Intolerable Cruelty (2003)

If there’s a disappointment to be found in the first two acts of Intolerable Cruelty, the Coen Brothers’ most misunderstood picture, it’s that the filmmakers chose so staid a subject to satirize as the divorce proceeding. That was old hat in the times of Sturges and Lubitsch, what about what those legends didn’t have? Reality television, diet fads, political correctness, tabloid worship, computers that serve as willful cocoon, etc, etc. Ethan and Joel Coen have a mastery of words that rivals the great writers of the 1930s and 1940s, but, as in The Hudsucker Proxy, they’re too preoccupied here with commenting on what has come before. The Coens can do the wax museum tour like no one in the business, but why settle for that when there’s so much else that remains to be properly lacerated?

For its ambitions though, Intolerable Cruelty is successful and considerably underrated. The film sets its tone, an anarchic mix of the swift and the intentionally leaden, in the opening minutes. Donovan Donaly (Geoffrey Rush, destined to work with the Coens), a successful daytime soap producer, returns home and, after a bit of back and forth, discovers that his wife has just finished boffing the Pool Man. Hint #1: the pool man is an old friend of the wife’s. Hint #2, Donovan doesn’t have a pool. The pool man apologizes to Donovan for “porking” his wife, while the wife sticks Donovan in the ass with his Emmy and flees the scene, knocking into Donovan’s car on the way out which, in turn, causes the sound system to resume playing the Simon and Garfunkle song that opens the film.

Intolerable Cruelty demonstrates this sort of play through out, much of the humor is sharp and set at a “what did they just say” lightening pace that rivals the iconic old school comedies, only punctuated with a modern banality, such as Cedric the Entertainer’s continued promise to “nail your ass.” I think it’s this dissonance that frustrated audiences of most camps: the critical elite thought the Coen Brothers had gone crass and mainstream; the mainstream, poised for an effortless Clooney-Zeta-Jones meet cute, didn’t know what the hell they had stumbled into. This also proved a problem for the Coens’ follow-up picture, a remake of The Ladykillers, that, while not as successful as Intolerable Cruelty, does have its merits, including the best Tom Hanks performance since, I don’t know, Turner and Hooch?

This film works similar wonders on Catherine Zeta-Jones. Jones is a talented, charismatic actress, but most movies can’t handle her; she’s too beautiful and otherworldly to convince in the sorts of “ordinary” roles that usually win awards, while the superstar roles, the roles that used to make legends out of the Rita Hayworths and the Lana Turners, don’t really exist anymore. Jones has never been more startlingly beautiful than she is here; she truly lives up to the cliché of a star who glows, radiating that perfect contemptuous sexual movie heat that Hitchcock would have adored. Comedies normally don’t play fair in the battle of sexes, one usually appears to be unquestionably superior to the other, but Jones holds every bit of her own against that considerable Coen regular, George Clooney.

And there are very few stars working today who seem to understand their effect on movies and moviegoers as intimately as Clooney. Tabloids, in their incessant desperation, have successfully stolen the lesser stars’ mystique. Stars spend too much time convincing the world that they too are plagued with the average man’s tedium, while the average man spends much too much time convincing himself that he too is blessed with the average star’s presence (how many Who Wants to Be a Fill in the Blank are there?). The line has blurred, I want my movie stars to be Gods again, and George Clooney continues to fight that good fight. I don’t hear what George Clooney has eaten for breakfast, I don’t hear about George Clooney’s illegitimate step-aliens, the man simply knocks off the occasionally obligatory I’m just a guy doing what I do bit of faux modesty and cleverness while keeping the work up and good.

The key to Clooney, and the reason everyone seems so desperate to call him Cary Grant, is that, like Grant, he’s that rare breed of sexy movie star who feels comfortable looking totally ridiculous. Not many can pull off the suave, broken romantic badass of Out of Sight. Fewer still have the boony Clark Gable burlesque of O Brother, Where Art Thou? in them, and much fewer still can pull off both. Clooney’s work in Intolerable Cruelty presents us both sides of the Clooney equator in one film. Miles Massey is a charming, fast-talking shark, a divorce attorney of course, but he’s also a bit of a romantic bozo, dropping his briefcase at the first sight of Marylin (Jones) and immediately exposing himself to her in the exact same way that he knows her previous fallen men have. Miles is stupid, canny, sharp and, eventually, quite endearing.

Can we please retire the “Coens don’t ever peek from behind their icy wall of intellectual condescension to engage the heart” logline for good please? No Country for Old Men wasn’t the first film to venture into the realms of the human either, all of their films (particularly the marvelous, under seen The Man Who Wasn’t There) are full-blooded and passionate in their own way, usually some sort of existential exploration of our role in life. Intolerable Cruelty is a slighter work, but there are scenes even here that stick, and that’s because, ultimately, the Coens mean the love story between Miles and Marylin. When Miles, heartbroken, turns to Marylin, and says “And all of that last night, meant nothing?”, this isn’t brushed off with a post-modern smirk, its a jarringly honest dramatic beat. People who accuse the Coen Brothers of hiding behind irony are missing the point, the films are really requiems for sincerity; a sincerity that, they clearly believe, has gone extinct.

You may have noticed the phrase “the first two acts” near the beginning of this post. The third act of Intolerable Cruelty is a mild problem. The film whimpers when it should roar, turning into a more traditional Coen brothers picture seemingly for no other reason than exhaustion of ideas, the “let’s take turns hiring a hit man” bit doesn’t feel tonally right. Tonal malleability is a Coen brothers’ trademark, but the experiment doesn’t quite play here, you hope for the brothers to more rigidly follow the screwball framework and trump it by the confidence of execution, not evasion. It’s a testament to the messy, anything goes charm of the picture though that even the not quite right stuff yields something memorable: the huge, sad-eyed Wheezy Joe, who lingers as one of the Coens’ more haunting criminal oddballs (he gets a hell of an exit too). Imagine what Wheezy Joe could do if he found the right film.

★★★

Posted on March 17th, 2008 in Reviews, Comedy, 2003 |

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