O Brother!

The Coen brothers hit a Homer

Gary Susman

O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the latest from the Coen brothers, is supposedly based on Homer's Odyssey. Yeah, right, just like the Coens' Fargo was supposedly based on a true story.

This is an epic dreamed up and set in Coenland, where familiar film genres get twisted into balloon animals, and where anything might happen to the characters because, hey, why not?

Preston Sturges fans will recognize the title as the serious movie about country folk surviving the Depression that Joel McCrea wanted to make in Sullivan's Travels. His Sullivan was trying to leave behind his trademark silly, anarchic comedies like Ants in Your Pants of 1939. That would have been an equally apt title for the Coens' movie; their O Brother is indeed about Depression-era country folk, but it's no somber James Agee/Walker Evans study. Despite its goofy, comic tone, it's also not terribly Sturges-like, since those movies, for all their chaos, depended on a rigorous logic that the shaggy-dog Coens have eschewed in virtually every movie except Blood Simple and Miller's Crossing. Like so much else in their films, the title is just a film-geek in-joke, something the Coens did simply because they could.

Just to keep the conceit going, there are a handful of references to the Odyssey, but we're not exactly talking James Joyce here. George Clooney stars as a Mississippi convict with the unlikely name (for a Southerner) of Ulysses McGill, though everyone calls him by his middle name, Everett. (Is naming a character "Everett McGill" another in-joke, an homage to the actor who played Big Ed on Twin Peaks? Does it matter?) Everett escapes from the chain gang with two other prisoners, Pete (John Turturro) and Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson). Everett leads the others in an ostensible quest for a robbery stash he buried, but actually he's in search of his estranged wife (Holly Hunter), who is called (of course) Penny. Along the way, the escapees meet a blind prophet (who says, "You will find a fortune, but not the fortune you seek"), a trio of sirens who seem to have a Circe-like ability to turn men into beasts, a Cyclops (a one-eyed Bible salesman right out of Flannery O'Connor's story "Good Country People," played with great relish by John Goodman), and some unusual cows.

They also meet some figures from local period folklore: Tommy Johnson (Chris Thomas King), who, like distant cousin Robert Johnson, is said to have sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads in return for blues-guitar virtuosity; fervent bank robber George "Baby Face" Nelson (Michael Badalucco), not really a Southerner, but who cares; and Governor Pappy O (Charles Durning), an apparent cross between Huey Long and Jimmie Davis, the Louisiana governor who composed "You Are My Sunshine."

Music is everywhere in O Brother, just like the otherworldly signs and wonders that everyone takes for granted in this vividly imagined patch of O'Connor/Faulkner country. The Coens and their music coordinator, roots guru T-Bone Burnett, fill each scene with excellent bluegrass, blues, and country songs of the era, expertly re-created. Most of the characters turn out to be gifted singers, and the musical prowess of Everett, Pete, Delmar, and Tommy's impromptu band (called the Soggy Bottom Boys) gets them out of more than one scrape. The music almost seems the one aspect of the story the Coens take seriously, until you see the four Soggy Bottom Boys, in fake beards that make ZZ Top look clean-shaven, doing a hillbilly dance so corny it would be laughed off Hee-Haw.

The Coens have assembled a game cast for this silliness. In terms of masculine charm and ease, Clooney is at his most Gable-esque here, but he's also willing to look ridiculous. Turturro, in his fourth Coen film, is operating enough on the brothers' wavelength to make his underwritten character feel fully lived-in. Nelson, better known as an indie writer/director (Eye of God), is a revelation as the childlike Delmar.

Then again, you're not going to a Coen-brothers movie for rich insights into human behavior or realistic evocation of a historical period, but rather to give yourself over to master manipulators and tall-tale tellers. If you're in the right frame of mind, you may find a treasure, but not the treasure you seek.