Read Online George Clooney by Mark Browning - Free Book Online

freedom,” but we see her having little idea of what to do with this freedom or that either of her husbands oppressed her particularly. She leaves Miles, coldly telling him that he will “always be my favorite husband,” but then she seems sad and almost tearful on the plane. In terms of character development, we have little sense other than the expectations of genre and the need for some form of narrative closure as to why there is a sudden change of heart on her part. Miles tells us (twice) that he finds her “fascinating” (once even with something akin to a raffish growl), but this is asserted rather than shown dramatically or explained.
    The number of quotable lines, perhaps, suggests a script that is too diffuse to be convincing (with a long history, the Coens picking up a story from Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone) and that might have felt cutting edge a decade or so ago, but debates about prenuptial contracts (or prenups as they are termed in the film) feel dated. Often the best lines come from minor characters, such as the woman testifying against her husband on the grounds that he used the vacuum cleaner for a sex toy, thereby depriving her of a cleaner for a considerable time, or about matters in passing, such as Miles’s sarcastic order for a “ham sandwich on stale rye bread, lots of mayo, go easy on the ham,” which is taken down without reaction from the waitress. However, the exaggerated dialogue (such as Miles’s climactic summing up of the Baron as “the silly man”), visual gags (like the magazine
Living without Intestines
that he reads while waiting to see Myerson), or farcical actions like his tennis practice, barely moving his racket as the machine fires balls right at him, all seem almost placed to be used as trailer material.
    Rather than exploring any complex notion of motivation, Miles’s resolution to “find her Norgay” (the individual who helped her to achieve greatness) only leads to the camp comedy of Baron von Espy (Jonathan Hadary) and some cheap anti-French jokes. Miles’s advice to Wrigley in the pursuit of wisdom, which seems echoed in the script more widely, is to “start with the people with funny names.” Ellen Cheshire and John Ashbrook make much of what they see as the rampant homophobia in the film, and certainly there are a large number of thinly veiled references to same-sex relationships. 3 However, this does not really coalesce into anything approaching a coherent ideology but is closer to the anally fixated comic sensibility of a Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy stand-up routine. Where the comic elements of
O Brother
resonate with depth,
Intolerable Cruelty
seems happy to operate at a much more blunt level, in terms of its use of stereotypical characters and sexualized dialogue (such as Miles declaring “Darling, you’re exposed” after Marilyn rips up the prenup).
    Miles’s supposed great change is signaled by departing from his prepared speech and then symbolically ripping it up, but even this is taken as a stunt leading to applause, which we clearly see Miles enjoying. He may declare that he is “naked, vulnerable, and in love,” but he does not seem capable of real depth of feeling, only stating “Love is good” in a self-conscious echo of Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is good” from
Wall Street
(Oliver Stone, 1987). His resolution to be a better man is undercut by his comic inability to describe precisely where he might do good works (practicing in “East Los Angeles or one of those other … ”), finishingwith a dismissive wave. This is not a portrayal of genuine emotion but a parody of it, with a sentimental piano score, the audience rising to its feet through which Miles passes to increasing adulation, and eventually Wrigley (his alter ego) declaring in tears, “I love you, man.”
    Certain elements of screwball are certainly present: an emasculated hero