It is the story of Miles Massey who is a well-known divorce lawyer. Miles began a new experience when he decided to represent a rich client, Rex Rexroth. Now, Miles finds his life changed in Rex's gold-digging wife, Marilyn Rexroth, who may make his life and change the course of his love.
As Miles, Clooney doesn't make any direct emotional appeal to the audience and yet his high style is so smashingly effective that Miles stands open to us: macher, lover, patsy.
The Coens do an efficient job of stamping their signature grotesquerie on sumptuous Beverly Hills and Las Vegas settings and ladling on gallows humor and malice, sometimes with the verve of early Robert Zemeckis.
[T]here's a lot of problems with the script, and some of the stuff with Edward Herrmann I don't think works at all, it's not funny it just kind of falls flat. But Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones, I think they deliver enough to say it's worth seeing.
eFilmCritic.com
September 24, 2007
This is the Coens dabbling in the mainstream, and bending it to their will.
The Coen Brothers do provide enough of a diversion with bits and pieces of wacko casting, and with the deranged details of dress and makeup of their fleeting gargoyles, to make the proceedings at least moderately amusing.