The Coen Brothers’ ‘Intolerable Cruelty’ explores the shared territory between romantic comedies, film noir, and reality television
In the lore, a vampire cannot enter your home unless he’s invited in. Once this supernatural presence has crossed the threshold, there’s no way to rid yourself of him except by killing him. Though the better idea would be to not welcome the vampire to begin with, it’s sometimes difficult to recognize an absorbing aura as an ill omen.
Incidentally, this piece of wisdom has its modern applications. One of which is Joel and Ethan Coen’s oft-neglected comedy Intolerable Cruelty (2003) and its condemnation of the crass entertainment industry during pre-financial-crash America. Miles Massey (George Clooney) is the Beverly Hills divorce lawyer of choice. While it could not be more clear how little he cares for the emotional well-being of his clients, Miles brings results and only improves his reputation with each win. His stature draws the eye of Marylin Rexroth (Catherine Zeta-Jones), who seeks a divorce from her adulterous husband Rex Rexroth (Edward Herrmann) after hiring private investigator Gus Petch (Cedric the Entertainer) to catch him in the act. However, Miles agrees to represent Rex in court, thwarting Mariyln’s effort to take Rex for millions, leaving her embarrassed and looking for revenge against Milles.
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Marylin finds former soap opera producer Donovan Donaly (Geoffrey Rush), who has literally been left in the gutter after his wife secured Miles’s representation and divorced him. Marylin and Donovan launch the following snare: She takes up with “oil millionaire” Howard D. Doyle (Billy Bob Thornton), a soap opera actor in disguise. Knowing that Miles has a thing for her, Marylin brings Howard to draft one of Miles’ famous “Massey prenups” that will prevent Marylin from getting any of Howard’s money should they divorce.
Though a smitten Miles urges her not to pursue the prenuptial, Marylin and Howard sign the agreement. But Howard eats the document at the wedding in front of everyone, including Miles, to show his love for Marylin and signal that his money is not protected. Some time later, the two divorce and Marylin lives in ostensible, obscene wealth. She and Miles meet at this point, sleep together, and marry — and although they initially sign a prenup, Miles throws it out in his passion for her. Thereafter, Marylin announces her plans to divorce Miles and leave him with nothing but a blow to his ego.
Upon realizing the breadth of her deception, Miles devises a revenge plot of his own. He hires a goon to break into his home and kill Marylin. Marylin is, of course, several steps ahead of Miles and the plan is bungled. The divorce proceedings continue apace, but Miles and Marylin find themselves drawn back to one another. Interestingly, the film ends on a coda not of the reconciled lovers, but on one of Gus and Donovan: Gus is now the host of an America’s Funniest Home Videos-style show devoted to clips of people being outed for infidelity that a gleeful Donovan, buoyed by Marylin’s financial support, now produces.
It should be obvious that none of these characters are good people. Rex might be the only good one — though he cheats on his wife and is outrageously wealthy, his unbridled passion for trains is amazingly goofy and charming. Miles is charming, too, but in an oily way: He’s equal parts lawyer, actor, used car salesman, and politician. Marylin is gorgeous and seductive, but every bit as sociopathic as Miles. Gus knows enough about the world he’s involved in — Marylin and Miles both contract him on separate occasions, after all — and while he certainly isn’t as bad as them, he does not care for people any more than they do. Donovan is consumed with his ego to an obnoxious, destructive, and admittedly comical degree when he buffoonishly shoots at his wife after learning that she is cheating on him. (This is the altercation that results in their divorce and introduces us to Miles.)
