Studios have gotten better at disguising the changeless familiarity of their romantic comedies by hiring real talent to add some twist and tang to otherwise formulaic movies. Boy meets girl is still the basic recipe, but the demand is now for tortuous situational jokes, vaudevillian pets, and plucky underdogs (preferably Ben Stiller).

“Intolerable Cruelty” is one of these new anti-formula formula comedies, Ron Howard’s Imagine having tapped Joel and Ethan Coen to spruce up their film (one imagines Brian Grazer raving about getting “that Coen Brothers feeling”). They’re actually a natural choice. Adultery figures big in several of their films, especially their first, “Blood Simple”. Cheating wives or husbands are staples in their scripts. The original story, written by Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone, appears to have been a multiplex-friendly exercise in spry viciousness, probably along the lines of “Ruthless People”. The Coens seem to have wanted to make a fast-talking society comedy recalling Wilder or Hawks.

The differing visions make for a cross-eyed film. George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones do strike up a handsome sort of chemistry, and the script gives them a few clever “His Girl Friday”-ish back-and-forths. They look great together, and sparks of devious intelligence flash in their eyes. Something intriguing is always going on behind those eyes, but none of it adds up. When Miles first kisses Marilyn, for instance, it’s a bolt from the blue dictated by the running time rather than anything in the story.

The trick with doublecross comedies is letting the audience in on when they’re lying and when they’re playing it straight. Though the Coens take pains to illustrate what’s going on with Miles (including cut-aways to his hideous Senior Partner nightmare), the grandiloquence of the cynical lawyer never abates long enough to believe his change of heart. Miles’ silver tongue is too acid; he tends to  strike a note of parody and mockery, even when laying his heart bare. Meanwhile, no foothold of any kind is gained on Marilyn’s character. She is simply an unsolvable riddle capable of anything, perhaps, except love.

The writing is the culprit. The screenplay is clearly the work of two separate sensibilities, and they don’t merge well. The snarky cynicism and genuine feeling flip throughout the movie in a queasy either/or vacillation. When Marilyn moves out of her Las Vegas suite, Miles having discovered that he’s “exposed” himself to her golddigging wiles, she leaves with so little emotion you’d think Miles was a bellhop she was tipping on her way out. Yet in the very next scene she stares out the window pensively, as if she’s left her heart in Vegas. It’s an unconvincing switch, and most of the table-turning feels the same. Every “straight” line or scene wilts in the shadow of the parody that’s around the corner. As gifted as they are, the Coens cannot modulate the comedy to suit the subtle demands of the story.

The models for that kind of writing are the Hugh Grant comedies, where a slick, cynical, and hyper-articulate hero somehow manages to get in touch with his deeper emotions even as he continues to belt out sardonic ironies. Nothing like that is accomplished here. “Intolerable Cruelty” is really the first of their films to justify the charge, often made against them, that their worlds are arid places inhospitable to human fallibility. In other words, that they’re snobs laughing at the unfortunate boobs who dare to love, laugh, and make mistakes. Normally it’s a ridiculous charge—the films of high-stylists like the Coens are always puppet shows—but here it has some merit because the film isn’t fully theirs. The story plays on the human weaknesses of divorce, and while their face-lift added some fun it also extracted all the heart. Miles, Marilyn, and the rest have all the life of a set of wooden marionettes, and that’s a bad thing for a comedy that seeks a mass audience. The fusion of sensibilities flat-out failed.

That failure doesn’t mean the movie is bereft of sporadic delights.  Although the Coens live and breathe in the margins of what must be considered their worst film, there are plenty of fine jokes worthy of their canon. Clooney’s dialogue is as fake as “a pair of tits on a boar-pig” (to borrow a phrase from Billy Bob Thornton’s oil baron) and every bit as funny as his clausy declamations in “O Brother Where Art Thou”. Many Coen characters talk with the elaborate formality of lawyers anyway, so Miles must have been an easy character to write.

The theme of wounded male power peaks bizarrely when Myerson gives a pep talk to Miles with a tube hanging out of his chest in what looks like the shape of a limp penis. The divorce lawyer’s organization, “N.O.M.A.N.” (National Organization of Matrimonial Attorneys, Nationwide), proudly uses the slogan “...let N.O.M.A.N. put asunder.” The finest moment, a gag that belongs with the best, most outrageous moments in the Coen canon, is Wheezy Joe’s tragic mix-up of a gun and an asthma breather. If “Intolerable Cruelty” had more of this, and was less eager to satisfy more conventional tastes, it might have been one of the Coens’ best.