Joel and Ethan Coen have a distinguished pedigree, having produced more great films than Jamaica produces mangoes.

Their last film would lend high expectations for this one: “No Country for Old Men” won Best Director, Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor at the 80th Academy Awards.

Its “lighthearted” followup, “Burn After Reading,” stars Brad Pitt, George Clooney, John Malkovich and Frances McDormand. Pitt and McDormand are employees at a gym called Hardbodies who stumble upon a CD with a manuscript and data from Malkovich – an employee of the CIA who quit when faced with a transfer.

The plot of my favorite Coen film, “The Big Lebowski,” is about as simple (spoiler alert): a girl is kidnapped, but then it turns out she isn’t. Sure, decorations abound, but “Lebowski” and “Burn” are both fundamentally character pieces that lampoon their genre and make the entire narrative a red herring.

In “Burn After Reading,” the opening scene is the familiar satellite-to-building zoom we’ve all seen in the Bourne trilogy, in “National Treasure” and a hundred other Jerry Bruckheimer pieces of garbage and in any given spy movie since at least “Enemy of the State.” The film pokes fun at the pettiness of our lives, at the absurdity of the spy game and at the small events that trigger larger ones (the so-called “Butterfly Effect”).

The film is most effective during the moments featuring J. K. Simmons and David Rasche as “CIA Superior” and “CIA Officer.” They dissect the banal machinations of the protagonists with an unanticipated, hilarious perspective.

“Burn After Reading” is as funny as “No Country for Old Men” wasn’t; at the showing I attended, the audience clearly got both the subtle and the broad comedy of the original script by the Coens. After the relative artistic failures of “The Ladykillers” and “Intolerable Cruelty,” this film reestablishes the pair as a serious comedic force and a serious artistic one.

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