[I erred; it turns out there are books related to the Coens—see this Amazon page (this does not constitute an endorsement of the books). However, they seem generally like “fanboy” books—certainly the “Dude” one does—and not scholarly or otherwise judicious studies. Anyway, I haven’t read them, so perhaps my Coens analysis is a little poorer for this.]
[Also, this entry touches on issues of tolerance that are, in current events, inflamed amid the Dharun Ravi case, an anti-Semitic attack in France, and a racially charged shooting case in Florida. Perhaps it would be helpful to read the last subsection here (“What lesson?”) before the next-to-last subsection ("The nightmarish senior partner...").]
[This entry has been edited 3/23/12.]
[This entry has been edited 3/23/12.]
Intolerable Cruelty (2003)—the epitome of the Coens’ skepticism of lawyers
Having to represent yourself in an important legal matter—as I’ve done a number of times—is typically a lonely affair, and is like finding a snake in your sock drawer: it’s something of a horror to have to deal with it, and you don’t relish doing it again, but the more often you do it, the better you get at it, and the more you somehow welcome the experience.
But you need some therapeutic help amid such a process, no matter how developed your confidence. So if ever you wanted to see a movie that, for sheer laughs in a strongly satiric vein, would take your worried mind off a pending legal matter—because it gives some helpful laughs about the legal profession—Intolerable Cruelty is one of the best choices.
According to a DVD-extra interview of the Coens, this film (IC for short) began as a writing project they did for Universal, starting apparently in about 1994. Whatever complicated route it took from there, it ended up with screenwriting credits for the Coens and two other people, and Brian Grazer (producer of A Beautiful Mind and other notable films) is one of the producers. The end product is a pitched satire of the divorce-lawyer world, yet it comments—in the Coens’ way of adapting, and adapting to, certain standard genres—on “screwball comedy,” with (as Ethan notes) the softheaded male and the hardheaded female. Such films might have starred Cary Grant, on whom George Clooney’s wardrobe (and other features) is modeled in IC. So instead of the relatively mild humor of screwball comedy, you get laughs as from dark satire.
Meanwhile, the charisma (and tooled acting) of the two stars (Catherine Zeta Jones plays the woman set against Clooney’s character) and a certain burnished, Technicolor look to the film make it an odd mix of sleek entertainment seemingly aimed at the mainstream and a sly, dark commentary. And it is the only Coens film that focuses mainly on the legal world, whereas the legal world makes up only minor (if usually important) parts of many of their other films.
The premises of IC, and even many of its character names, have a certain “formulaically satirical” quality to them. Clooney plays Miles Massey, a next-to-top partner in the firm Massey Myerson Sloan and Guralnik, LLP, which seems to specialize in matrimonial law. After an introductory scene in which a putatively sleazy producer of soap operas (“Donovan Donaly”) is cuckolded by his wife, she turns up in Miles’ office for an initial consultation, which is a tour de force of a scene depicting a disingenuous attorney willfully misinterpreting and redefining what he half-hears of her story—even while she half-moves to correct him—in order to shape it to a case in which he feels he can win uncompromisingly.
Storyline shows serial golddigger “matched” (in two ways) by ruthless attorney
Then the main plotline involves Miles’ representing Rex Rexroth, a mini-mall developer whose wife Marilyn, played by Zeta Jones, is suing him for divorce; the outcome of the two men’s “initial consult” is a summing up to Rex Rexroth by Miles: “So you propose that, in spite of demonstrable infidelity at your part, your unoffending wife should be thrown out on her ear?” Rex smiles like a kid: “Is that possible?” Miles turns briefly to think. He responds somewhat ironically, “It’s a challenge.”
He then uses in his own way the same crass private investigator that Zeta Jones has used to get videotape on Rex shacking up with a floozy at a motel: Gus Petch, a tough, competent, self-promoting sort who follows his prey into their trysting place with big video camera recording them and chants with gratification, “I’m gonna nail your ass! I’m gonna nail your ass!” (This phrase becomes playfully echoed by different people in different contexts in the film.)
In a specially requested way for Miles, Gus Petch (played by comic and actor Cedric the Entertainer) will break into Marilyn and Rex’s house to photograph her address book; it is this maneuver that has Miles’ assistant Wrigley [sp?] ask him, “Couldn’t you get disbarred for that?”—to which Miles has a smooth, self-serving answer. It is on the basis of Gus’s finding info on the amusing concierge of a swanky European inn that Miles is able to win in a big way for Rex in the divorce trial, with no money to Marilyn, in a nicely wrought scene in court: the concierge turns out to present evidence on Marilyn’s having set up Rex to be married to her until such time as she can divorce him for adultery and get some of his estate. And as we find, Marilyn’s poolside girlfriends (who greet with traded air-kisses) mostly seem like serial marriers-and-divorcers out only for their husbands’ money.
