Intolerable Cruelty

By EWAN MCDONALD - DVD, video rental February 26

(Herald rating: * * * * )

Miles Massey is a divorce lawyer in Beverly Hills. His career, and his fortune, has been based on the Massey Pre-Nup, an uncrackable pre-nuptial agreement under which he wins outrageous settlements for his female clients or protects his male clients' outrageous fortunes.

Soon after the movie opens he's in court, representing a husband (Geoffrey Rush) who surprised his wife with the pool man and found that odd, since they didn't have a pool.

This allows the Coen brothers to paint Miles -- debonair, droll, self-absorbed and bored, played with wicked enthusiasm by George Clooney.

His new client, Rex Rexroth (Edward Herrmann), is married to Marylin (Catherine Zeta-Jones, pictured). Her detective, Gus (Cedric the Entertainer), has a hotel-room video that proves Rex has a cheatin' heart and Marilyn wants enough of his millions to ease the pain.

After Miles wins the case, Marylin turns up in his office, asking him to draft her one of his famous pre-nuptial agreements for her next marriage, to Howard, a Texas oil billionaire (gloriously over-played by Billy Bob Thornton).

This confuses Miles because he knows she's a serial bride whose lifestyle depends on her hooking rich men and walking away with the proceeds

At first Miles can't understand why she wants to marry Howard and sign away her rights to his money. Soon enough, he will.

And soon after, because this owes so much to those 50s and 60s romantic comedies that you know what's going to happen, you know he will find himself in much the same fix. And that there will be a twist in the tail.

Clooney is well-suited for his role, while Zeta-Jones is required to pull out a passable imitation of Ava Gardner and Deborah Kerr.

Whether she succeeds or not is pretty much down to your opinion of her acting ability, and I'm prepared to go so far as to say she makes a fine clothes-horse though the finer points of delivering the barbed wit are more demanding.

For this, as an American critic put it, "is a date-movie with brain cells". So how come the Coen brothers are making a romantic comedy with two of Hollywood's biggest names? Even their most devoted fans would admit their movies are an acquired taste, a tad too quirky for the mainstream.

It seems they never planned to, the project just evolved. The brothers agreed to rewrite an original, failed screenplay by Robert Ramsay and Matthew Stone, rejected the idea of directing it because it was too commercial, and were then convinced. That gave them the opportunity to inject their oddball style.

The DVD (1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen) is sharp and warm-coloured, while the sound (Dolby Digital and DTS 5.1) and dialogue is crisp and clear. The soundtrack lifts many of Simon and Garfunkel's greatest hits (the Vegas wedding chapel version of Bridge Over Troubled Water on bagpipes is a highlight). Extras include a brief "making of" feature, outtakes, wardrobe feature, cast and crew biographies.