The Coen brothers, in case you hadn’t noticed, are movie-makers who are also movie buffs. Naturally, this informs their filmmaking. Yet unlike that other movie-buff filmmaker, Quentin Tarantino, their references are not 1970s B-movies and straight-to-video gorefests, but rather the stylish and stylised classics of the 1940s.
It is no exaggeration to say that all the Coen brothers’ movies are, in some way or another, homages to the two great genres of the 1940s: film noir and the screwball comedy. I would say, as a broad-strokes simplification to get this argument off the ground, that they make movies that are post-modern variations, revisions, or even sly combinations of those genres. Into the film noir category fall Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, Fargo, and The Man Who Wasn’t There; in the screwball slot are Raising Arizona, The Hudsucker Proxy, The Big Lebowski, Fargo, O Brother Where Art Thou?, and now Intolerable Cruelty.
For the first time in their career, the Coens have taken on a script not generated in the first instance by themselves. Clearly, though, they’ve given a good rewrite to Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone work — their fingerprints are all over it. It’s also funnier, in their screwball or oddball way, than most of the rest of the American movies available. Instead of relying on tired sitcom formulae, as the others tend to do, they aspire to genuine wit — and most of the time they get there.
Intolerable Cruelty should really have been titled The Massey Pre-Nup (a far more Coenesque title). It’s about a slick, self-regarding divorce lawyer, Miles Massey, played with a sort of charmless charm by George Clooney. Miles is the author of a watertight prenuptial agreement — which becomes one of the film’s motifs. He is a ruthless schemer, prepared to go to any lengths to destroy his clients’ ex-spouses.
One of those ex-spouses, however, is the sultry femme fatale — and here’s the film noir note — Marilyn Rexroth (Catherine Zeta-Jones). Miles finds himself powerfully drawn to her. The fact that she is as ruthlessly amoral as he is means that their association will not end when he demolishes her in court, and what follows is a sequence of romantic and verbal sparring matches that owe something to, and offer the satisfactions of, the 1940s oppositions of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell or Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracey.
In general, it works a treat. This is a lovely idea, well-executed by all those concerned. Clooney, in particular, manages the kind of thing Cary Grant did for Hitchcock — playing partly against type, trading on his looks and charm but to create a rather nasty character. Here, though, is where the film falters in producing a more pleasing overall effect. It pains one to say so, because the films the Coen brothers make (this one included) are so much cleverer and so much better than the bulk of Hollywood product, but Intolerable Cruelty does have its flaws.
One is that Zeta-Jones never really unleashes her full seductive arsenal. The main quibble, though, is that however amusing we find the Clooney and Zeta-Jones characters, their sheer amorality makes it hard for one to care about them much. What does it matter to us if one of them gets outwitted and trashed by the other?
This, in fact, is a tricky issue, and I find myself rather hoist by my own petard. While one resents the way mainstream Hollywood presents simplistic moral schemes in order to manipulate the viewer, and one despises the way Hollywood redemption is usually empty wand-waving, Intolerable Cruelty does feel as if it needs something in the way of a moral compass. At one point, Miles seems to be transformed by the powers of love, but his moment of sentimental self-realisation ends only in humiliation.
Maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps the lack I find in the film’s moral schema really has nothing to do with alleged morality. Perhaps the Coens should just have pushed Intolerable Cruelty further in the amoral direction — make Miles and Marilyn even nastier, and thus funnier, and, if you’re going to do screwball comedy, accelerate the repartee!