Intolerable Cruelty (2003)

INTOLERABLE CRUELTY

Rating: 2/5 stars

Date of Review: February 12th, 2004

REVIEW BY JOHN ULMER (Copyright, 2004)

So I sit there for the first half hour, waiting for it to get better, until the film starts to gradually become even worse. Is this possible? I wonder to myself. Have the Coen Brothers--Ethan and Joel--made yet another bad movie?

To say that they haven't made a good movie since "Fargo" may not be true in some viewers' opinions. Many people enjoyed "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" and "The Man Who Wasn't There." Although I thought that these two films were well made and distinctive, they were also both rather empty and dry--a bit too cold and occasionally stupid for my own liking. And both "O Brother" and "The Man Who Wasn't There" substantially fall downhill in the third--and final--act.

After "Intolerable Cruelty" was over I talked to the projectionist for a few moments on my way out. She said that she is a big Coen Brothers fan, but that she thinks they should stick to what they're best at. We both found the occasional moment of "Intolerable Cruelty" sporadically amusing, but I didn't laugh out loud a single time at this film--which is a bad sign for a near-two-hour comedy that thinks it is very clever but really isn't. It is as if the movie believes itself to be as smart as "Fargo." It just isn't.

If I'm not mistaken, this is the first film from the Coen Brothers that was not essentially their sole idea in the first place. It is as though the Coens have co-ownership of the film; Brian Grazer co-produced, the script was written by two other individuals (along with the Coens), and all the flair and quirkiness of the earlier Coen outings--such as "The Hudsucker Proxy"--is practically invisible here. What a mess.

Just when I thought George Clooney was starting to grow on me in a less-than-literal way, he turns out one of the most over-the-top performances in the history of film. He is Miles Massey, a hotshot divorce attorney who has a strange fetish about clean, white teeth. Clooney presents Miles the way he should be at first, but soon he becomes too silly to take seriously. It seems as though Clooney thought he was acting in some type of slapstick Farrelly Brothers movie here--whereas he was over-the-top in "O Brother," yet still seemed real, here he just seems like a dull sort of caricature of a lawyer--not really a pun on attorneys, not really a pun on humans, just an in-between shell of some strange creature whose eyes bulge open all the time, and whose voice takes high pitches to accentuate certain adjectives and verbs. It's like a sort of unlikable "Saturday Night Live" character stretched out for a feature-length film--minus the laughs of something such as "The Blues Brothers." Sometimes I enjoyed Clooney's performance, and sometimes I found his casual performance refreshing...but more often than not he annoyed me, and I saw him as some type of very weird character. Have you ever seen "Clifford"? He's like Martin Short's title character mixed with a pinch of the egotistical flair of Clooney himself. Disturbing, to say the least.

Catherine Zeta-Jones does little but pose cleavage for the camera here--she walks around in short, tight leather pants and makes subtle innuendos. (Zeta-Jones: "I'm going to mount his behind on a wall and throw darts at it." Clooney: "I'm still looking for a behind to mount." Zeta-Jones: "Don't look at mine.") To be fair, she plays her evil character with the sort of touch it deserves--but the ending is so silly and ridiculous that it made me feel cheated.

Zeta-Jones, you see, is a sort of black widow--she marries stupid rich men, divorces them, then takes all their money. But this time it hasn't worked, because her husband's (Edward Herrmann) attorney is Miles, who proves that her intention was to take his cash from the start. Even her evidence of his affair (caught on tape by Cedric the Enterainer, who has a funny slogan) is little enough to prove her innocence.

So she decides to go after Miles himself--marry him, take his money, and run away. It's a complicated mess but soon she finds herself truly falling in love with him.

Well, that's the sort of plot summary I read about, anyway. The first paragraph I described was true. The second is not. There is no gradual love that forms between the two leads as their relationship goes on. The film staggers onwards for close to an hour and a half until they finally get married, and then she suddenly divorces him and is out the door. Then we get the typical ending that I need not delve into. You just have to see it for yourself to laugh at its sheer stupidity. I sincerely hope that the Coen Brothers didn't intend any audience to take such a contrived film seriously?

What we had here was great potential for an irreverent romantic comedy with smart dialogue, witty ideas and good central performances by arguably two of Hollywood's hottest sex symbols. Instead we get a slapstick farce that is as utterly stupid as it is unfunny, and as painfully long as it is boring. What went wrong?

I expected something much different from "Intolerable Cruelty." I thought it would be a darker, funnier, more serious comedy. At first it was partially serious. Then it just fell away into a pit of silliness--and the rest of the film is a further stumble downhill. Alice has fallen down the rabbit hole and the Coen Brothers are going after her.

It is dark, sometimes. But there are sequences with an old lawyer hooked up to IV machines who taunts Clooney that are just...well...stupid. And the film makes its characters very unlikable after they order hitmen to kill each other. Would a lawyer really do something like that? Well...maybe it isn't that unbelievable. But it still makes these somewhat innocent characters into murderers--just because the hitmen obviously fails at his job doesn't mean they never had the intention of ordering killings. There's something about this that just seems wrong. Maybe not in "Fargo," but in a lightweight romantic comedy there should never be stupid hitmen ordered to kill lovers. It lowers our respect for the characters--and it also makes them seem unlikable. Is this going overboard? Nah. I'd be willing to forgive such a flaw if the movie was good--but it just wasn't.

"Intolerable Cruelty" is a surprisingly aptly named film that offers nothing but multiple glances at one's watch and some restless shifting. It may not be cruel, but it's pretty damn intolerable.

- John Ulmer
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X-RT-RatingText: 2/5