The second half of the film, after Miles wins for Rex, shows Marilyn trying to get even with Miles—who, as it happens, despite his apparent cynicism about marriage, falls in love with her—by making Miles (with a pang of jealous yearning) want to marry her after she pretends to marry an oil millionaire, who is actually a soap-opera actor to whom Marilyn is referred by the now-destitute Donovan Donaly. She marries Miles (in a fun scene at the apparently real-life Wee Kirk o’ the Heather, a Scottish-themed wedding chapel in Las Vegas), immediately after which she gets the wheels turning on divorcing him to get his money—and this after importantly scrapping Miles’ invention, a form of prenuptial agreement that is supposedly impossible to “penetrate” once it is in force. She tears up the “prenup” as if to demonstrate her love and trust in him, but ends up using this voiding of the prenup as a means to have his estate be exposed to her courtroom attempt to get at least half of it.
As I write this, I am reminded of how densely developed a satirical script this is: all sorts of comical elements interwoven, in a story that seems to describe such selfish, cynical people that some viewers today might find it so dark as to be wildly unrealistic. And yet as I’ve said, today, it seems that so much more is subject to satirical treatment in this country, post-2008, that IC seems about as “wise about where we are now” as an old Mad magazine.
The nightmarish senior partner brings home the most trenchant remarks about cynical law
However much the Coens themselves devised in this film the barbed criticism of attorneys as disingenuous strivers with virtually no conception of love, this film certainly goes about as far as you can go to make these points without tipping over into completely implausible situations and characterizations (and maybe some would find it this way anyway). But their most pointed addressing of the nature of practiced law in this country—or the worst extremes to which it can be taken—is perhaps in Miles’ visits to the “senior partner’s” office, that of Herb Myerson (actually, one of the “visits” is just a nightmare image of Miles’). There are three such scenes in the film, the first two being pat theme-setters of a sort; the third actually is an important locus of a plot development.
Herb Myerson, well into his eighties, is a cadaverous old coot hooked up to enough tubes and beeping machines that he seems as if he’s in an ICU, in a shadowy office that almost seems like an especially murky Mafioso’s lair. (It is interesting to compare this fantasy center of power—a sort of “Wizard of Oz behind the curtain”—with the odd redoubt of Marshak, the senior rabbi of the community temple in A Serious Man (2009), who seems an occult, benign, bearded elder hemmed in behind a mysterious museum-like array of Judaica, Hebraica, and apparent medical-lab displays and other portentous odds and ends. Marshak’s “emeritus official’s” main duty, to greet the newly bar-mitzvah’d boys, seems per the movie’s whimsy to entail little more than clearing his throat noisily and, in the case of the movie’s boy-protagonist, returning his confiscated transistor radio and showing he’s learned the names of the members of a rock group the boy has shown interest in.)
In the two theme-setter scenes in IC, Myerson congratulates Miles for his value to the firm, with Myerson listing the stats on Miles’ accomplishments, almost as if the firm was a sleazy, boiler-room affair interested only in cold end results: X many motions for summary judgments sought, Y granted; and so on…and umpty-ump lunches charged. Myerson has a New York area Ashkenazi-Jewish accent (e.g., “firm” is “foim”) that would almost seem an anti-Semitic slur if it weren’t for the Coens being the sly perpetrators of this; he seems like the kind of cynical elderly Jew whom some would scorn as “the type that gives his ethnic group a bad name,” or “that kike who gypped me in X circumstance.” It’s as if the Coens are saying the “heart of darkness” of such a firm is a lot of people’s stereotype of a ghoulish old Jew who is so greedy, he is salivating over the balance sheet even when half dead.
In the third Myerson scene, the old man now seems less enthralled to good news of balance-sheet numbers and is keen on confronting a chastened Miles, who has been thrown for a loop by Marilyn’s proceeding to divorce him, with Miles confessing to the fact that for the first time in his life, “I don’t know what to do; I’m a sitting duck!”
Myerson responds furiously, scorning “all your goddam love, love, love,” and arguing, “This firm deals in power! This firm deals in perception! This firm cannot prosper nor long endure [note the similarity to language in the Gettysburg Address] if it’s perceived to be dancing to the music of a hurdy-gurdy! [his pronunciation: “hoidy-goidy”].” Then, in what may be the main satirical point the Coens make about how bad a law firm can get, he says (some of this may be paraphrased), “I’m going to tell you something about the goddam law! We honor the law! We serve the law! And sometimes, counselor, we obey the law. But counselor, this is not one of those times.”
