Perhaps 323 days before my own wedding may not have been the optimal time to sit down with the Coen Brothers' new divorce comedy Intolerable Cruelty. After it blew by me, a part of me considered the possibility that this impending seismic life shift occasioned a highly skewed reading of the film. After all, these are filmmakers whose movies I've enjoyed for nearly as long as I've considered cinema something worthwhile. Flash-forward to 305 days away from said nuptials and I’m still trying to figure out why I can’t find much in it that resembles earlier Coen films, much less anything to like at all, in Intolerable Cruelty. Could I have been too busy imagining the right salad pairing for rosemary-buttermilk chicken to appreciate the “sparkling wit” of the Geoffrey Rush (sporting his Pirates of the Caribbean hairpiece) prologue? Should I follow the film’s advice, get a pre-nuptial agreement and then shred and dip it in BBQ sauce as an expression of true fidelity? Could it be made into a dessert course for 200 guests? Maybe Intolerable Cruelty just plain stinks, and furthers the Coens’ highly uneven slugging percentage post-Fargo. It may not be the outright disaster of their rape 'n' pilfer approach to Preston Sturges that was O Brother Where Art Thou?, but damn if its unmitigated parade of aggrandized selfishness and avarice doesn't come close.

My first encounter with the Brothers Coen was the one-sheet for Blood Simple—two anonymous blue-jeaned legs concluding in white cowboy boots planted astride a pair of alarm-red pumps (one raised provocatively from the floor) filled to the brim with feet that looked like they could only mark the beginning of trouble; pistol and purse placed off to the side like the most considered afterthought ever. With minimal information, it managed to be as evocative as the title itself. I was eight, and was hooked. To my mind this poster promised a movie experience far more intriguing than anything portended by the contemporaneous campaigns for My Life as a Dog or A Room With a View. I caught up with Blood Simple and the rest of their films a few years later, and was far from disappointed—Miller’s Crossing, Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, and the rest were among of my first entrees into cool, big-kid cinema and out of the assorted garbage of the awkward PG-13 years. I imagine many other film enthusiasts of my generation probably had similar experiences, and this may help explain why the Coens’ core audience is so eager to give them a free pass. In retrospect, it seems ever more likely that our mid-Nineties aging into the Coen Brothers coincided with the apex of their careers.

Intolerable Cruelty deals in the high stakes world of marital law, and offers an image of a cynical, hedonistic humanity that just longs to L-O-V-E underneath its bronzed, acerbic exterior (the one-sheet says it all, and couldn’t be more different than the more studied Blood Simple artwork—it reflects the kind of film that Blood Simple was trying not to be). George Clooney’s pearly whites in close-up may be our first meeting with divorce law legend Miles Massey, but it’s his bleeding heart that’s supposed to be left beating in our laps by the end. Catherine Zeta-Jones is gold digger Marilyn Rexroth, in a turn that has prompted not one but two prominent New York critics to use the word “chocolate” to describe her performance. The plot, such as it is, boils down easily: once upon a time in L.A., Miles screws Marilyn out of the landmark settlement she’d been arranging to win from her adulterous husband, Rex Rexroth (his name is really the film’s only funny joke), Marilyn arranges to get even by seducing Miles and leading him into an exposed(!) marriage, several pre-nuptial agreements are shredded, dipped in sauce and/or eaten, antagonists end film together in mock(?) reconciliation. It’s a classic screwball setup and Clooney, in a simple reprise of OBWAT?’s Ulysses Everett McGill (with slight upgrade from jail- to pinstripes) does manage to shine. Coen films tend to be populated more by walking collections of mannerisms than fully formed characters, and in this world of pure surface, Massey’s facial semiotics exist as a microcosm of the entire narrative landscape—a virtual ballet of carefully choreographed tics, twitches, and raised eyebrows as calculated as every move made by the rest of the cast. Bravura work, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that more time was spent on the space between his eyebrows than on that in front of the camera. Time and time again, Ernst Lubitsch turned this very collision of wealthy cynicism and earthy emotion into compelling and hilarious work. No such luck here.

In earlier films, the magic of the Coens’ humor was in the wholly unexpected places where it would pop up—in a forest before a contract killing, midway through a suicidal plunge from a skyscraper, a bowling alley, Minnesota. Here, feeble attempts to infuse the film with that “Coen Brothers thing” feel like nothing so much as a nastier cinematic equivalent to Botox—it’s awkwardly grafted on, and always obvious as hell. Maybe they should give up making comedy that’s supposed to be funny. The other pillar of their filmmaking lay in their innate sense of narrative mechanisms which allowed them to push their stories past all limits of credulity into a strange, paradoxically logical space. You can’t question where Barton Fink or The Hudsucker Proxy is leading you—they’re constructed so that they couldn’t happen any other way. In the rare instances when they’ve thrown a slight wrench into their own machine, the results have been transcendent (witness the end of The Man Who Wasn’t There).

Intolerable Cruelty only starts putting its house in order with the introduction of Wheezy Joe (Irwin Keyes), an assassin hired by Massey to off Marilyn who’s tricked him out of his airtight pre-nup, fortune, and reputation. It seems like more comfortable territory, but the film inexplicably ends a mere 15 minutes later with a narrative patch job that feels like the very Hollywood slapdash that all of these ridiculous characters are supposed to be mocking. It’s the kind of thing you might expect from a Brian Grazer-Ron Howard collaboration (appropriately enough, Grazer co-produced Cruelty with Ethan Coen), not the filmmakers behind Miller’s Crossing.

Locating the Brothers Coen in their works continues to be the most problematic and troubling aspect of their oeuvre. Is The Big Lebowski a highly personal depiction of Clinton-era ambivalence towards the legacy of Reaganism, or is it a pothead’s collection of easily quotable one-liners? Is Fargo an attempt to inject new life into a noir-policier structure they’d already outgrown by the end of Blood Simple, or merely a chance to prove to the world just how strange people who live in Minnesota are? I’d like to believe that George Clooney’s earnest mid-film oratory about cynicism’s crippling effect on love (delivered to a conference of hardened divorce lawyers no less) reveals the Coens more than anything else in the film, but as much as that moment—and the standing ovation it garners—cries for attention like a big, wagging sore thumb, it still feels awfully suffocated by the movie that surrounds it. There’s something about Intolerable Cruelty that supports the nagging worries I’ve had about their films all along: that the Coen Brothers are cynical audience manipulators with a tremendous grasp of film form more than a pair of truly gifted humanists trying to fight their way through dominant cinematic codes. Perhaps it’s not so much that Intolerable Cruelty marks a radical loss of focus as it somehow manages to pull all of their worst tendencies into one film, laying bare what’s been hidden behind their linguistic puns, genre-mashing, and visual dexterity from the beginning. Maybe things like growing up and getting married have lessened my tolerance for the antics I found so enthralling at age fourteen. The Man Who Wasn’t There notwithstanding, I worry that Intolerable Cruelty, following so close to OBWAT?, might be the beginning of the Coens own exposure—as frauds.
—JEFF REICHERT