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Ten Days Of The Coen Brothers: Day Seven Part One

Published

10 years ago

March 4, 2016

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Cruel and Unusual

♦ With the release of Hail, Caesar! in the UK on 4 March, Tripwire kicks off a look at all of the Coen Brothers films released to date. Yesterday we took a look at their ninth film The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001) and now our editor-in-chief Joel Meadows takes a look at their tenth movie Intolerable Cruelty (2003) .

Intolerable Cruelty

Director: Joel Coen

Stars: George Clooney, Catherine Zeta Jones, Geoffrey Rush, Cedric The Entertainer

After a very impressive run of films, the Coens had a rare misfire with Intolerable Cruelty. From the opening scene where TV producer Donovan Donaly (Geoffrey Rush) is threatening his wife’s lover, pool man Ollie Olerud (Jack Kyle), you know that something isn’t quite right. To paraphrase the filmmakers themselves, it doesn’t have that Coen Brothers Feeling.

Clooney plays hotshot Beverly Hills divorce lawyer Miles Millar, who finds himself outwitted by gorgeous gold-digger Marylin (Catherine Zeta Jones), a woman who seems hell-bent on marrying as many gullible millionaires as her not insignificant charms can attract. The problem here, and there are many, is that unlike every other film they had made before, there is no genre subversion here, and a complete absence of invention, ingenious characters, and familiar Coen tropes. What we have instead is a pedestrian romantic comedy of the kind that Hollywood absently churns out every single year. Clooney is competent and Zeta Jones looks staggering but the script is uncharacteristically functional at best, while the plot lacks any imagination. There is some half-baked drivel about redemption tacked on at the end but it’s such a ham-fisted effort at thematic development that it barely registers.

Billy Bob Thornton, who was sublime in The Man Who Wasn’t There, sleepwalks through his cameo as one of Marylin’s husbands, while Geoffrey Rush phones everything in, unconcerned with the tepid proceedings. The Coen Brothers at their best are visionaries, able to take previously hackneyed concepts and inject them with skewed humour, maverick treatments and unvarnished humanity. Intolerable Cruelty is a flimsy, weak rom-com with an inept script, a true waste of an ensemble of great and talented actors. Maybe they thought it seemed a good idea at the time. One of the very few duds in the Coen canon, it’s an atypical venture that’s best skipped over in favour of the next worthwhile project.

JOEL MEADOWS