Profile: The Coen Brothers (Part 4)

The final installment in a great four-part profile by Trevor Hogg from FlickeringMyth.com. An excerpt about their involvement in the movie Intolerable Cruelty:

Working once again with celebrity actor George Clooney, Joel and Ethan Coen found themselves being accused of having “gone Hollywood” with the release of Intolerable Cruelty in 2003. Morally compromised divorce lawyer Miles Massey (Clooney) falls for a conniving serial divorcé, Marylin Rexroth (Catherine Zeta-Jones).

Channeling the suave comic spirit of Cary Grant, Clooney enjoyed performing in the romantic comedy, “The fun part of these characters is that they both don’t really realize the trouble they’re in emotionally until they run into each other.” Catherine Zeta-Jones (Chicago) found her role to be challenging, “I didn’t want Marilyn to be that deliciously bitchy, because I wanted people to like her. And I wanted George, and my other husband, to like me.” Commenting on how she perceived Marilyn, Zeta-Jones declared, “She really has no idea how much chaos she can create. She is like the eye of the storm. The tornado — all the craziness that happens around her — she just waltzes through it.”

Cast alongside George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones are Billy Bob Thorton, Geoffrey Rush (Quills), Cedric the Entertainer (Be Cool), and Richard Jenkins (The Visitor); capturing their performances on film was veteran Coen brothers collaborator and cinematographer Roger Deakins. “We wanted to make a glossy picture,” says Deakins. “The film is about high-society, rich people, and we wanted the people and the locations to look rich, classy, more glossy than what we usually do on [Coen brothers’] features.

Intolerable Cruelty marked two significant changes for the Coens. The script was composed with three other writers and the movie footage was assembled digitally. “It’s so much more efficient,” Ethan remarked on the reason for embracing computer editing, “and so much easier to mark where you want to mark and review what you’ve marked, as opposed to rolling back and forth on a Moviola and using the brake and getting a general idea within a few frames. It’s also infinitely easier to look at alternate takes as opposed to handling all this film. You find yourself looking at more. You find yourself being more comprehensive or exhaustive than you would be if you were still working in film.” Joel agreed. “You can cut about twice as fast as we’re used to. That’s kind of an issue for us, since we don’t start cutting until after we finish shooting.

Earning twice as much as its $60 million budget, Intolerable Cruelty was well received by film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader, “The Coens do an efficient job of stamping their signature grotesquerie on sumptuous Beverly Hills and Las Vegas settings and ladling on gallows of humour and malice, sometimes with the verve of early Robert Zemeckis.” Ruthe Stein of the San Francisco Chronicle was far less impressed with the picture; she wrote, “Two-thirds through, Intolerably Cruelty shifts to Las Vegas and runs out of steam, like a gambler after an all-nighter.”

For Trevor’s previous posts re the Coen brothers:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

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