Intolerable Cruelty

2003 romantic screwball comedy

Rating: 14/20

Plot: It's a battle of the sexes as a gold digger meets up with a successful womanizing divorce lawyer!

I'd been meaning to give this another shot anyway, but the recent death of Irwin Keyes who plays "Wheezy Joe" in this gave me an excuse. I couldn't find either of Keyes' time travel movies, one called Timegate: Tales of the Saddle Tramps and the other featuring Pat Morita. Keyes had an interesting career with some interesting roles. He was Shorty the Stagehand in Lynch's On the Air, a police officer in The Warriors, the hunchback in Motorama. He was even in an episode of Growing Pains, but I don't remember whether he had any scenes with Boner Stabone. Black Dynamite, House of 1,000 Corpses, The Flintstones. I'm not sure he was ever better than in his brief role here, the kind of minor but memorable character that can exist only in the Coen brothers' wacky world. His exit is about as memorable as it gets. Rest in peace, Wheezy Joe.

I should make a Wheezy Joe inspired top-ten list of favorite Coen Brother auxiliary characters. Joe's making it, especially if my top-ten list has fifteen items on it like it usually does.

This movie isn't nearly as bad as I thought it was. In fact, it's really pretty good. I think it's a combination of a few things. First, I'm older and more mature. Second, I have more experience with the kinds of comedy the Coens are trying to pull off here than I did when I first saw this. Third, I'm pretty sure I was disappointed that this was a movie made by the same people who made Fargo and The Big Lebowski, and I'm better able to detach the experience of watching this from my expectations. As an homage to 1940's screwball comedy, the Coens already had done it better with the criminally-underrated The Hudsucker Proxy, but this is definitely worth watching and will probably make you laugh.

We open with a great scene with Geoffrey Rush singing Simon and Garfunkel in his car. It leads to hijinks that feel kind of like Coen light. The opening sequence is almost funny, but it all seems strangely forced, not like something that belongs naturally in the Coens' world. It's almost like seeing a tiger in a cage in Indiana instead of seeing one out in the wild. It actually takes a little while for this thing to gain momentum, but once it does, it's fluent and nearly virtuosic. There are cute animated credits, choo-choo foreplay, an Abbott and Costello routine at the beginning of a courtroom scene, a bagpipe version of "Bridge over Troubled Water," and a shot of Living Without Intestines Magazine.

This was George Clooney's second Coen romp. The character's not as good as his first, but he plays this Cary Grant thing so well. Lines that aren't things that anybody would say ever, an exaggerated version of things that 1940's suave characters said that also weren't things that anybody would say ever, come out of his mouth so naturally. I'm pretty sure I have a thing for Catherine Zeta-Jones, and if there's any actress alive who could make characters fall into the traps they fall in, it might be her. Of course, I have a thing for Billy Bob Thornton, too. He's funny here, previously acclimated to the Coen Brothers' world. But man, those auxiliary characters. You've got Coen-regular Richard Jenkins playing a another lawyer. And then there's a scene-stealing performance by Jonathan Hadary as Heinz, the Baron Krauss von Espy who performs while holding a little yippy dog. I mean, watching this is worth it just to hear Hadary say, "She specificated a man with a wandering peepee!" And Tom Aldredge as a near-death Herb Myerson, even wheezier than Wheezy Joe? Man, I love that performance, probably just because of how he says the word "form."

So no, this isn't higher echelon Coen Brothers' stuff, but when you stack it against other rom-coms from the last 25 years, it more than satisfies. Worth checking out again if you haven't seen it in 13 years.