A cheesy soap opera producer cruises through the streets of suburban L.A. in his Jaguar convertible listening to Simon and Garfunkel’s classic paean to the common man: “The Boxer.” Through no uncertain irony, he tries to sing along but barely knows the words. Little does he know that he will soon be poked in the rear with his Daytime Television Lifetime Achievement Award by his wife, whom he catches in flagrante delicto.


This is the unconsciously superficial world of Intolerable Cruelty. One in which the leading lady can say to the leading man: “I eat men like you for breakfast.” and it doesn’t seem cheesy at all. It just blends in with every other over-exaggerated glimpse into this hyper-stylized high society America. And little lines like that fit so well into this new concoction of the Coen brothers not just because they make comical sense in the scripted world they have created, but because somehow Catherine Zeta-Jones pulls it off. Evenly matched by George Clooney as the overly-successful lawyer who even “has a man to wax my jet,” Intolerable Cruelty forces us to suffer through the lunatic half-parody of a world in which marriage is a commodity, nothing more than a venue of financial success for the more adventurous sort of female.


For such women Miles Massey is both cheerleader and enemy. On the one hand he dismisses marriage as compromise and explains to us that in the context of divorce proceedings financial victory is life, everything else is death. On the other hand, he is the inventor of the indestructible Massey pre-nup, which is guaranteed to preserve the original financial assets of each party in any situation leading to divorce, thus the bane of all gold-diggers. After being laughed out of the courtroom after a cross examination by Massey at a divorce hearing, Marylin Rexroth is up for the challenge of beating Miles at his own game. She is out partly for the thrill, mostly for the money, but primarily just to win. And the contorted artistry which she brings to bear on the impenetrable Massey rivals is enough for three screwball comedies, earning her a place next to a few of Hawks’ most venerable leading ladies.


The Coen brothers are merry pranksters. They give us precisely what we want us to see, but make us work for it through a continual nod to the giant inside joke that their scripts depend on. Their scripts intone worlds of their own device, intentioned collections of parodies and overly indulgent intrigues that tend to leave the uninitiated with narrative whiplash. This is not because they are determined to leave us with something profound or even helpful; it is mainly just because they can. Together with Jonze/Kaufmann, their films are the amusement park rides of the American art-house scene. Intolerable Cruelty is so traditionally screwball that it deserves a feminist reading. Not only is it intentionally screwball, but it is self-conscious of its gender stereotypes to the point of parody. In the grand tradition of the femme fatale Zeta-Jones navigates the patriarchal system of marital law like a preying mantis. But we all know (wink-wink) that she really just needs to be loved, that she needs the emotional security of the strong arms of a man who smells good and has a lightly cleft chin. The Coen brothers give us exactly what the gender codes of the genre demand, a resolution that occurs only when the lantern-jawed Clooney wins and she falls into his arms. Thus she proves to us that women are strong and intelligent, but she also finds the love that she needs to fill up her otherwise empty existence.


But... Miles Massey does win. And the film closes with us wondering when exactly the satire rug was pulled out from underneath our feet and slid cleverly back in place without us noticing.