Clooney and the Coens do the hokey pokey.

Has there ever been a movie where a man comes home in the middle of the day, finds a handyman's truck in his driveway and DOESN'T discover the guy in bed with his wife? If there has been, it's not Intolerable Cruelty, the latest dark comedy from Joel and Ethan Coen. But that's okay, because if there's one thing the brothers know how to do it's take a cliché, bitch-slap it with a little irony and some snappy patter, and make it their own.

Intolerable Cruelty is their twisted take on the battle-of-the-sexes school of screwball comedy, the sort that Cary Grant may have starred in with Katherine Hepburn or Rosalind Russell. Today we get George Clooney playing Miles Massey, the most successful divorce attorney in Los Angeles, where business is booming if E! Entertainment Television is to be believed. Not only is he the master of spinning any marital breakdown in his client's favor, he is the author of the Massey Prenup, the gold standard in covering your assets. His latest client: Rex Rexroth (Edward Herrmann), caught-on-tape philanderer who'd kinda like to leave his allegedly innocent wife Marylin (Catherine Zeta-Jones) with nothing. Miles is up to the challenge.

"Must . . . Maintain . . . Eye contact."

Oh, but he wasn't counting on becoming instantly smitten with the gold-digging Mrs. Rexroth, whose moral code can be summed up as "One husband at a time." The rest of the plot concerns Miles' pursuit of Marylin, Marylin's pursuit of money, and how the two intersect.

The movie is closer in tone to The Hudsucker Proxy or O Brother, Where Art Thou? than, say, to The Man Who Wasn't There or Blood Simple, filled with the Coens' trademark off-kilter characters and dizzying digressions. The screenplay (on which they share credit with Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone) crackles with rapid-fire dialogue and is populated by the most sharply written caricatures this side of a David Lynch movie. (Well, either side of a David Lynch movie, when you get right down to it.) You can almost hear the brothers cackling from off camera at the sheer, over-the-top ridiculousness of characters named Heinz the Baron Krauss von Espy or Wheezy Joe. They delight in cheeky sight gags and unexpected bits of silliness, like the first shot we get of Miles. He's in a dentist's chair, getting his teeth whitened and all we see is his glowing mouth magnified through a glass as he rattles off orders to his secretary over a cell phone. Who else would think of that, I ask you?

George likes a lady with a leash.

As for the two leads, well, I think Clooney does his best work with the Coens. He's perfect as Miles, slick, smart and fast when he's in his element, insecure and easily rattled when he's not. Clooney plays smooth better than just about anyone but he never falls back on conventional charm here, preferring instead to go for the funny. This is one of the best comedic performances I've seen all year.

Zeta-Jones doesn't fare quite so well. This could be chalked up to an under-written part, but that's a cop-out. A lot of the roles may not have seemed like much on the page but the actors made the most of them. She's beautiful and silky and I suppose that's enough but I would have liked to see more.

Eh, so what. There's plenty of fun to be had in the rest of the movie. It scampers gleefully across a tightrope between silly and screwball, black comedy and social satire, scathing and slapstick. And yet through it all there's the sense that love may be the answer to everything. It's unsentimental, but with heart. Nice trick, guys!

Gorilla Pants rating: 3.5 out of 4 bananas