Zeta-Jones's performance complements Clooney's with a perfidious elegance. Her uptown-girl beauty and silken opacity -- that ability to not let on what she's thinking, even to herself -- make her the kind of trophy Miles would want to own. And she coos so lushly that Marylin's hand-tailored cool is even more beguiling: she knows advertising that she's an opportunist is a bad way to conduct business, which in her case is finding rich-husband material.
That joy in low-down behavior is kept on the down-low. Cedric the Entertainer plays a crass, but direct, video surveillance expert, Gus Petch, who becomes the point of intersection in the world of Miles and Marylin. Cedric delivers the crassest lines with what can only be called hammy understatement; his years of stand-up have taught him that less is all.
The picture lacks the manic, red-line highs that make for great trailers and ragged films. It's not the kind of dark comedy that Grazer has produced previously -- like Greedy and For Love or Money -- that finally soften the characters' acquisitive behavior with a fatty dollop of sentimental mayonnaise.
The Coens, bless their hearts, are too smart to apologize for avarice -- it's what gave screwball comedies a kick, and sends this movie straight to your head. Keep in mind that it's only a minor rush, but a rush nonetheless. It has a Jell-O-shot smoothness that makes you a little dizzy afterward in recollecting how assured and unremittingly smart Intolerable Cruelty is. The second word in the title is a little too apt; this movie should pack a license to kill.
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