BEFORE: Following up with another film about divorce. Direct linking is not possible, but Tim Matheson from "Divorce American Style" was also in the film "A Little Sex" with Edward Herrmann, who appears tonight. (Alternatively, Jean Simmons was also in "How to Make an American Quilt" with Richard Jenkins.)
THE PLOT: A revenge-seeking gold digger marries a womanizing Beverly Hills lawyer with the intention of making a killing in the divorce.
AFTER: Keeping with the theme of romantic schemes, what's a grander scheme than marrying for money? Or should that be divorcing for money?
I went through what may have been one of the easiest divorces - a few months before splitting up, my first wife and I witnessed friends of ours, a married couple, go through a rough patch, and it seemed that the husband, who wanted out of the relationship, also wanted to keep the apartment. This didn't seem right to us, we figured losing a Manhattan apartment in addition to a marriage was like adding insult to injury. So when she wanted/needed to be out of our marriage, it seemed right that she should be the one who had to pack. I wrote her a check for half of our money, and kept the bank account.
Months later, we got together to work out the paperwork, and we used a mediation lawyer, rather than 2 separate attorneys, which made the whole process faster, cheaper and easier. The lawyer had to run down a checklist of possible property, like furs and jewelry and boats, and we had none of that, so we jokingly made little side deals, like "I'll keep the furs, and you can have the boat." Meanwhile, the lawyer was probably wondering why we were laughing so hard - that's something they probably don't see a lot of in that line of work.
I did have to pay her in order to keep the condominium, but fortunately she wanted only half of the money we'd invested in it to date, not half of the full market value. Still, that was a good chunk of change I had to raise in about a year's time, so I got a roommate for a year, and his rent went towards buying her out - easy peasy.
Anyway, on to the film - can a film similarly wring some comedy out of divorce proceedings, cheating husbands and money-hungry wives? Umm, yes and no. I liked the framework of the "Battle of the Sexes", with each gender jockeying for prominence in the light of his affair and her lawsuit - after all, a divorce is a court case, and court cases are won by sharp lawyers who know all the angles.
That sort of spills over outside the courtroom - and everything becomes fair in the larger game of life. Within the battle of the sexes are many smaller battles, and a revenge plot or two. That's all well and good - and in a sense, the act of marrying for money gets portrayed as something equivalent to a complex heist, a la "Ocean's Eleven".
But what I can't condone is the automatic pigeonholing of each gender. If every woman in the film happens to be a conniving gold-digger, then the film's overall message suggests by extension that every woman everywhere draws from that playbook, and I don't think that's the case. On the flip side, if every man is portrayed as gullible and easily deceived, then what does that say overall?
I also disapprove of the bending of California divorce laws to be, essentially, whatever the plot needs them to be. You can't just shoehorn in the rules when they provide a good turning point, and ignore them when they don't affect the plot at all. Case in point:
NITPICK POINT: A divorce is a legal document, and in addition to the spouses getting copies, each attorney would probably retain a copy, and then one probably gets filed with the state. So while it's a grand gesture for someone to tear up a signed pre-nup, it's an empty gesture as well. I'm betting the party at risk would go out of their way to find a copy to protect their assets - but this film relies on people naively tearing up the docuemnt a total of THREE times. Didn't anyone think to check on the legality of this repeated situation? So the pre-nup is "iron-clad" - a good writer should still be able to think of two or three ways around it. Death of one of the parties, for example - or challenging the mental competence of the signer - but relying on the same device three times is just lazy screenwriting.
Starring George Clooney (last seen in "The American"), Catherine Zeta-Jones (last seen in "The Mask of Zorro"), Geoffrey Rush (last seen in "Les Miserables"), Cedric the Entertainer, Edward Herrmann (last seen in "Nixon"), Richard Jenkins, with cameos from Billy Bob Thornton (last heard in "Puss in Boots"), Julia Duffy.
RATING: 5 out of 10 daytime Emmys
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