The Coen brothers film with the widest, the broadest, the massiest appeal to date, or in the common phrase their "most accessible." Two glamorous A-list movie stars of opposite sexes, George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones, looking their respective bests, sugar-cured and honey-glazed, and none of the Coen "regulars" -- no McDormand, no Goodman, no Turturro, no Polito, no Buscemi. What's more, Joel and Ethan for the first time share the screenwriting credit with a couple of other guys. (Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone by name, co-writers of the Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence comedy, Life, as well as the Dave Barry literary adaptation, Big Trouble.) Have they at last gone straight? gone soft? gone safe? Have they given up the good fight in pursuit of the brass ring? Fear not. As Hollywoody as this might look on the surface, or from the outside, it remains no less subversive from within -- not as directly and explicitly anti-Hollywood as Barton Fink, but nor as obliquely and metaphorically as Fargo, The Hudsucker Proxy, or The Big Lebowski. The setting of this cold hard look at the divorce racket -- the reduction of marital relationships, mutual alliances, common bonds, to cold hard cash -- is specifically Tinsel Town and its mansions, its swimming pools, its health spas, its supper clubs, its nearby playgrounds, even though only one of the litigants has an actual toehold in show business: producer of the daytime soap, The Sands of Time. Unflaggingly speedy, snappy, fresh, and funny, the film is as tightly constructed as any Coen film before Lebowski (the point at which they started to overload and overstuff), homing in on the whole culture of divorce, a world unto itself, a total way of life, with its lore and legend, its luminaries and lesser lights, its legion of interchangeable face-lifted and liposuctioned ex-wives (the Stepford exes), even an annual convention in Vegas (where better?) for the National Organization of Matrimonial Attorneys Nationwide: "Let N.O.M.A.N. put asunder." Billy Bob Thornton, Geoffrey Rush, Edward Herrmann, Cedric the Entertainer. (2003) — Duncan Shepherd