Director : Joel & Ethan Coen

Cast: George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand, John Malkovich and Tilda Swinton

At the CIA headquarters in Arlington, Va, analyst Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich) arrives for a top-secret meeting. Unfortunately for Cox, the secret is soon out, he is being busted. Cox does not take the news well and returns to his Georgetown home to work on his memoirs and his drinking, not necessarily in that order. His wife Katie (Tilda Swinton) is dismayed, though not particularly surprised; she is already well into an illicit affair with Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney), a married federal marshal, and sets about making plans to leave Cox for Harry. Elsewhere in Washington, D.C. suburbs and seemingly worlds apart, Hardbodies Fitness Centers employee Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) can barely concentrate on her work. She is consumed with her life plan for cosmetic surgery and confides her mission to can-do colleague Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt). Linda is all but oblivious to the fact that the gym's manager Ted Treffon (Richard Jenkins) pines for her even as she arranges dates via the internet with other men. When a computer disc containing material for the CIA analyst's memoirs accidently falls into the hands of Linda and Chad, the duo are intent on exploiting their find. As Ted frets, "No good can come of this", events spiral out of everyone's and anyone's control, in a cascading series of darkly hilarious encounters.

We wanted to do a spy movie and it didn't exactly turn out that way. I don't really think it is a spy movie. That's how the original idea was structured. It's really about these particular characters. Whenever you do these things you want to be specific about the place that your story is set. You want it to be about not just the people who are in the government in Washington, but also the people who live in that community. It wasn't a specific person that we based our characters on. We don't relate one movie to the other among any of our movies. We're thinking about whatever we're working on. They are different movies. I guess to the extent that they feel very different, that's good. Certainly, it's an ambition that you change from movie-to-movie. You don't want to repeat yourself. As for the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of each of those two movies, I don't know what to say to that. The characters could be leading lives that don't have a whole lot of meaning, but they can still be interesting characters and actors in an interesting story.