INTOLERABLE CRUELTY IS THE COEN BROTHERS’ HOWARD HAWKS MOVIE, JUST AS THE HUDSUCKER PROXY WAS THEIR FRANK CAPRA SAGA AND O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? WAS THEIR PRESTON STURGES MADCAP ROMP.
All the Hawksian tropes are evident from the start. Up front is George Clooney as the dashing but devious divorce lawyer Miles Massey, pure 1950s Cary Grant. Ranged against him is a perfectly formed Hawksian female antagonist, Catherine Zeta-Jones’s serial divorcee Marilyn Rexroth, a gold-digger with beauty, brains and a frustratingly hard-to-find soft spot. Driven by equal parts lust, greed and one-upmanship, they embody the Hawksian view of the sexual comedy as a good-natured, gamely fought war of wiles. Just as Hudsucker and O Brother suffered from too intimate an identification with the directors who inspired them, so too does Intolerable Cruelty. Which is not to say that the Coens aren’t up to the job of imitating the inimitable: far from it.