O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? (Touchstone) Starring: George Clooney, John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson, Charles Durning, John Goodman, Holly Hunter, Michael Badalucco. Screenplay: Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, based on "The Odyssey" by Homer. Producer: Ethan Coen. Director: Joel Coen. MPAA Rating: PG-13 (profanity, adult themes, violence) Running Time: 107 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
In the opening credits of O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU?, Joel and Ethan Coen announce that the film we are about to see is "based on 'The Odyssey' by Homer." They do so with the same straight-facedness they employed when announcing that FARGO was "a true story," and they are equally full of crap this time around. True, O BROTHER features a character named Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney) trying to get home to his wife Penny (Holly Hunter). And yes, along the way he encounters a blind prophet, a one-eyed beast and a trio of sirens that tries to lure him to his doom. He also winds up in the company of a Mississippi bluesman who claims to have sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads, and a bank-robbing gangster named George "Baby-Face" Nelson. Funny, but I don't remember them turning up in my Western Civilizations reading list.
If you really want a sense of what the Coens are after in O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU?, it helps to know the origin of the title. In Preston Sturges' SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS, a Depression-era filmmaker popular for his frivolous comedies decides to hit the road in America to research an important, significant film story -- a story he plans to call O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? Ultimately, he discovers that people love frivolous comedies, and that there's no shame in creating them. Forget epics of the common man; make them laugh, and you've got them right where you want them, and right where they want to be.
I'm not sure I could make an argument for the Coens' O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? being flawless film-making. It is, however, the most utterly demented, unashamedly un-important and purely entertaining film experience I've had all year. The central plot finds Clooney's McGill fleeing a Depression-era Mississippi chain gang with fellow convicts Pete (John Turturro) and Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson). They're heading for $1.2 million McGill has hidden from a pre-incarceration heist, money that's days away from being sent to the bottom of a lake by a dam project. But that journey to the treasure takes many turns, during which the three fortune-tossed men join Nelson for a bank job, become inadvertent recording stars and wind up in the middle of a floundering re-election bid by Governor Pappy O'Daniel (Charles Durning).
Essentially, there's nothing to O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? but a string of comic misadventures. Coen brothers characters don't often occupy a particularly moral universe, so there's not really a lesson or point to any of it. Manic-depressive gangster Nelson takes his Tommy gun to a herd of cows. The governor's campaign team laments their opponent's clever use of a midget as a representative of "the little man" he stands for. McGill shows nearly as much interest in finding his preferred brand of pommade as he does in finding his loot. It's an exercise in free-form narrative cinema, held together by the Coens' distinctive whip-smart dialogue and their gift for putting the right face on every role.
And it's constantly, gut-bustingly hilarious. Viewers who have been lukewarm to previous Coen projects aren't likely to become converts this time around, but if you're in tune with their warped sensibilities, you're in for a treat. O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? is the kind of film you'll spend most of the time watching with your mouth open, either laughing out loud or in dumbfounded amazement at what they're able to put on a screen. And few things are as dumbfoundingly amazing as George Clooney's loose-limbed comic performance, the kind of work that forces you to re-think an actor's versatility. From his know-it-all soliloquies to his performance of the bluegrass standard "Man of Constant Sorrow," Clooney takes every bizarre situation and runs with it as far as the Coens will let him. In a cast full of great comics and Coen film veterans (Turturro, Durning, Hunter, John Goodman), Clooney steals the show.
It happens to be a joyous show he's stealing. Somewhere creeping around the edges of O BROTHER is a commentary on our need for religion and mythology even in an "age of reason," with its combination of Greek legend and American folk tales. It would be ridiculous, however, to argue that this is the Coens' personal "Odyssey." It dips and swerves, hits its lulls then tears back into remarkably goofy set pieces. There's no important message here, no contemporary re-working of an ancient classic. This, folks, is film-making that aims for nothing more profound than the funny bone. This, folks, in all its glory, is frivolous comedy.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 opposite-field Homers: 10.
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