Joel and Ethan Coen, the brothers who have written and directed some of independent cinema’s finest productions of the past 15 years, score their most mainstream victory with “Intolerable Cruelty,” an uproariously quirky story about romance in the very unromantic field of matrimonial law.
Miles Massey (George Clooney, “Ocean’s Eleven”) is Los Angeles’ finest divorce attorney with his smooth-talking, reckless disregard for morality. He is the author of the Massey Prenup, a premarital document so ironclad that Harvard Law devotes an entire semester to its study, and he is exceedingly wealthy, with an open tab at the local Mercedes dealership.
But Miles has become bored with his maverick lifestyle and, while representing her husband in a bitter divorce, becomes “fascinated” with Marylin Rexroth (Catherine Zeta-Jones), a razor-sharp socialite who seemingly looks on her dying marriage as an extended act of prostitution with a hefty John’s fee.
To further explicate the plot of “Intolerable Cruelty” would require revealing twists that commence as early as halfway through the film and keep coming at a remarkable rate. Suffice to say that with the entrance of a chest-thumping private investigator (Cedric Kyles, aka Cedric the Entertainer, “The Original Kings of Comedy”), a down-and-out television producer (Geoffrey Rush, “Shine”), a gossiping baron (Janathan Hadary, “Private Parts”) and an oil tycoon (Billy Bob Thornton, “The Man Who Wasn’t There”), the storyline remains delightfully tactless.
Despite that lack of tact, the Coen brothers present a movie indicative of their finer films and seem to demand that the audience pass moral judgments of the protagonists. This was a relatively simple task in “Barton Fink,” where evil was denoted by the raining down of fire and brimstone, and “Fargo,” where good was denoted by a badge, but the central characters in “Intolerable Cruelty” are all fairly intricate, with hidden agendas and complex motives.
The film leaves greedy ex-wives looking far worse than a hit-man suffering acute asthma, shows attorneys as only being as sinister as their clients dictate, and rewards conmen (or, more appropriately, conwomen), with credit for the intellectual weightiness of their heartless plots.
When it comes to portraying that heartlessness, Catherine Zeta-Jones is phenomenal. She has certainly rehearsed the role with equally chilly parts in “Chicago” and “America’s Sweethearts,” but starring opposite George Clooney demands a suave coating of every spoken word, something that even tripped up Julia Roberts in “Ocean’s Eleven.” But Zeta-Jones fully exploits the Coen brothers’ sharpest dialogue to date and carries herself with confidence opposite Clooney.
The former ER star’s presence is not the only trait reminiscent of a Steven Soderbergh project. “Intolerable Cruelty” exhibits the sort of decadent scenery that dominated “Traffic” and “The Limey,” a risky move that wouldn’t have paid off had the aforementioned script not been elegant enough to keep viewers’ eyes from wandering.
Ultimately, “Intolerable Cruelty” is less a comedy about a divorce attorney and the woman he loves than a tragedy about the state of marriage in society. The film opens as a Hollywood producer drives down a palm-tree-laden boulevard in an expensive convertible, mouthing the words to Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer:” “I’m just a poor boy/ Though my story’s seldom told.” And while the Coen brothers certainly intend for you to laugh at the irony of the statement, their film, which values love above all else, suggests that the producer — who is about to walk in on his cheating wife — really is “just a poor boy.”
Grade: A
