It's a little ironic that, in an apparent bid for mainstream credibility with a major studio, rather than extending their talents in directions suggested by the excellently accessible The Big Lebowski and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the Coen brothers instead pillage their back catalog for tactics that make the end result look remarkably, well, Coenesque. Yes, Intolerable Cruelty reacquaints me with all the reasons why I long harbored a dislike for the Coens. No, it's not a bad movie by any stretch. George Clooney's best performance, yadda yadda. Probably Catherine Zeta-Jones's, in a walk — it's hardly a stretch, but a pleasant enough development anyway (count me among those few who were decidedly not wowed by her in Chicago).

The lost-in-the-'40s scenario has been described as a throwback to screwball comedy, but a key strategy of screwball comedy was to convince us that two characters — no matter how adversarial was their relationship or how irreconcilable seemed their differences — eventually cared deeply for one another. What's required, but missing, is a sense of love and at least the possibility of devotion — the Coens have regarded married life with the air of guys who've been there throughout their filmography, but they've never before challenged themselves to depict two people falling head over heels for each other. On the evidence here, they're not up to it.

To his credit as a consummate professional, Clooney gives it a real shot (the scene where his line "You fascinate me" follows Zeta-Jones out of the room comes closest to depicting the kind of manic, obsessive adoration that his character would require in order to be caught up so short by a woman). But Zeta-Jones - who looks great in this movie, thanks to crackerjack DP Roger Deakins - seems incapable of regarding his character with anything but bemusement. The script is unequivocal on the point of their feelings for one another, but by the end of the film it's hard to be convinced that Zeta-Jones isn't still dicking this poor guy around.

That's not to say Intolerable Cruelty is without merit. When the elements really gel, such as in the courtroom scenes where Clooney puts on his most dapper affectations and delivers crisp Preston Sturges-style dialogue like spitballs, the brothers are operating at the height of their powers, and the film is a delight. Less successful is a sequence where the Coens stretch their material to accommodate a sequence of madcap black comedy, as if they feel an obligation to deliver that damned Fargo wood-chipper again. They spend an inordinate amount of time mocking affluent women who spend time hanging around the pool and contemplating cosmetic surgery, which is like firing a slingshot at the broad side of a barn from about 10 feet away. And Intolerable Cruelty marks the triumphant return of an earlier Coens strategy that has character actors mug and gape endlessly for their wide-angle closeups. OK, it's obviously a matter of personal taste, but few things bore me faster.