Intolerable Cruelty
Joel Coen (2003)
I hated it by the time the opening titles appeared. The prologue features a TV producer returning home unexpectedly to find his wife being unfaithful with an odd job man. Garishly overdone marital mayhem follows. When someone of Geoffrey Rush’s calibre resorts to the kind of desperate overacting on display here (Rush plays the producer), you fear the worst. The animated titles – a fussy confusion of hearts and putti and Victorian cut-out figures – are followed by elaborate shots of George Clooney’s teeth under dental treatment and you wonder when the Coens are going to give you a break from showing how pointlessly clever they are. The break comes as soon as Clooney appears in person: his star impact cuts through the hectic swill. The Coens really are very lucky to have him. If his filmography were different, Clooney’s inability to seem crude might be a limitation. For as long as he keeps making pictures like this one, it’s a saving grace.
Not that he’s at his best here – most of the time anyway. He plays Miles Massey, a hot-shot divorce attorney, creator of a pre-nuptial agreement that’s never successfully been challenged (and on which the plot depends). Clooney is funny in interviews with his clients, including the TV producer’s wife (Stacey Travis), and in court but he does too many double takes, as if trying to prove what genre of film he’s in. (There’s also a sequence when he gesticulates too noticeably – the hand movements seem put on and they don’t recur.) More crucially, there’s no connection between Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones: the Coens may be too cynical to want Miles and Zeta-Jones’s character, the serial bride Marylin Hamilton Rexroth Doyle Massey, to feel something for each other beneath the relentless self-centred scheming that propels their relationship. But the lack of feeling between the stars – it’s a lack of physical appetite too – is radically destructive to a romantic comedy, however ‘dark’ it’s meant to be. Though he fails to spark with Zeta-Jones, Clooney brings off brilliantly a keynote speech at a gathering of divorce lawyers in Las Vegas. (The organisation’s acronym is NOMAN and its tagline, displayed on a notice behind the lectern, is one of the better jokes in the script – ‘Let NOMAN put asunder’ – although the Coens rather spoil it by the daft explanation of the initials as ‘National Organisation of Matrimonial Attorneys Nationwide’.) Miles takes to the podium thinking he is, through his impending marriage to Marylin and her shredding of the ‘pre-nup’, a fabulously rich man. This causes him to recant his calculating lawyerly past and experience an outburst of fraudulent humanitarianism. Clooney is wonderful delivering this hypocritical oration. He engages so completely with it that he doesn’t only take in the audience in the hall. He just about convinces us that he means what he says.
Catherine Zeta-Jones isn’t a bad actress but she has a waxy look and a weightless presence here – she’s a simulacrum of a sexy film star. She’s best when Marylin is slyly faking emotion in the witness box at the hearing of the divorce between her and Rex Rexroth (Edward Herrmann). Zeta-Jones seems comfortable in a scene like this when the shamming is theatrical and when her performance can be largely self-contained (two things which explain why what she did in Chicago was mainly very effective). When Marylin’s duplicity needs to be more subtle and elusive, Zeta-Jones is vacuous. Partly because I’d got the wrong idea in my head that the Coens had based the film on a particular screwball classic (I began to think Adam’s Rib), I also started expecting Zeta-Jones and Clooney to be playing competing attorneys who fall in love. There would have been some comic friction in the idea of being asked to believe in Catherine Zeta-Jones as a brilliant lawyer: casting her as a mercenary tart doesn’t have the same effect. (I wondered how much better the film might have been with Cate Blanchett or Gwyneth Paltrow in the role.)
The Coens don’t have the temperament for successful screwball comedy. They despise their characters too much – they rarely see them as fallible and sometimes ridiculous but with redeeming aspects of personality. This seems to go for everyone in Intolerable Cruelty: George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones are exempted by the Coens only because they look good – not because they turn out to be interesting or likeable people. The crack timing of Richard Jenkins (who has a fine doleful professionalism as Marylin’s attorney) and Billy Bob Thornton (easily droll as a soap actor pretending to be the Texan magnate whom Marylin marries between Rexroth and Miles) makes their performances enjoyable but they’re the only two, apart from Clooney. Not for the first time in the Coens’ world, the worthlessness or turpitude of many of the characters is typically conveyed by behaviour of gross stupidity and a physical appearance to match. This can be unpleasantly creepy: the octogenarian senior partner of Miles’s law firm (Tom Aldredge) is grotesquely geriatric – sequestered in a darkened office where, at death’s door and with tubes coming out of his decaying face, he croakily recites the statistics of a lifetime’s professional success. (Miles, hardly surprisingly, has nightmares of turning into this horror film figure.) More often, it’s just feeble: why would someone as smart as Miles have a right hand man as unrelievedly dumb as Wrigley (Paul Adelstein)? The Coens’ galloping derision is comedically counterproductive with a character like this one: when Wrigley starts blubbing at weddings, it would stand a chance of being funny if he’d seemed heartlessly incisive at work. Since the Coens have to make him a twit throughout, reducing him to tears doesn’t mean anything. In the Coens’ hands, the screwball hallmark of sustained wisecracking dialogue is sporadic and not integrally connected to the characters speaking it. The lines come across as yet more showing off by the writer-directors.
23 October 2009