And we cut to a scene with another wacky character, a stocky hit man named Wheezy Joe, who confers with Miles and Wrigley on a plan to kill Marilyn, while he uses what seems a rescue asthma inhaler with some frequency. The denouement of the movie involves Miles and Wrigley’s trying to stop Wheezy Joe from assassinating Marilyn once they find she has inherited Rex Rexroth’s estate—he has suddenly died, and had never revised his will from when he’d still been married to her—and later Wheezy Joe dies in a bizarre mishap that is a typical violent episode in Coens films. Miles and Marilyn eventually have a reconciliation…and as screwball comedy has it, there is a sort of neat happy ending, though in this case we obviously have reservations about the morals of the individuals comprising the happy couple.
What lesson?
If people find the Coens too glibly cynical at times, perhaps the best way to look at something like “the nightmare Jew” at the heart of a law firm is to compare these capable filmmakers to another area of American literature, not that of 1870-1915 naturalism and satire, as I argued in the first part of this blog entry. That area is William Faulkner, whose demanding works contained such unhappy elements as a mentally retarded person being the “reliable narrator” for part of a story (The Sound and the Fury), violence and dislocation shaping uneducated people’s lives (As I Lay Dying), and plenty else that didn’t leave things simple for our unruffled consideration. In The Sound and the Fury, Jason Compson, who seems the sanest character to whom a long chapter’s focus is given, seems racist in a way that might make us laugh despite ourselves: what does Faulkner want us to believe about this?
Where was the moral center of some of his works? How did we know which character to believe in?
We know from, say, his having the servant Dilsey be the center of decency and everyday sobriety in The Sound and the Fury that he required us to seek out, amid the damage, decline, and distortion of American life, where the true keepers of the flame of “traditional values” were. In the introduction to the section on Faulkner in the 1979 edition of The Norton Anthology of American Literature (the volume covering from about 1865 to modern day), it is noted that Faulkner can present a stereotype in a character, but his work is such that you are invited to see the reality around or beyond it. [See end note.] His type of work of art may not have made this easy, but the dislocation, the sensational portraits of all kinds of violence, helped make discovery of the real “heart of the work” all the more precious and credible.
More generally, art can help us face, and resolve, stereotypic thinking in two ways: (1) in providing a space where all boundaries are dissolved, and we share (for a relaxed time) in all “other types”—such as with rock ’n’ roll (either as fans or practitioners), where everyone can be race-blending and/or gender-bending and/or a “whatsit?”—like a Little Richard, a David Bowie, a Mick Jagger, or a Lady Gaga. The other way is (2) to somehow facetiously embrace and draw implications out of a stereotype that is so bluntly ludicrous that we start to see how ridiculous stereotypic thinking is in general—such as in Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat (2006).
But the Coens don’t make this sort of aim simple; they’re, you might say, college-level filmmakers. In Intolerable Cruelty, Miles gives a speech to a convention of matrimonial lawyers, after he has married Marilyn, that is the most sincere-sounding “soliloquy” given in the movie—though obviously we are meant to see it as quite ironic to be delivered to such attorneys. Later, Miles returns more long-term to something of his more reprehensible side. Does the movie’s real “message” lie in this speech? Or in the seemingly slur-like characterization of Herb Myerson?
That’s the sort of challenge of Coens movies. Where is the restoration of sanity? Where is the moral center? Is a given fleeting instance of either of these enough for the movie? Maybe that’s up to all of us individually to decide.
###
End note
“His fiction, not his public pronouncements, remained
the most sensitive register of his anguished recognition of the power and human
capacities of the black people. There he had ‘explored,’ in the words of the
black novelist Ralph Ellison, ‘perhaps more successfully than anyone else,
white or black, certain forms of Negro humanity.’ In portraying American
Negroes he ‘had been more willing perhaps than any other artist to start with
the stereotype, accept it as true, and then seek out the human truth which it
hides.’” (p. 759)
###
End note
In The Norton
Anthology of American Literature, vol. 2 (New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 1979):
“Faulkner’s literary form is distinctly appropriate to the
sense of desperate urgency with which he confronts the world he envisions. The
contortions into which he twists his materials…and the sensationalism of his
themes and formal effects…define Faulkner’s world. It is a world in which
‘despair’ and ‘doom’ are recurring motifs because social and moral orders prove
to be founded on racial exploitation and violence; …[and] social and moral
traditions are threatened with enervation and perversion, and human destiny is
faced with the alternatives of annihilation or apocalypse.” (p. 1760)
