the same way a suspense movie works, with a consant hum of energy rather than a series of setups and payoffs. If you see a lot of movie comedies, you’re accustomed to the fact that the comic energy in a scene, on a scale of 1 to 10, often works something like, “1, 2, 5, 3, 7, 10.” Start slow, make a small joke, die down again, and then POW! with the scene-ender. Burn After Reading is more like, “6, 8, 9, 8, 9, 7, 8.” So you don’t see the punch of a punchline.

There’s definitely some great meta Hollywood stuff going on here: Clooney is mocking his own salt-and-pepper man-on-the-make smoothie; McDormand is playing a hodgepodge of people she’s played in the past; Swinton is making her usual ice queen into a comic creation; Malkovich is actually getting even more meta than in Being John Malkovich, in a sense, because he’s blowing up the tight, weird performance he gave in that movie into something even tighter and weirder.

And, delightfully, Brad Pitt is just about perfect in this movie. When he appeared on Friends in 2001, it should have been another stunt-casting bit of silliness, like the appearances of Brooke Shields and Danny DeVito and whoever else. But it wasn’t; he was wonderful. Hilarious and committed, he created a memorable and fully formed character, and this is really the first performance since then that has capitalized on the talents he showed in that episode. Clooney and Pitt exploiting their divine coolness in Ocean’s 11 was one thing, but for them both to explode that coolness into buffoonery is perhaps even a little better.

I think I know why critics don’t like the movie, but it’s going to spoil you as to a genuine surprise, so see the movie first, and then come back and follow the jump. Until then, suffice it to say that the movie is good, the reviews are not to be taken at face value, and I highly recommend that you run right out and see it.

Okay, the spoilers are coming; are you ready? (There are also some Fargo and No Country For Old Men spoilers, while we’re at it, so if you haven’t seen those, be prepared.)

About two-thirds of the way through the movie, when you least expect it, Clooney shoots Pitt dead, right in the face. It’s not telegraphed, you’re not made ready, and it’s one of the most genuinely surprising things I’ve seen in a movie in quite a while. You don’t realize until it happens that it is absolutely rule-breaking. The tone of this particular comedy is such that you simply do not kill the bumbling criminals. It’s a shocking death, and that’s why I say the tone is darker than Raising Arizona in the direction of Fargo. The Coens like playing around with rules, particularly about who can be killed: they didn’t kill Marge Gunderson in Fargo, and I think they wouldn’t have, but they did kill Jerry Lundegaard’s wife and a bunch of other innocent people in a movie with an awful lot of comedy in it. Ditto the death of Llewelyn Moss in No Country For Old Men.

But my sense is that this death, for a lot of people, distanced them from the movie. It’s a pretty comfortable experience up to that point; mostly goofballs acting silly. But there’s a change in tone where, for a while, you feel like Clooney is trapped in a different movie from the one everyone else is in. He doesn’t play the panic that follows the shooting for laughs, really — in those moments, he’s genuinely stricken and horrified, and it takes you in a different direction. And while the shooting may seem out of nowhere, it’s really quite necessary. You need it to move the story from farce to tragicomedy, which is where they want to wind up. Without that moment, what you have is a bunch of idiots engaged in relatively low-stakes nonsense. Once that happens, you have what is quite correctly referred to in the movie as a clusterfuck, and the movie emphatically is about the concept of the clusterfuck.

I think that a lot of people who reviewed the movie ultimately found it impossible to place. It’s not a totally successful comedy, because it has that unsettling death (and one other). It’s not a successful drama, because it all comes to nothing — a point that’s driven home by the absolutely brilliant structure and execution of the final scene. I was fascinated and wildly impressed by the way the movie built until there were a lot of threads that would have to be wrapped up, and then instead of taking the time to show us how they were all wrapped up, it just…wraps them up. You’ll understand once you’ve seen it.

J.K. Simmons and David Rasche have a discussion that I think has made too easy a target. I’ve read several reviews in which someone suggests that the sort of nihilistic “Huh, so…that happened” speeches that you’ll see in that scene somehow suggest that the Coen brothers are telling the public that they think the movie is a big nothing, but that’s much too easy. Making a movie like this, with this much carefully shaped manic energy, is so much harder than it looks. This doesn’t just happen; comedy is hard.

Everybody’s wrong. The people telling you not to see it? Wrong. The people who think it’s lazy or auto-piloted or not showing adequate effort? Wrong. Watch it and see for yourself.