Starring: George Clooney, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Billy Bob Thornton

The Coen brothers, Ethan and Joel, make significant strides towards classic "screwball" territory with Intolerable Cruelty, a much more tolerable comedy than we've been led to believe.

"Screwball," that rarely achieved and beautiful classification of comedy, created by the likes of Ernst Lubitsch, Howard Hawks, and Preston Sturges, has been the brothers' undeclared major for some time now. It's been the classes entirely outside of the discipline, however, where they've consistently had the best grades. Their fortitude has kept them coming back, however, and their attention to their studies is now paying off.

One can understand how they became so enamored, as their first attempt, Raising Arizona, was a resounding success and perhaps the first, best contemporary version of screwball comedy since What's Up Doc? (you can probably give a nod to Martin Scorsese's After Hours, two years earlier than Arizona, but that was more dark comedy). Then they made The Hudsucker Proxy, a film jam-packed with great notions that seemed to have been stored up since the 8th grade (Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums would make exactly this same mistake seven years later). Fast quipping, supplied by a tightly-wound Jennifer Jason Leigh channeling His Girl Friday's Rosalind Russell, didn't help this film achieve the Hawk-sian loopiness it so desperately strove for. 2000's O Brother, Where Art Thou? was their most direct foray into the Sturges oeuvre but only succeeded in surges (the title is from Sturges's Sullivan's Travels wherein a well-meaning, successful comedy director wants to abandon the lowly humor form and make an "important" movie entitled "O Brother, Where Art Thou?").

With Intolerable Cruelty one sees all the hallmarks of the screwball form. There are gorgeous people in glamorous settings. There are crazed situations and fiercely independent females. There is also love, divorce, money, scheming, back-stabbing, bizarre characters and frivolity. No Odyssey-theme this time; the Dick Cavett pretense has been abandoned.

And then there's George Clooney. The guy had a rough 2003. He had one of the best performances of last year in the stilted Solaris and he directed one of the best movies of last year in the completely, tragically ignored Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. And now? Now he's going to get to hear, definitively, repeatedly, and for the rest of his life, the name of Cary Grant. He's going to hear it because he's Grant-good in Cruelty (he was actually Grant-good in O Brother but there were all of those English 110 references flying about). His timing and his double takes are exquisite, right up there with one of the best physical, facial performances in the last decade, Johnny Depp's Sam in 1993's Benny & Joon.

Clooney plays Miles Massey, the best divorce lawyer in town. He turns cheating wives into wronged spouses in the eyes of the courts, but now he's got the difficult task of making Rex Rexroth (Edward Herrmann) appear as anything but the philanderer he is. Rexroth has been caught on tape with a woman by Gus Petch (Cedric the Entertainer, once again a valuable, if minor addition to a film) and Rex's wife, Marilyn (Catherine Zeta Jones) wants everything she can get. Marilyn is a complete and utterly shameless gold digger, with the brains and the body to prove the ultimate foil for the cynical, but still vulnerable, Miles Massey.

The screenplay, by Robert Ramsey, the Coens, Matthew Stone and John Romano ticks along almost effortlessly (though an opening sequence doesn't set `em up and knock `em down the way it should). Miles and Marilyn trade barbs but they're not moving so fast, nor are the Coens allowing them to move too fast, that they don't have to listen to what the other person is saying (something usually dispensed with in screwball-wannabes by under the breath muttering).

Longtime collaborators cinematographer Roger Deakins and composer Carter Burwell fit hand-in-glove with the proceedings. Their contributions don't stand out because they've ensured that they blend in. Zeta Jones looks more glamorous, more gorgeous than she ever has. The pregnancy "glow" (she discovered she was bearing another child at the beginning of filming) agrees with her. Dear God, could this usher in another Hollywood fad, the propitious pregnancy program?

There are, as there have been in most Coen films, uneven spots. They are too strident and obvious in their skewering of Marilyn's cadre of catty gold diggers, and Massey's assistant Wrigley, played by Paul Adelstein, is a character that the Coens have a hard time conveying (he's either laughing at a ridiculous mid-film wedding or he cries easily at such occasions, we're not sure which).

Something to be sure of, however, is that if the Coens decide to stick with screwball, they're finally on the right path.