Taming gorgeous George

Every weekday morning, early, Miles Massey (George Clooney) checks his teeth and his schedule, and goes to work as a millionaire Los Angeles divorce lawyer. He suspects he is lonely.

Creature comforts no longer comfort him, the thrill of the kill is gone and the gigantic settlement won for the least deserving of Beverly Hills seems like every other deal done long ago.

Then he meets Marylin Rexroth (Catherine Zeta-Jones), the tough, estranged wife of a philandering property developer. Miles is hired by her husband to ensure that she doesn't make a cent from the divorce - something Marilyn tells Miles she will never forgive. They find themselves unable to stay apart for long, carping and flirting whenever they meet.

On the face of it, Intolerable Cruelty is a screwball comedy - a film with Hepburn-Tracy prickle, the kind of romance in which love can only be won through trials of sarcasm and strength.

But you get the impression that the Coen brothers (who are more used to working with their own material) took a conventional script by Robert Ramsay and Matthew Stone and unpicked it very purposefully, razoring in hefts of their trademark cold zing.

It is a more glamorous movie than you might expect from them, but it is pretty familiar in one important respect: characters in Coen Brothers films never like admitting to their feelings, and in the divorce courts of Intolerable Cruelty that kind of sentimental behaviour could lose you your house, your pool, your fat future.

Marilyn, certainly, cares only for cash. She parades her pink cashmere in court, and wears gold dresses in restaurants.

Miles finds her fascinating, particularly the way she turns sideways to catch him gawping at her like an adolescent. I love that Clooney can still do this - act as if he might lose his marbles over a woman and do something youthful and embarrassing - because for the past 10 years he has managed to stay the same age: around 40.

Like Cary Grant, he seems perpetually held in the hotspot of middle age, the ultimate salt-and-pepper-temples moment.

In one scene, Clooney sits with two other men, talking most excitedly - it is as though the little bit of film containing his image has been treated with Technicolor, while the rest just got sent off for processing at the usual lab.