Intolerable Cruelty

With Katharine Hepburn's death this past June, Hollywood not only lost a movie legend but also one of screwball comedy's brightest lights. With Carole Lombard, Cary Grant, Irene Dunne, Myrna Loy, and Barbara Stanwyck all long gone before her, Hepburn had been the final torch-bearer of a curious movie sub-genre that existed for a little under a decade. In subsequent years, there have been only a few attempts, with varying degrees of success, to recreate screwball's dizzying pace and even dizzier characters. The latest comes from a promising source – Joel and Ethan Coen, the brothers behind the wonderfully eccentric Hudsucker Proxy, Raising Arizona, and more recently, The Big Lebowski. Unfortunately, the result is not the triumph of the quirky, madcap humor one has come to expect from the duo, but rather a flat, quasi-conventional Hollywood romantic comedy. Whether this dullness is a result of the Coens' pairing with Hollywood producer Brian Grazer remains to be seen, but regardless, the brothers do not seem to have fully invested themselves in the material, which – unlike most of their other efforts – did not originally spring from their unique minds.

Nevertheless, George Clooney delivers a fantastic performance as sharky divorce lawyer Miles Massey. Renowned for his underhanded (yet always winning) tactics in the courtroom, Miles finally meets his match when he comes face to face with Marylin (Catherine Zeta-Jones), a golddigging wife in the process of divorcing her wealthy, philandering husband. Despite incontrovertible evidence of bad behavior on the part of Marylin's husband, Miles manages to bilk her out of a settlement by bringing in a witness that attests to money-hungry ways. Broke and furious, Marylin hatches an elaborate plot to wreak revenge on Miles.

Although Catherine Zeta-Jones plays the ice princess well, her performance falters towards the end of the picture, when Marylin is supposed to grow a heart. In one of her greatest roles – spoiled heiress Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story – Katharine Hepburn embodied a similarly frosty creature, but the effectiveness (and timelessness) of that performance stemmed from the deep sense of vulnerability she allowed to slowly filter through her steel exterior. While Zeta-Jones ably delivers Marylin's most biting lines (my favorite: in response to Miles's inquiry as to whether she is carnivore, Marylin, with a mischievous glint in her eye, purrs, "Oh Mr. Massey, you have nooo idea."), she never fully lets her guard down or gives the viewers a sense of what's driving her.

Billy Bob Thornton and Cedric the Entertainer both appear briefly for some comic relief, but the real star of the show is Clooney, whose comic talents are stretched to full effect by the Coens. On occasion, the actor will turn in a performance in which he literally coasts on his (considerable) charm, a phenomenon most recently witnessed in Ocean's Eleven. In Intolerable Cruelty, the Coen Brothers allow him no such slack. Contorting his face in ways that simultaneously rival and channel Cary Grant, Clooney's Miles begins as a hilariously vain and cocksure shark in a suit and nervously transforms into a helpless, lovesick puppy.

The rest of the movie, however, fails to live up this central performance, lacking the antic pace that made screwball comedy so appealing. Shot by Roger Deakins, the film looks gorgeous, but in this case its bark doesn't live up to its bite.