The film cemented Clooney’s status as a romantic lead (his name, along with Pfeiffer’s is enough to open this picture) but it also developed his on-screen persona, drawing on the child-friendly associations of Doug Ross from ER. He is likeable and charming, while also a little childish and shy of long-term adult commitment (with a backstory of a failed relationship). Ironically, a central problem for Clooney in any romantic narrative is that he looks like George Clooney. The idea that someone who looks like him would have serious difficulty attracting female attention stretches audience credibility and sympathy. Even here, his face is known, plastered on adverts for his column on buses, and certainly Melanie’s mother is very susceptible to his charm. The central premise of the film is implicit in the slogan accompanying his picture (“You don’t know Jack”). Melanie is forced to accept this, while Jack already sees that she is not as strong and independent as she likes to appear. Most romantic comedies work on the basis of having misconceptions to undermine, but here he seems to read her quite accurately from the outset.
As an exposé of modern parenthood, it does not take us much beyond cliché, including the parental nightmare of losing a child (although here it is not Melanie’s own). She is more distraught at the prospect of being exposed as an irresponsible parent in the eyes of Jack. The breakdown of the previous relationships of the protagonists seems vindicated: Sammy’s father appears at the soccer game only in order to let the child down about spending time with him, and Kristen’s initial appearance apparently dumping Maggie on Jack for the duration of her honeymoon does seem inconsiderate.
The puddle scene, signaled as a supposed emotional climax by the swelling score, is mawkish in the extreme, and Van Morrison’s following “Have I Told You Lately” (1989) bleeds over shots of Jack sheltering Sammy from the rain, demonstrating his paternal protectiveness with Melanie lost in thought at a window of her apartment. The notion of dreaming of the object of your affection (represented by the music) and his or her sudden appearance on the doorstep all seems quite clichéd and designed more for narrative closure than emotional credibility.
Even in the final scene further obstacles are contrived, delaying further their eventual but chaste consummation. Their first kiss is interrupted by Jack’s wisecracks about her dropping a bomb in his mouth like in Jaws; then the children need to be removed from the scene with the bribe of a video (Victor Fleming’s 1939 The Wizard of Oz with its central mantra, “There’s no place like home”); then Melanie goes to freshen up; and lastly by the time she returns, Jack has fallen asleep. It feels more like a coy squeamishness in dealing with the sexual stage of the relationship, rather than the perpetuation of a romantic atmosphere. The action of the camera pulling back and out of the building, craning up past other apartments might suggest the same scenario is being played out in other homes, but rather than the sense of typicality, there is also the feeling that this particular narrative has gone as far as it can credibly go. To introduce a sexual element here would take the plot in more serious and difficult territory (with certification, at least) and the film shies away from this.
As a romantic comedy, both elements are actually fairly scarce, the latter in particular. The funniest line in the whole film is probably Melanie’s “If you don’t want your balls juggled, don’t throw them in my face,” but this feels more like an overwrought metaphor than knowing innuendo. The situation comedy of the pair improvising some superhero costumes has Jack’s nice line, as he asks in awe “Where d’you get a bag like that?” but again this operates largely at the level of stereotype about the contents of women’s handbags. Jack’s use of deliberately provocative language on the phone in the taxi while sitting next to Melanie has some wit (he is speaking to his editor and yet asks “Are you wearing panties?”) as does his later warning to Sammy to “put the gun down,” but this does not really develop far beyond light banter. It seems more indicative of a light and easy charm that Jack regularly indulges in and, judging from the reaction of Melanie’s mother, usually seems to work. The beauty parlor scene is interesting for its inclusion of a bullish receptionist who is openly oblivious to his superficial charms. When Jack asks for details of clients, she bluntly tells him that she has five sons and “when they make eyes at me like that, I make them a pot roast.” When presented with someone impervious to his charm, Jack is rendered fairly powerless (although with some luck, as the woman is called away, he gets to see the names on the register anyway). Melanie suspects he “can make women smile,” but this is more a cause of suspicion than engagement for her.
Like the scene in The Full Monty (Peter Cattaneo, 1997) in which a garden gnome is waved up at a window during an interview, Melanie struggles to concentrate during a meeting as Jack fools around outside with the children. Play is foolish and distracting but ultimately that is the point. The problem is that in the film, if he represents fun and she personifies responsibility, he is always going to be more dramatically engaging.
Intolerable Cruelty (the Coen Brothers, 2003)
Miles:
So, you propose that in spite of demonstrable infidelity on your part, your unoffending wife should be tossed out on her ear?
Rex:
Well … (brightening) Is that possible?
Miles:
It’s a challenge.
