Intolerable Cruelty, everywhere.
Seven years on from the inimitable Fargo, the Coen brothers arguably find themselves in the same position as Quentin Tarantino; struggling to live up to the extraordinarily high expectations of their devoted audience. With Intolerable Cruelty they fail, again.
Following an equally poor effort in the Man Who Wasn’t There, this flick stuns in its opening sequences only to fall horribly flat in the middle and lift only slightly towards the end.
The Tarantino comparison goes deep, for both he and the Coens are constantly exploring, or maybe ransacking, film history for genres to “refresh”. While Tarantino this time has gone for the kung fu action movie, the Coens are after romantic comedy a la Preston Sturges. For both, or rather all three of them, the closer they get to being faithful to these models, the greater it seems is their failure. By being faithful they are failing to make their own mark on the material, failing to take ownership, to grab the genre by the scruff and give it a good, hard shake.
This film has been receiving breathless reviews over here, making me wonder if maybe there are two films out there with the same title. Maybe I saw the wrong one. If that’s the case all I can say is the one I saw wasn’t very good. Slate’s been harsher.
In fact I’d say the last film from the Coens that stood up was made way back in 1998, The Big Lebowski, and even that was a comedown from Fargo.
The opening sequence of Intolerable Cruelty is vintage stuff, with the brothers’ current favourite, George Clooney as divorce lawyer Miles Massey, having his impressive teeth polished. Making Clooney’s pearly whites the stars of the first ten minutes of the film is a great self-referential gag. Unfortunately, there isn’t much to back it up. Some good lawyerly set pieces follow and then the humour goes west until the end.
Classic Coen grotesquery does feature; in the head of the law firm, totally wired to life support, gasping and heaving and raging a mere hair’s breadth from death. Also in the asthmatic hired killer, Wheezy Joe, who dispatches himself most bizarrely.
But in the end Intolerable Cruelty just doesn’t do it. Clooney ends up pulling faces rather than acting, overusing the lines on his perfect face. Zeta-Jones does a tolerable job in what is hardly a demanding role. Clooney’s sidekick is plain unfunny.
Sad.