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It took me about 20 minutes to accept the movie. The scene of Ralph Fienes drilling the drawl out of Alren Erenreich's elocution locked me in, and I "got it". THe love the Coens have,for movies, for all the "Hollywood Touches" that all the movie makers in the history of American movies pervades every scene. I have to fault the writing for and performance by George Clooney. There's something missing,maybe the actor's connection with the role, or the elusiveness of that due to spotty writing of the part. Altho, when I think "Victor Mature", Clooney's role works much better. Brolin is great, his secretary great. All in all absolutely delightful, very dear, even precious.

Excellent movie. It is really a play, with a play's limited sets, but with the movie camera's freedom to somehow annotate the lines with sub-textual commentary. The camera, is, however, never, intrusive, and remains mostly neutral (if that is even possible). The immense frustration of this absurd ritual for divorce transfers to the viewer. The 'wife", seeking the divorce, remains almost silent, save for several curt responses to the self-important rabbis ruling over the case. The underlay here is Middle East culture, fundamentalism in my book, trundling it's (formerly: its) tyranny down thru these ages, and it makes you wonder how sane peep still adhere, so desperately it seems, to this primitive and obsolete madness.

The movie seems slow, awkward in places, but it's a story which MUST be told, and for that reason it gets 8 stars.

Reviewers here are kinda harsh, calling those involved in this event "stupid", and one hard-ass said they got what they deserve ...wow, such compassion. This may be psyche 101, or 102, or whatever, but the reason this craziness happened was due to "triangulation". A simple dyad of one person interacting with another, one on one, under these absurd circumstances (a voice on the phone representing "authority", would not have not resulted in the actual, and enacted outcome. There is no power-relationship between the "cop" and Becky, for example. Rather, Becky is by nature obedient to the cop, but is, moreover, under sway of her manager, who, day-to-day, is an "authority figure" to her. The manager, in turn, is triangulating with the cop and her own boss, the regional manager, with who she's already in hot water due to an expensive loss of spoiled food. And so the manager's compliance is primed by her recent failures--causing an almost unnatural desire to "please", to redeem herself, to avoid more problems-- and the manager can easily be exploited. The manager's fiancé comes into the picture already believing--after all, his sane, and bossy, girlfriend called on him for help, and when he arrived at the restaurant she was participating in a strange "strip-search", which, despite being obviously outside of any reasonable justitifcation, or unreasonable for that matter, he complied with. Remember the bumper sticker; QUESTION AUTHORITY!!!