What would Homer say?

By STEVE PERSALL

© St. Petersburg Times, published January 11, 2001

In O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the brothers Coen apply their loopy lunacy to Greek tragedy.

O Brother, Where Art Thou? mixes the Greek tragedy of Homer with the corn-pone comedy of Homer and Jethro, just another inspiration for those loopy, lovable Coen brothers.

Joel and Ethan Coen have had strange ideas before, from Raising Arizona to Fargo. Blending The Odyssey with a Depression-era tale of chain-gang escapees is a stretch even for their inventive minds. The film occasionally buckles under the weight of expectation for Homer's plot and the Coens' gifts.

Viewers know the troubles these wandering heroes will face as they make their way home; Cyclops and sirens, monsters and marriage breakers. Familiarity with the myth makes the film slightly predictable. Unless, of course, the Coens represent those archetypes in freshly conceived fashion. Most of the time, they do.

Everything in this film is a tribute to something, from filmmaker Preston Sturges' optimism -- the title comes from his Sullivan's Travels -- to the history of country music and cinema itself. Sometimes, it's the Coens joyfully celebrating each other as artists unleashed. Whether they're daring or reckless is for the audience to decide.

The film begins with the escape of three Mississippi convicts who barely are smarter than their shackles. Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney) is the brains of the bunch, simply because he can talk rings around his partners, Pete Hogwallop (John Turturro, playing dumb) and Delmar O'Donnel (Tim Blake Nelson, playing dumber).

Everett is a man of constant sorrow, banished from home for years and determined to return to his wife (Holly Hunter) and children. All he has going for him is an ability to spin tales, a crew leading him into more trouble and half-wits to get them out. Clooney is startlingly good in this role, looking like Clark Gable and double-talking like Cliff Clavin. His Golden Globe nomination is well-deserved.

The trio embarks on adventures with passing resemblances to Homer's epic: a one-eyed bully (John Goodman) assaults the boys and three singing women seduce them. State police and the Ku Klux Klan track the convicts, and Everett's wife Penny has married again.

The stroke of genius in O Brother, Where Art Thou? is the Coens' use of roots-country music of the period to frequently comment on the action. Some of the best period songs -- Harry McClintock's Big Rock Candy Mountain, for example -- perfectly mirror Everett's desperation and disrespect for the law. Keep on the Sunny Side by the Whites makes an ironic statement on his predicament.

Everett, Delmar and Pete get in on the act themselves, conning a blind radio station manager into recording them singing for a few bucks as the Soggy Bottom Boys. The result -- a thrilling version of the traditional lament, I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow -- becomes a hit, but the boys don't know it. Clooney ably lip-syncs Dan Tyminski's nasal lead vocal. Nelson displays a fine baritone for In the Jailhouse Now, the only bona fide singing from the stars.

T-Bone Burnett's selections of country standards become as much a star of the film as the actors. The best scenes in O Brother, Where Art Thou? occur when music and motion are perfectly meshed, such as a riverside revival with Allison Krauss and a church choir singing Down to the River to Pray, or Krauss, Emmylou Harris and Gillian Welch lending their voices to the sirens on Didn't Leave Nobody but the Baby.

Those sequences are hypnotic, but a few others are merely puzzling when the Coens get too clever for their own good. Too much attention is paid to a KKK meeting that evolves into something like a halftime show. The finale seems an ill-paced effort to cram in more music.

But the Coens rarely err, and when they do, it's on the side of ambition. O Brother, Where Art Thou? fits somewhere in the middle of their shaggy oeuvre; odd enough to prove who made it, fitfully making the Coens' lunacy our own.

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

• Grade: B+
• Director: Joel Coen
• Cast: George Clooney, John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson, John Goodman, Holly Hunter, Charles Durning
• Screenplay: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, based on the epic poem The Odyssey by Homer
• Rating: PG-13; profanity, violence, sexual situations
• Running time: 107 min.

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