Intolerable Cruelty

Light and sleight are good ways to describe the film based on the Coen brother’s first work-for-hire script. Intolerable Cruelty could have been directed by someone else (and nearly was, by first Ron Howard and then Jonathan Demme) but the scenarios are uniquely Coen-esque; those other directors wouldn’t have fooled anyone. It’s a romantic comedy marketed as such, but features little romanticism and not a lot of comedy.

George Clooney plays high profile divorce attorney Miles Massey, famous for his “Massey pre-nup” agreements. Miles meets his match in master manipulator Marylin Rexroth (Catherine Zeta-Jones), who has a history of marrying for fortunes – and then quickly divorcing. When her current husband, Rex (Edward Herrmann) is caught on video in the act of cheating on her (said video shot by private investigator Gus Petch (Cedric the Entertainer), Rex draws upon Massey’s talents to defend him. When Marylin meets with Miles and Rex with her lawyer (Richard Jenkins), Miles is immediately smitten with her and she flirts back. Can the most famous pre-nup attorney survive a romantic tryst with the dangerous man-shark Marylin? Enter Billy Bob Thornton as Texas oil millionaire Howard Doyle, who Marylin’s suddenly engaged to.

Intolerable Cruelty is influenced by and echoes the cynical and hard romantic comedies of director and writer Ernst Lubitsch — especially the trilogy of films he made with Miriam Hopkins (The Smiling Lieutenant, 1931; Trouble in Paradise, 1932 and Design for Living, 1933). These were risque divertisements low in sentimentality and high in sarcasm. The Coen brothers’ film, though, also traffics in raunch (as was the trend for romantic films in the early aughts), a formula change which transmutes the story from being almost too cynical to acidic. A film with unlikable characters doing unlikable things needs a light touch — a certain wry whimsy to make it enjoyable for the audience. The Coen brothers, though, make it hard to care for the film’s protagonists.

“Making movies is never going to get better than working on a Coen brothers project.” ~Sam ElliotThis isn’t the fault of the actors. Clooney’s in full comedic mode, a narcissistic (obsessed with his white teeth) con man who’s so sure of himself he can’t imagine he could be taken by someone smarter. Catherine Zeta-Jones is his equal in allure and smarts. Her Marylin can cry at will to influence a jury. Billy Bob Thornton’s oil man is amusing, and clearly based on Oklahoma oilman and romantic threat Dan Leeson (Ralph Bellamy) in The Awful Truth (1937), another divorce-centered romantic comedy. The Coens, in fact, borrow many scenes from earlier romantic comedies; a late night hotel corridor sequence is practically stolen from Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief (1955). One of the funniest scenes in Cruelty involves another throwback to ’30s screwball comedies, Jonathan Hadary’s turn as the dog-clutching Swiss hotel concierge Baron “Puffy” Krauss von Espy, who testifies in court that he helped Marylin find a rich, foolish man to marry. Hadary’s act recalls the glory days of ’30s character actors like Eric Blore and Edward Everett Horton.

Intolerable Cruelty, with cinematography by Roger Deakins, looks bright, colorful and polished. With appearances by Geoffrey Rush and Julia Duffy, the story’s filled with goofy characters. The film zips along at a fast pace. It may, after all of that, still leave you feeling cold. My recommendation, if you haven’t seen it, is to instead watch The Awful Truth. It’s funnier and stars the comedians, Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, who George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones aspire to.

—Michael R. Neno, 2020 Feb 17