This is what I love about the genre of irony--for once you're not being treated like a sap. Irony can get ugly in its underestimation of human behavior, and can shut you out of the in-joke (that has been the fault of the Coen Brothers' movies). But Clooney makes Miles too appealing, even while acknowledging his deficiencies, for these problems to arise. In addition, there's no left-liberal sense of moral retribution for Miles's being a vain Beverly Hills divorce attorney who has a tab at the Mercedes dealer. Everything that contributes to Miles's success just makes him more appealing as a protagonist, though he's also a buffoon. But he's a fool because people are fools about love, even the ones who harbor the fewest illusions about it.
And Clooney's performance opens up into an amusing low estimate of movie romance. In romantic comedy the conflicts that have kept the lovers apart are resolved at the end, permanently. Even if the resolution comes about by magic you feel that the conflicts will not rear up again. With irony the movie can bring the lovers together despite everything and still suggest the more realistic fact that the conflicts are quite likely to arise again. In Intolerable Cruelty these dolts are doing at the end what they've been doing all along: signing Massey Pre-nups against their better judgment and legal advice and tearing them up as proof of a love we suspect they can't feel or sustain.
Carl Franklin's Out of Time starring Denzel Washington is an example of irony in the hands of people who do not get what it's for. They're like children playing with a loaded gun. Washington is Matt Whitlock, chief of police in a small southern Florida town screwing around with a married woman who he believes is dying of cancer. Matt finds out from her doctor about an expensive experimental treatment available in Europe and so gives her the cash his officers confiscated from a drug bust. That night she and her husband die in a house fire and the next day the DEA calls for the money because it's needed as evidence in a major trial.
The suspense of the movie lies in watching Matt solve the arson-murders at the same time that he suppresses all the leads that point to his involvement with the dead woman. It's a nightmare plot and the way to make it work is to treat Matt's moral vacuity as a hard fact and maybe as a bonus make it funny. This is the genius of Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944).
In terms of its narrative structure Out of Time is a work of irony, an inverted romance in which the knight is both less perceptive and honest than a true hero would be and his quest is a series of desperate, self-serving measures designed to hide rather than reveal the truth. The point of irony is that our fallen nature, the spiritual equivalent of our bodily functions, makes nonsense of the heroic romantic stories we tell each other. Those stories are lies and the pleasure of the ironist is to catch us out, handing us a tall, bracing glass of vinegar when we're drooling for yet another soda pop. Because irony is an inversion of the form of romance, a movie like Out of Time doesn't make sense if the makers treat the corrupt knight like a hero we can root for openly, unreservedly.
Article comments
1 - Eric Olsen
I agree, I think George is pretty great. The Perfect Storm was really a crappy movie though, and I never got the sense that he found the center of that role.
2 - Natalie Davis
Man, Alan, what a great review! Saw Out of Time and enjoyed Washington's performance for the most part, but there was something about the film bothered me all week (I saw it last Saturday) and it was more than the completely lame ending). You, Alan, provided me with the "aha!", and I thank you for that.
Did you see The School of Rock? Just saw it and I was not as jazzed by it as i had expected. I would love to see your thoughts on that film.
3 - peter
I enjoyed the review of Intolerable Cruelty and I thought I'd let you know. However, despite my enjoyment of the film, I thought it fell apart in a couple of places where the cynicism and quick witted humor gave way to slapstick that didn't seem to fit the film - especially in the courtroom scene with the dog and the baron followed by the sadly predictable break-in scene towards the end of the film. Actually, most of the film was predictable, but enjoyable. I was just disheartened when the film moved from it's quick-wit and (hehe) engaging plot to cheap laughs from pathetic slapstick. The movie moves at times from the humorous to the ridiculous and I simply wish it would have stuck with the former rather than the latter.
4 - Alan Dale
Thanks for writing. Wish the movie had found more fans. I disagree with you only about the slapstick: I thought it was pretty good. To me the ending of the break-in with the inhaler/gun confusion was stunningly funny, so well thought-out that it erased the distinction between slapstick and wit. But I'm pretty promiscuous when it comes to comedy. They can throw it all in together as far as I'm concerned--romantic comedy, verbal wit, irony, vaudeville routines, pratfalls. Bringing Up Baby is an example.