- Intolerable Cruelty is a film whose title could also serve as its review were it not for the fact that I, like the Coen brothers, have an aversion to pithiness. Let me therefore expend a few words to marvel at the fact that the Coens tried to arrange a screwball romance around an amoral lawyer (George Clooney) and a gold-digging serial divorcee (Catherine Zeta-Jones). For directors who excel at humanizing unsavory characters, such a pairing may have seemed like a worthy challenge. For a creative team whose films already feature a dearth of sympathetic characters, it's a colossal misstep.
- The guy, a womanizing shark named Miles, is the sort of lawyer who doesn't so much instruct witnesses as give them acting lessons. The gal, a seductress named Marylin, marries rich saps like Rex Rexroth (Edward Herrmann) and Howard D. Doyle (Billy Bob Thornton) just to get at their bank accounts. Miles and Marylin are equally despicable people on the surface, but confidential confessions to their alleged friends (Paul Adelstein, Julia Duffy) are meant to suggest that there is more to these vacuums of decency than meets the eye. Judging from my reaction, you may conclude that I am not convinced.
- The film also features other characters whom I suspect, like Rex Rexroth, are brought in mostly for their quirky names, such as Donovan Donaly (Geoffrey Rush), Ollie Olerud (Jack Kyle), and (get ready for it) Heinz, the Baron Krauss von Espy (Jonathan Hadary). For no reason other than the fact that the Coens often helpfully mark their lesser films with a cretinous man-child, there is also Wheezy Joe (Irwin Keyes). The film's only truly likeable characters are a sad-sack lawyer (Richard Jenkins) who finds Miles intolerable and a private eye (Cedric the Entertainer) whose admittedly repetitive mentions of nailing people's asses are nonetheless entertaining. Despite Clooney's general suaveness and Zeta-Jones' intelligent beauty, neither is good enough to salvage the setup and characters they're given. The result is not only far less witty and charming than its screwball comedy antecedents but somehow also less fun than an actual series of divorce proceedings.
