For about an hour, Intolerable Cruelty is a tolerable little battle-of-the-sexes farce.
It's a throwback to those wonderful old romantic comedies of the '40s and '50s where the would-be lovers would spar wittily until they could no longer deny the real feelings they had for one another.
They were always opposites or at least antagonists who vowed they were above such a trifle as love.
Miles Massey and Marylin Rexroth are obvious adversaries.
Miles (George Clooney) is a divorce lawyer who lost his scruples at about the same time he lost his baby teeth.
Marylin (Catherine Zeta-Jones) is a gold-digger whose plan is to marry a rich man, drive him to adultery, divorce him and depart with the bulk of his wealth.
Her patsy is filthy-rich and just-plain-filthy real estate developer Rex Rexroth (Edward Herrmann) who loves to romp with young, nubile women.
Because Marilyn hired Gus Petch (Cedric the Entertainer), the best private eye in the divorce business, she has proof positive of her husband's infidelity.
For Marilyn, it's just a formality to get the prime real estate she's after. But then Rex hires Miles and he turns the courtroom into a theatre and Marilyn is left with nothing except bitterness and a thirst for revenge.
From the moment Miles and Marylin spy each other, there's a palpable animal attraction.
Clooney and Zeta-Jones have great fun alternately tossing daggers and lustful gazes, and punctuating them with biting remarks.
It's so refreshing to get such clever dialogue delivered with such confidence and panache.
It's with such dialogue and the easeful, bubbly set up of the conflict that Joel and Ethan Coen excel.
Geoffrey Rush has a seemingly inconsequential but hilarious cameo as an enraged husband that's delicious slapstick farce.
Then comes Herrmann's lecherous tycoon and Billy Bob Thornton as a love-sick Texas oil billionaire.
Intolerable Cruelty just zips along spilling so many laughs they almost trip over one another.
The film reaches true comic mayhem in a botched double-murder scheme with a bungling assassin named Wheezy Joe (Irwin Keyes).
Sadly, it's all downhill from there when the Coens, as both writers and directors, can't find a similarily hilarious way to end the movie.
Clooney is reminiscent of Cary Grant, Rock Hudson and James Garner in their heydays as sexy romantic cads and Zeta-Jones is a blend of Ava Gardner sultriness and Katharine Hepburn savvy.
No romantic comedy would be complete without the hero's sidekick. In this case it's Wrigley (Paul Adelstein), Miles' fawning assistant, a divorce lawyer who cries at weddings.
Adelstein's gem of a peformance is the kind of sly comedic turn Tony Randall brought to all his second-banana roles.
Intolerable Cruelty reminds us the sparkling romantic comedies of the past only looked simplistic and simple.
Even with the Coens working in the lab, it's not an easy formula to duplicate.
(This film is rated PG)
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