INTOLERABLE CRUELTY

Rating: 5

When the Coen Brothers get it right, there are no better filmmakers going, and with INTOLERABLE CRUELTY, they are at the top of their game. With an irreverent touch, they spin a tale of true love that includes all the melodrama, farce, and heartbreak that such a condition is oft wont to engender while still making the condition irresistible.
Our protagonists are two professionals playing both sides of the marriage game. Marriage here is understood to have nothing to do with two hearts that beat as one. He’s Miles Massey (George Clooney), the best divorce lawyer in Los Angeles and she’s Marilyn Rexroth (the ravishingly deadpan Catherine Zeta Jones), the pay-for-play serial bride with a dollar sign where her heart should be.  Actually, they both have dollar signs in their respective chest cavities, leaving the only other emotions open to them a world-weary cynicism about human interaction and a longing for something more. In Marilyn’s case, more money, in Miles’ case, a way to shake this nagging midlife crisis he’s developed. It’s all become too easy for him, cleaning out husbands with some slick verbal fireworks even though said husbands have caught their wives in flagrante delicto.  There are no more challenges, no more worlds to conquer until Marilyn, the soon to be ex of his train-obsessed client Rex Rexroth (Edward Herrman), steps into his office.
In lesser hands, this might be called a cat-and-mouse game. The current crop of ads certainly play it that way and this sells the film short in a way that should be criminally prosecutable. What ensues is less a game than a slick seduction, though who is seducing whom is a pertinent question, in that what may be Cupid’s arrow may well be a figment of someone’s imagination, a strange quirk of the subconscious leading from who knows where and whence is anybody’s guess.
Directors Joel and Ethan Coen set the mood with a restrained sense of the absurd in which the centerpiece is Clooney’s dead-on performance that mixes the script’s exuberantly dramatic prose and film noir sensibility with the profound truth that love makes us all blithering, willing idiots. The liberally quoted poetry of Romeo and Juliet resonates to perfection with courtroom violence involving surprise witnesses and doggie treats. Placing the action among the blase super rich of Los Angeles and Las Vegas, where a marriage license is not so much a pledge as a negotiable bond, and getting laid is like Russian roulette, the film holds the marriage contract up for the sham it is while thoroughly celebrating the glory of love as a separate entity. Even when it turns, well, homicidal.  
INTOLERABLE CRUELTY is a highly intelligent film masquerading as light entertainment. When Miles wakes from a nightmare that represents the abyss to which his life path inexorably leads, one fraught with loneliness and a lifetime subscription to something called “Living Without Your Intestines,” it’s not just funny, it’s an existential crises that ranks up there in the aethereal philosophic realms of Sartre and the Marx Brothers. And while the film makes it plain that love, the real thing that is, is inconvenient, annoying, and just plain embarrassing, it does the seeming impossible. It also exalts it for being as essential as the air we breathe and that makes this paean to passion one of the great romantic flicks of all time.