Intolerable Cruelty | Review

Mildly funny film serves up some romantic revenge.

It’s hard to walk into a new Joel and Ethan Coen film and not find something to like with there pragmatically unique filmmaking sense that gives us great characters, creative dialogue and some of the most ingenious storytelling intellect in film today, despite the presence of their trademark and punctuated dialogue inside some fine acting on the part of George Clooney (Solaris) and Catherine Zeta-Jones (Chicago), this year’s edition isn’t much of a comedic dish and if lucky will be actually the type of stuff which will appeal to mainstream audiences, but won’t satisfy the appetites of true fans of the filmmaker siblings. While Intolerable Cruelty contains a couple generous opportunities for a sincere laugh and still has many elements of Coen brilliance, this follows a film path that goes more into the direction of a gross misconduct with a heavy weight bout of stupid reactions type of scenario rather than a darkly, witty and inspired battle of the sexes account.

The first people not to blame for this sub-par tale are a couple of stand-out performances from the two A stars who have a great screen chemistry but must contend themselves for half-written, simple minded characters. Clooney who carries himself in a Cary Grant mode, replaces his hair care products from O Brother, Where Art Thou? for a bottle of Scope mouthwash, while his counterpart Zeta-Jones’ in burning red garb perforates the celluloid with her beauty and savoir faire attitude, heck her gaze alone is enough to add weight to her dialogue. Regrettably, even with their decent portrayals these are not the kind of personas which will come remotely close to the originality of a long list of great characters in the Coen filmography. Worse, are the rest of the cast in this War of the Roses lawyer’s world where there are simply one too many exaggerated characters as in the assistant lawyer and a list of clients who could have been better portrayed and developed by the likes of Coen film veterans in John Turturro (Thirteen Conversations About One Thing ) or John Goodman (Storytelling) who could have put a little zest in these minors roles.

While the Coens have always had the knack for dark and perverse, it is perhaps the addition of two other co-writers who made the unlikable benign film of Big Trouble that are the problem here with a script that comes across as the discussed iron clad wedding prenuptials papers, basically, it is good for the garbage. While the film suffers from a lack of original locations and its lack of familiar characterizations it is the lack of style which is more apparent with an uninspired cinematography. The comedy alone saves this picture from some ordinary second and third acts, the sequence with an asthmatic hitman who can’t tell the difference between a gun and his pump puts an edgy conclusion to a sequence that suffers from a lack of creativity, and a court room sequence full of funny dialogue gets boringly exaggerated by some overacting and ghastly humor. While there are still some surprises in the film it never catapults itself from being just plain ordinary.

Unlike the films of Fargo and The Big Lebowski in which I have developed unhealthy fetish-like obsessions over, Intolerable Cruelty falls into that category of Coen bros. vaguely enjoyable and easily forgettable last picture with The Man Who Wasn’t There.

Rating 2.5 stars