Clooney’s second collaboration with the Coen brothers sees him move toward the screwball comedy, in particular the tension between marriage and capital, money and love. As Andrew Sarris defined the screwball comedy, here we have “a sex comedy without the sex.”2 The cliché of a character discovering an adulterous coupling in a house would usually climax with a sex scene but we are denied this. Handheld camerawork takes us into the house but, sharing the point of view of Donovan Donaly (Geoffrey Rush), we only glimpse a fleeting figure, a rumpled bed, and an apparently innocent spouse with an implausible explanation. Manic visual gags predominate with Donaly firing his gun blindly at his departing wife speeding away in his car and then trying to take pictures of his wounded backside, having been symbolically stabbed with his trident-like Daytime Television Lifetime Achievement Award. The most we see between Miles (George Clooney) and Marilyn (Catherine Zeta-Jones) is a chaste kiss and plenty of flirting in the elevator, at dinner, and at legal meetings in front of lawyers. Deviant sex lives are described verbally in court, Rex’s eccentric indiscretions are interrupted by Petch (the eccentrically named Cedric the Entertainer) bursting in with a camera (and later by a heart attack), and Miles’s attempt at becoming tactile in the elevator is prevented by Marilyn’s poodle biting his hand.
However, although there are surface features of the screwball, we have little of its emotional heart. There is certainly wit and banter (in place of the sex) effectively written with lots of memorable lines by the Coens. The first meeting with Marilyn features rapid, playful sparring, not between flirting couples but between their lawyers, Miles and Freddy (Richard Jenkins). Marilyn might look the part of a smart but undervalued individual, determined to prove her worth in a male world. However, the way that Marilyn plans to gain independence is not through her own intellect and ability but through her beauty and how it can ensnare men into marriage. She does not seem to crave respect for her own achievements, just the empty material benefits of a life lazing by a pool, typified by her friend, Sarah (Julia Duffy).
In terms of screwball types, there is a rich woman who attracts an emasculated hero, the latter part played particularly effectively by Clooney, accurately described by Freddy later as “a buffoon, too successful, bored, complacent and on [his] way down.” The fixation with his teeth provides a neat counterpoint to Clooney’s previous part in a Coen brothers’ movie, Everett in O Brother, with his obsession with Dapper Dan hair pomade. He is first seen here as a body part, via an ultraviolet close-up on his teeth—as he waits for Marilyn at dinner, he checks out his reflection in the back of a spoon, his face ludicrously distorted. He declares “Maybe I’m reckless,” but that is the very last thing he is. In court, he st
ruts up to Marilyn in the witness stand and gives her a lingering stare, before executing a ludicrously dramatic and calculated turn at her claim that she loved Rex (Edward Herrmann) at first sight.
Costume designer Mary Zophres put Clooney in exactly the same cut of suit as worn by Cary Grant in Indiscreet (Stanley Donen, 1958). While this is effective at first, over time Miles is not an easy character to relate to. The idea that an individual who looks like George Clooney would be paranoid about his appearance might be possible, but audiences might feel it is a tad self-indulgent. Massey’s performance in his own office, striking a pose even before speaking, is a practice for the preening and grandstanding of the courtroom (essentially just another form of theater). It is hard to know at what point this is just a professional act and at what point there really is any substance to his character. Even in the marriage ceremony between Miles and Marilyn, the listing of Miles’s company after his name makes this feel more like a business merger than an emotional attachment. The final section of the film with Miles’s resolution to hire (and then cancel) the services of an unlikely assassin shifts the tone into the absurd. Miles’s and Wrigley’s exaggerated gait through Marilyn’s house, and particularly their backing into each other and spraying each other in the face, feels more akin to the slapstick of Scooby-Doo.
The figure of the senior partner, Herb Myerson (Tom Aldredge), who invites Miles into the inner sanctum of his office where he is surrounded by medical machines, is a physical manifestation of mortal transience, signaled by the choral singing, which Miles seeks to deny. The reality, that this is the best future he can aspire to, visibly shakes him but only temporarily. Although he later has a nightmare in which Herb’s face is translated into a vampiric figure via lightning flash-cuts, there is no moment of realization at the inequalities of the law. Clearly we are a long way from social realism, but the idea that a top law firm would ever employ the services of a cartoonish figure like Wheezy Jo (Irwin Keyes) rather than the cold killers of Michael Clayton seems unbelievable, even in the context of a black comedy.
Wrigley (Paul Adelstein) represents Miles’s less charismatic double, what Miles might be without his good looks and charm. Wrigley is a company man, musing “Who needs a home when you’ve got a colostomy bag?” Wrigley is the norm, not articulate enough to speak in open court, against which Miles measures himself, assuming there is a great distance between them when they are really two sides of the same coin. Wrigley’s nerdish recitation of company policy (“Only love is in mind when the Massey is signed”), or his opening advice that Miles is just experiencing a midlife crisis and should get a car, may be uninspired but this is only a less visually appealing version of Miles’s own nature. Wrigley’s excessive outpouring of emotion at Marilyn’s wedding may embarrass Miles but it is at least genuine—the kind of feeling that Miles cannot find in his own life. Wrigley also provides the function of a sidekick, but this really develops quite late on in the film, the two sharing a flat after the collapse of Miles’s marriage.
