Flak Magazine: Review of Intolerable Cruelty, 10-22-03

Intolerable Cruelty is a self-conscious throwback to screwball romantic comedy from those most self-conscious of filmmakers, Joel and Ethan Coen. The brothers' hyper-meta-awareness of their film heritage plays out differently in their movies than it does in those from their cinéaste colleagues; rather than sublimate their influences, they polish and découpage them. For this assignment, you might expect radiant movie stars with an orbit of hangers-on, high-society trappings, high-gloss cinematography, crackle-pop dialogue, and of course you get it all, plus laughs to spare.

Intolerable Cruelty pits divorce attorney Miles Massey (George Clooney) against gold digger Marylin Rexroth (Catherine Zeta-Jones) — and by "pits against," I of course mean "sets up to fall in love with." When Marylin gets videotaped evidence of her magnate husband's infidelity, she goes to divorce court to collect her 50 percent. Miles, being the best at what he does, digs up a witness to testify that the Rexroths met as a result of Marylin consciously seeking "a wary reege hozbund," thereby keeping Marylin from what she considers her rightful fortune. To show Miles up, Marylin remarries almost instantly, this time to a rich oilman, and flaunts her fidelity/tweaks Miles' ego by going to his office to sign the legendary Massey prenup ("It's never been penetrated!") — meaning that she obviously isn't in it for the money, since the contract only lets her take out of the marriage what she brings into it. This turn of the screw leaves the attorney appropriately dumbfounded and lovestruck, and things develop from here in a comfortably screwball fashion that points up the classic Hollywood charms of its stars and sends the audience out of the theater grinning.

Still, is it a coincidence that the least of the Coen brothers' movies is also the least Coenesque? Probably not. Working as filmmakers-for-hire for the first time, Joel (writer/director) and Ethan (writer/producer) became attached to Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone's screenplay after it has spent years languishing in a Hollywood drawer, and what began as a script polish grew into a full-fledged Coen brothers movie … except, well, it's not full-fledged.

The Coens established their sterling bona fides with a string of witty genre studies stretching from Blood Simple to The Man Who Wasn't There, with such comedy pearls along the way as Raising Arizona and The Hudsucker Proxy. What those movies, and all the Coens' movies until this one, share is a narrative recklessness — a feature that comes into particular relief when contemplating Intolerable Cruelty's all-too-straightforward nature.

The byzantine plots of such films as Miller's Crossing and Fargo, and especially the picaresque, devil-may-care stories underlying The Big Lebowski and O Brother, Where Art Thou? are not the autistic noodlings they're often made out to be. Sure, the Coens always introduce elements from far left field — think of the mercenary biker literally from hell in Raising Arizona, or John Goodman showing you the life of the mind in Barton Fink, or Marge's dinner with Mike Yanagita in Fargo. But that's how they raise the stakes and puncture the nearly hermetic story world they've created. This will seem counterintuitive to those who present these storytelling filigrees as evidence that the Coens regularly disappear up their own occipital lobes, but really, their bizarro turns of events always explode the story just as the audience is starting to get complacent. Plot is character, and so taking elements A, B and C and throwing in element ð forces us to consider the Coens' protagonists in an unforeseen light. It's when (and, depending on their temperament, if) viewers do this that the complexity of what the Coens are up to really comes into focus. To deny that there's something genuine being said about loyalty in Miller's Crossing, or about friendship in The Big Lebowski, or about marriage and the "modern man" in The Man Who Wasn't There, is a bit of emotion-denying perversity on par with that of which detractors accuse the Coens.

It's also true, however, that those movies' effectiveness is largely due to their screw-loose aesthetic. Intolerable Cruelty, while cleverly critical of material culture and romance-killing cynicism, never knocks your socks off — the mania doesn't eclipse the mannerisms. Miles and Marylin never become quite real enough to root for, their chemistry never quite so intoxicating that you get a contact high. And maybe that's because the story just … unfolds like it should. The Coens get a screenplay credit, but not a story credit, and the movie bears that out: The surface and rat-a-tat-tat dialogue seem right, but nothing truly unexpected or outlandish happens to turn the tables on the audience. The movie offers a garden-variety twist, and it's pleasant enough, but it's the kind of surprise that conforms to expectations rather than confounds them. This is a minor quibble, maybe, but a meaningful one: Intolerable Cruelty is the first ground-rule double in a career that's been all home runs.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)