While insensitive, cruel, and idiotic characters populate the entirety of Joel and Ethan Coen’s oeuvre, those in Intolerable Cruelty bear a special connection to American entertainment culture of the aughts. This was the definitive moment for reality television. Networks attempted to set the parameters for what the genre could be. We had a glimpse into the married life of pop stars on Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica (2003-2005); we witnessed how hard being a normal person is for Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie on The Simple Life (2003-2007). And what would this cultural moment have been without the dearth of reality game shows it birthed? Survivor (2000), Big Brother (2000), American Idol (2002), The Bachelor (2003), and America’s Next Top Model (2003) started off this era and are still with us two decades later. But there were also some shorter lived contests that deserve remembering, including 2004’s ill-advised The Swan, in which “ugly” women had to make themselves over and compete with each other to become the most beautiful. Overall, a baseline of crassness is inherent in this programming. These shows are cheap to make, easy to watch, and don’t require any emotional or imaginative investment beyond the simple pleasures of seeing. There’s nothing wrong with this on an individual level; everyone needs guilty pleasures. But in the aggregate, at a cultural level, it is degrading to set the bar so low.
The Coens reflect this degradation back to us with Intolerable Cruelty. The very premise of these odious characters lying to and actively harming one another has a particularly reality TV feel to it, because even the moments of sympathy in Intolerable Cruelty are counterbalanced by the feeling that these characters deserve what happens to them. Like the characters on reality television, they are the ones to blame for putting themselves in their respective situations. They can’t escape until the show is over.
Related: The Music Of Bad Timing: Joel And Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) by Steve Collins
That being said, all of these characters are fantastically fun to watch. There is such an obscene appeal to watching Marylin work out her designs to divorce Rex or to take revenge on Miles. We want Marylin to go on with her plans for divorce, not necessarily because we know enough about their marriage to say that she’d be better off on her own. Simply speaking, it is entertaining to watch Marylin behaving badly. In fact, the joy of watching Intolerable Cruelty is only heightened because the other characters are awful as well.
But the degradation of human interaction is also expressed in the way the Coens combine elements of the romantic comedy with those of film noir. There is a Hepburn-Grant charisma to Zeta-Jones and Clooney’s back-and-forth, but their playfulness is also filtered through the paranoia and existential angst of noir aesthetics. When Gus shows Marylin the footage of Rex in the midst of a liaison, he watches her cool reaction. She’s not overwrought with emotion about feeling betrayed; she’s anxious for the freedom and the independence that the divorce will bring her as she calculates the events to follow. It’s an intoxicating scene because Marylin is a classic femme fatale; the look on her face as she watches the video brings to mind the moment in Double Indemnity (1944) when Phyllis Dietrichson eyes Walter Neff in her foyer, knowing exactly how she’s going to play him. When Miles breaks into his own home, cloaked in shadows, to stop the hit he called on Marylin, he enters the apogee of noir. Marylin has become Miles’ shadow self: She has outplayed him and taken over his identity, and killing her becomes literally and metaphorically an act of self-preservation. And at the same time, the prospect of competing identifies is so fundamental to the screwball comedy and the maturation of the relationship between two equally matched partners. Indeed, by the end of the film, when Miles and Marylin reunite, Intolerable Cruelty feels more like a romantic comedy than it does film noir.
However, it’s absurd to imagine that their marriage is going to last when the entire film has been about the two conniving around each other, not to mention the previous marriages that they’ve both ended. It’s a strangely warped take of a romantic comedy ending. It is, essentially, the reality television version for 2003. Miles and Marylin’s re-commitment to each other is hard to believe, and yet, there’s just a pleasure in accepting that it’s true for the moment, while you know in the back of your mind that there’s no way that it’s going to last. But then again, they may be the only people capable of caring about each other.
Nevertheless, there is a permanence to Miles and Marylin. They are the vampires that cannot be turned away. They obviously drain the life out of the marriages they come into contact with, and they also simply cannot rid themselves of their attraction to or desire for revenge against the other. But in a cultural sense, they are the cheap and cruel characters that we have been consumed with for decades, and we have no apparent desire to rid ourselves of them. This is perhaps why Donovan is the one who closes out the film for us. Restored to his former glory, he is given energy by a room filled with an audience applauding the mishaps of unfaithful lovers caught cheating on Gus’ reality clip show. At this point, it becomes clear that Intolerable Cruelty is basically the same as any of the videos that the audience of the film is watching, or that actual audiences are watching with reality television. By the dim light of the TV screen, Dracula steps out of his coffin.
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