Joel and Ethan Coen have built a career on surprising their audience, but there's no surprise in their new Intolerable Cruelty that can match the opening credits, particularly the one that reads: 'Story by Robert Ramsey & Matthew Stone and John Romano, Written by Robert Ramsey & Matthew Stone and Joel Coen & Ethan Coen.' Can it be -- two filmmakers whose one name is synonymous with 'idiosyncrasy' helming a picture whose convoluted writing credits rival a summer blockbuster's? And getting bottom billing to boot?

It's enough to strike fear deep into the hearts of the Coens' admirers (and maybe bring a smile to their detractors' tightly pursed lips). The flames of doubt were fanned by Universal's insipid trailers, which accomplished perfectly the job of making Intolerable Cruelty look like a tedious, run-of-the-mill rom-com; one of the Coens went so far as to say he wanted to try something different, which is what filmmakers usually say while holding their artistic consciences face down in a rain barrel.

Now that those fears have been proven baseless, I don't mind admitting to a gnawing trepidation that would blossom into full-grown dread every time that awful trailer flickered onto the screen. (Critics don't often get a chance to see trailers, but this one seemed to fling itself at me like a rabid bat.) But if those fears were inaccurate, they weren't unfounded -- it's just that everything that should have been wrong about Intolerable Cruelty is what's right about it.

According to published reports, the original script for Intolerable Cruelty had been kicking around Hollywood for seven or eight years before producer Brian Grazer (facilitator of such highbrow fare as the Nutty Professor movies) hit up the Coens for its (at least) second rewrite. Thinking that it would be either easy money or a welcome diversion or some combination of both, the Coens obliged, but with no idea of directing it themselves. The result is a story that, while hardly free of Coenisms -- indeed, after watching Intolerable Cruelty, it's impossible to imagine anyone else knowing what to do with it -- is the most streamlined, coherent and unified thing they've written since Fargo.

Said story involves a classically barbed screwball romance between inhumanly self-assured divorce attorney Miles Massey (George Clooney) and aspiring husband-bilker Marylin Rexroth (Catherine Zeta-Jones), though it should be pointed out that Rexroth is just the most recent in an ever-lengthening string of surnames. Miles has Clooney's stock-in-trade cockiness, the overcompensating charm he made a meal of on ER. But where a movie like Out of Sight or O Brother, Where Art Thou? trusts Clooney's charm will remain intact no matter how much they chip away at it, Intolerable Cruelty declines to endorse Clooney's high opinion of himself. Miles Massey is, not to put too fine a point on it, a vain, preening boob, seizing every spare moment to polish his teeth (the soundtrack makes little squeak-squeak noises when he rubs at them) while eagerly -- and successfully -- promoting a system in which romantic love is merely an excuse for two people to get close enough to stick their hands in each others' pockets.

Intolerable Cruelty is the kind of movie in which a cuckolded TV producer (Geoffrey Rush) gets stabbed in the butt with his daytime TV lifetime achievement award within the first five minutes, which is to say there's not an excess of dignity to go around. The Coens, of course, give most of the dignity to the story's most venal character: Marylin, who as the sun rises is suing her adulterous, and very rich, husband (Edward Herrmann) for divorce. Unfortunately for her, Miles takes the case on behalf of her husband, and makes short work of her in court, but not before he's become entranced by her cold-blooded machinations. No wronged wife she: As Jonathan Hadary's absurdly louche concierge reveals in court, Marylin deliberately sought out a man she could sue for divorce inside of six months, a wealthy man of loose morals and little brain. As Miles falls progressively deeper under her spell, it may dawn on you that her ex-husband is hardly the only man in the movie who fits that description.

In classic screwball fashion, the man and the woman hurl knife-edge remarks at each other for nine-tenths of the movie, then inevitably fall into each others' arms at the end. So it is with Intolerable Cruelty, except for the inevitable part. We're not sure that Miles and Marylin will end up together, or even that we want them to. Partly, it's that it's so much fun to watch the characters suppressing or ignoring their passions that it's hard to enjoy it as much when they finally give in to them; the movie ends on a weak, inconsequential joke, more of a misdirection while the Coens sneak out the back before the lights come up.

Given that, for all his faults, Miles Massey still looks like George Clooney, it may take you a while to realize what an arid, sterile life he leads. Understandably skeptical about romance, he seems to have no interest in the opposite sex at all until Marylin comes into his life, as powerful as he and a whole lot shapelier, and shows him that sex and power make splendid bedfellows. What Intolerable Cruelty ends up proposing is nothing more modest than the reintroduction of love into the sex-as-money discourse of the moment. If the Coens mean it, even just a little, it's a beautiful thing.