George Clooney in the Coen Brothers' Intolerable Cruelty: Masters of Irony - Page 2

Intolerable Cruelty has a nifty plot but I don't think it would be nearly as good without Clooney's classic performance driving it forward. The opening, before Clooney has appeared, in which Geoffrey Rush finds his wife with the pool cleaner--in a house without a pool--is merely squawky. Once Rush's wife goes to Miles for help, the movie hits its stride and never stumbles as long as Clooney is onscreen.

I also think that Clooney and Zeta-Jones don't have the kind of "chemistry" that people look for in straight romantic comedies, but that doesn't really matter. The movie is about Miles's temptation and Zeta-Jones as Marilyn is tempting, God knows. Her style doesn't match his but serves as a complement. The whole point of her role is to send ambiguous signals as to whether she's been stirred by Miles's energy and skill. Marilyn describes what kind of fool Miles is, and though she's extraordinarily beautiful and self-possessed the joke is that this supremely confident and competent professional man is the ordinary kind of fool.

The chemistry doesn't matter because the movie is a work of irony and so it doesn't expect you to project yourself into the story the way romantic comedies do. Neither does Miles have to be likeable, exactly. We first see him getting his teeth whitened, and he keeps checking to see if they really look white (to see if he got his money's worth? if they're dazzling enough?) With Clooney playing Miles this vice doesn't make him less attractive, and Miles's lack of scruples is so open and so deeply incorporated into his snappy style that it's comic, too.

Clooney has leapt right past the usual way an actor compounds a character out of the realistic details in the script. Rather, he seems to have become Miles and then played the script's crazy mosaic of traits in character, all held together by a nervy command of artifice. This is how Miles would exert control, this is how Miles would experience doubt, fear, desire; this is how Miles would lose it. Miles is a live-born creation and yet one of the great pleasures of irony is being outside the character along with Clooney as he reveals him to us.

We believe in Miles's proficiency sufficiently for the Coens' disenchanted vision of Beverly Hills to cohere, but Clooney's confidence is the real marvel here. His delivery has the speed you associate with Robin Williams or Michael Keaton, but he doesn't come across as a comedy specialist. He's not a disruptive clown but seems more integrated into the depthless adult world of the movie. He also has the sleek dominance, at once sports car and steamroller, that Kevin Spacey has shown at his most exalted-menacing, as an L.A. winner in Swimming with Sharks (1995), for instance, but Spacey has a fundamental seriousness that is almost leaden compared to Clooney's mastery of artifice. (My guess is that if Spacey had had to choose between the role of Miles and Willy Loman in a movie version of Death of a Salesman he would have chosen the latter; I expect Clooney would have better sense.)

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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