Certification. 12A
Intolerable Cruelty is a lacklustre romantic comedy from the Coen brothers. There's more than a nod to the love-hate dynamics of the old Spencer Tracey-Katharine Hepburn or Rock Hudson-Doris Day films, but Intolerable Cruelty, unusually for a Coen brothers production, lacks the sharp, witty dialogue associated with the sexual sparring of these older iterations.
The performance of George Clooney, as the ruthless divorce attorney, Miles Massey is the only positive in Intolerable Cruelty. He is superb as the super-slick smoothie increasingly fascinated and challenged by his feminine adversary.
The storyline is bookendend by two horribly misjudged set pieces. The film opens with a farcical Geoffrey Rush stumbling upon his spouse in flagrante, and climaxes with an incongruous botched murder attempt. If the opening of Raising Arizona, "is up there with anything the Coen brothers have committed to film" then I'm afraid I was close to abandoning Intolerable Cruelty after the first five minutes.
The likes of Ernst Lubitsch, George Cukor and Preston Sturges pulled off these 'battle of the sexes' comedies, but they were different times. It is nigh on impossible to make comparable modern romantic comedies with characters hardened by a similar sense of pragmatism or cynicism. Intolerable Cruelty is proof of that.
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