Marilyn is extremely hard to like or indeed really to know. She betrays everyone, so why she should be trusted at the end seems unclear, and unlike most screwball comedies, there is little sense that she really learns anything. By the close, she appears just as calculating as ever. She has already conned Miles into marriage once, and apparently little changes late in the plot to suggest a rapid conversion from this position (perhaps indeed a hardening of resolve would be more credible since he pays someone to kill her). Like the bombers in Fail Safe (see chapter 7), the fact that he subsequently tried to call the plan off does not deny the motive behind the plan in the first place. The role played by Zeta-Jones here seems strongly reminiscent of her performance in Splitting Heirs (Robert Young, 1993), where she exudes glacial charm, cynically marries for money, and spends her time lounging by a pool. She stands next to Miles in silence in the elevator, not because they are inhibited but because they really have nothing to say to each other.
More problematically, she looks the part but there is little on-screen chemistry between the pair. When Miles grabs her away from Howard (Billy Bob Thornton) for a second and kisses her, she seems to be transported into a state of ecstasy one moment and then coolly walks off the next. Later, after dinner, they both realize that having achieved their main goals, their lives remain empty and neither feels hungry. Her coquettishness never really thaws (except supposedly right at the end as they kiss across the table that first separated them). She declares that divorce is a “passport to wealth, independence, and freedom,” but we see her having little idea of what to do with this freedom or that either of her husbands oppressed her particularly. She leaves Miles, coldly telling him that he will “always be my favorite husband,” but then she seems sad and almost tearful on the plane. In terms of character development, we have little sense other than the expectations of genre and the need for some form of narrative closure as to why there is a sudden change of heart on her part. Miles tells us (twice) that he finds her “fascinating” (once even with something akin to a raffish growl), but this is asserted rather than shown dramatically or explained.
The number of quotable lines, perhaps, suggests a script that is too diffuse to be convincing (with a long history, the Coens picking up a story from Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone) and that might have felt cutting edge a decade or so ago, but debates about prenuptial contracts (or prenups as they are termed in the film) feel dated. Often the best lines come from minor characters, such as the woman testifying against her husband on the grounds that he used the vacuum cleaner for a sex toy, thereby depriving her of a cleaner for a considerable time, or about matters in passing, such as Miles’s sarcastic order for a “ham sandwich on stale rye bread, lots of mayo, go easy on the ham,” which is taken down without reaction from the waitress. However, the exaggerated dialogue (such as Miles’s climactic summing up of the Baron as “the silly man”), visual gags (like the magazine Living without Intestines that he reads while waiting to see Myerson), or farcical actions like his tennis practice, barely moving his racket as the machine fires balls right at him, all seem almost placed to be used as trailer material.
Rather than exploring any complex notion of motivation, Miles’s resolution to “find her Norgay” (the individual who helped her to achieve greatness) only leads to the camp comedy of Baron von Espy (Jonathan Hadary) and some cheap anti-French jokes. Miles’s advice to Wrigley in the pursuit of wisdom, which seems echoed in the script more widely, is to “start with the people with funny names.” Ellen Cheshire and John Ashbrook make much of what they see as the rampant homophobia in the film, and certainly there are a large number of thinly veiled references to same-sex relationships.3 However, this does not really coalesce into anything approaching a coherent ideology but is closer to the anally fixated comic sensibility of a Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy stand-up routine. Where the comic elements of O Brother resonate with depth, Intolerable Cruelty seems happy to operate at a much more blunt level, in terms of its use of stereotypical characters and sexualized dialogue (such as Miles declaring “Darling, you’re exposed” after Marilyn rips up the prenup).
Miles’s supposed great change is signaled by departing from his prepared speech and then symbolically ripping it up, but even this is taken as a stunt leading to applause, which we clearly see Miles enjoying. He may declare that he is “naked, vulnerable, and in love,” but he does not seem capable of real depth of feeling, only stating “Love is good” in a self-conscious echo of Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is good” from Wall Street (Oliver Stone, 1987). His resolution to be a better man is undercut by his comic inability to describe precisely where he might do good works (practicing in “East Los Angeles or one of those other … ”), finishing with a dismissive wave. This is not a portrayal of genuine emotion but a parody of it, with a sentimental piano score, the audience rising to its feet through which Miles passes to increasing adulation, and eventually Wrigley (his alter ego) declaring in tears, “I love you, man.”
Cer
tain elements of screwball are certainly present: an emasculated hero (in Clooney’s absurd running style in racing to the elevator to talk to her), a sexually aggressive female seeking a closer form of equality in the battle of the sexes, and some snappy banter. However, there are several missing elements, which hamstring the emotional power of the narrative. Classic screwball heroines are defined in relation to their work, or at least want recognition in relation to it. Marilyn’s relation to work is to seek to avoid it altogether by freeloading from rich husbands. In this, she is a reflection of changing social values, but it is questionable what proportion of the female audience would really want to aspire to her vacuous lifestyle here. Also conventionally, there is an element of reversal in that hero and heroine learn something from each other. It could be argued that Miles learns the value of true love over cynicism, but Marilyn seems unworthy of his adulation, weakening his status further, and as her motivation remains questionable right up to the end, what she might learn is open to question. Unlike in O Brother, where the generosity of spirit is emphasized, here it is emotional mean-spiritedness that prevails. By choosing to close on the TV show, which may be intended as a parody but probably exists somewhere, it is Petch’s slogan and the notion of marriage as material for cheap television that endures.
Leatherheads (George Clooney, 2008)
George Clooney Page 5