George Clooney in the Coen Brothers' Intolerable Cruelty: Masters of Irony - Page 3

In addition, with Spacey irony is always a weapon, as it is with Bill Murray, in Groundhog Day (1993), for example. Because Clooney is not investing himself in the role as a naturalistic character, he's able to use irony as a means of revelation perfectly in tune with the moviemakers' intentions. (And the Coens are really on here. The movie reaches a climax with an episode involving an asthmatic hitman that is the funniest slapstick they've shot since Raising Arizona (1987).) As Miles, Clooney doesn't make any direct emotional appeal to the audience and yet his high style is so smashingly effective that Miles stands open to us: macher, lover, patsy. Irony provides no shield for the character, and the actor doesn't use it to assure us that he's not the dupe his character is. Whether you're laughing with Clooney or at Miles you're laughing, and feeling the pleasure that an actor in total control of his means can give you.

Clooney can match any of these recent comedians for impact but he's also romantic in a way they aren't. He's a movie star in the best old Hollywood sense--not just a recognizable product like Tom Cruise (who visibly sweated bullets to give his high-energy comic performance in Jerry Maguire (1996)) or Brad Pitt (who confuses narcissism with charm), but a performer who has the extraordinary skill to shape the material to his personality. As Miles he's as antic as John Barrymore in Twentieth Century (1934) or Cary Grant in His Girl Friday (1940), comic masters at the height of their powers, while maintaining a similar romantic suavity. (This material suits him much better than the bucolic slapstick of the Coens' O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000).) Miles is all crisp image, which Clooney is able to sketch convincingly and undermine for laughs at the same time.

Northrop Frye has described the genre of irony as a parody of romance, the obvious example being Don Quixote. The point is to take the idealized, prettified forms of romance and put back into them the unidealized realities that romance excludes. Irony is the narrative equivalent of makeup remover; it isn't just an attitude but a process. (In works like Don Quixote, which are closer to satire, the artist's attitude is evident. In a more reticent work of irony such as Madame Bovary the artist's attitude is more mysterious, in a way that is particularly hard for Americans to grasp.)

As a work of irony Intolerable Cruelty is not a romantic comedy but a parody of one. The hero is a cynical specialist in breaking marriages apart as profitably as possible for one party regardless of culpability, and the heroine is a woman who marries men likely to cheat on her so she can win a settlement that will make her independent of all men. The big inverted centerpiece of the movie is Miles's keynote address at the convention held by his professional association, the National Organization of Matrimonial Attorneys Nationwide (their slogan: "What God hath joined, let N.O.M.A.N. put asunder"). Believing Marilyn to be richer than himself, Miles has signed one of his own Pre-nups. He is in fact so smitten he tears the technical speech he had prepared in half, improvises a heartfelt paean to love, and announces he's leaving the practice to do pro bono work, in East L.A. or one of those other … he's not even sure what to call "them."

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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