I’m just as big a fan of the Coen Brothers as any… okay, so I’ve never seen Miller’s Crossing and think Blood Simple was overrated, but I’m a pretty big fan nonetheless. My video collection is lined with gems from Barton Fink to Fargo to The Big Lebowski, the last of which I’ve been unable to stop quoting since mid-1997.

Moreover, since the one-two punch of Out of Sight and Three Kings, I’ve come to view George Clooney as one of the more ingratiating leading men of the Hollywood A-list. He’s willing to take risks and defer his reputation to the visions of the filmmakers he works with, and beneath the talk-show smarm of his early “ER” days, he’s shown a startling charisma and likability – he can seemingly underact and still say it all.

So I was looking forward to O Brother, Where Art Thou, the first film from Ethan and Joel Coen since… God, it’s been awhile. Then I saw that Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly’s sourpuss (but, more often than not, dead-on) head critic, perched the movie atop his year-end worst list. Imagine, in a year crammed full of formula dreck and short-cut writing – and, dare I add, a year that yielded a certain John Travolta, Scientology-nightmare vehicle – the Coen Brothers, of all people, bringing up the rear. I was skeptical, to say the least, although it seemed no other critic piled on quite so much venom as Gleiberman.

In the end, O Brother, Where Art Thou? is another par-for-the-course 2000 movie disappointment, not bad enough to hate and disavow yourself of but certainly not as memorable as most of the brothers’ output. What this retread of Homer’s Odyssey amounts to is weirdness for weirdness’ sake, episodic and derivative by nature but really just a hit-and-miss showcase for its actors and indulgent script. (Translation: Another Hudsucker Proxy.) And most of it really isn’t half bad; it just meanders and somehow has too broad and narrow a scope all at once.

And, no, you can’t blame anyone involved for making the movie they did – I’m sure it was fun as hell to be a part of. The sparse, Monday-night-at-10:20 audience I saw it with seemed to enjoy entire stretches of it, too, although there were plenty of periods of gaping boredom. My ultimate test of a movie’s pacing and hold over me comes when I have to go to the bathroom. If I hold it for twenty minutes and then leave reluctantly because my bladder is going to implode, it’s a well-paced movie. If I can get up any old time and wander to the restroom and back, stopping for a leisurely drink at the water fountain and gazing at posters on the way back, the movie’s pacing is, if you’ll pardon the expression, p|ss-poor. O Brother was a definite poster-and-water-fountain movie.

Still, I liked its touches. I know I’ve read The Odyssey at some point in my life, perhaps eighth grade, maybe ninth. (I’m trying to recollect, but my memory keeps taking me back to the moment in freshman English when my teacher caught me with the Cliffs Notes for A Tale of Two Cities tucked neatly into the spine and told me bluntly that, if I had to resort to reading those, I’d might as well just pick something easier. My next book report was on an unauthorized paperback biography of M.C. Hammer, and I got an A.) At any rate, all I remember is that Homer’s work involves a Cyclops, some deceptive sirens and a protagonist named Ulysses. That’s probably all the Coen brothers remember, too.

Their broad satirical target is, instead, the South in the late 1930s. A very easy target. Our trio of protagonists are escapees from a prison chain gang, first seen walking off the line because they believe they’re invisible. The ringleader is, of course, Clooney, and he’s only slightly smarter than the other two – he has been granted, he acknowledges, “the gift of gab,” which allows him to engage in unflappable moviespeak and steer the course of the other two prisoners (Tim Blake Nelson and Coen staple John Turturro). Their immediate but vague goal, beyond losing the chains and prison uniforms, is to find a buried treasure.

Naturally, the movie consists of them trying to get there – O Brother is less a caper movie than a road movie, with lots of episodic set pieces. One of the best involves bipolar bank robber Babyface Nelson (Michael Badalucco), who conducts hold-ups simply for the notoriety but confesses a deep emptiness in his life, particularly when one of his robbery victims calls him by his nickname. Then there’s the zealous cracker (Stephen Root of “Newsradio”) who pays the boys ten dollars apiece to record an old-time bluegrass number; their accompanist is a black guitar player who has just sold his soul to the devil. And don’t forget the small-town mayoral race that seems to hinge on ties to a very well-choreographed branch of the Ku Klux Klan.

If this makes scant sense, don’t worry. The movie doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, either. It’s a series of vicarious experiences, some of them lived out by the prisoners and others merely observed or retold. And any of the issues raised – the techniques of Bible salesmanship, the salvation of two of the prisoners, the temptation from the sirens and, of course, the Southern-style racism – are mostly dodged or stripped of their deeper implications because the characters themselves are such dim bulbs.

In the end, the movie is worth more for its parts than for the sum of those parts. There are worthwhile stretches crammed with quirky humor, inspired dialogue and strong filmmaking. I loved the visual contrast in the whitewashed outdoor shots with the goldenrod wheat fields. I loved George Clooney’s voice and sentence structure and obsession with Dapper Dan hair gel. I loved the brief but token appearances by John Goodman. I’m not sorry I watched the movie, and I certainly wouldn’t trivialize its pleasures by associating it with year-2000 dreck like Whatever it Takes and Battlefield Earth.

But O Brother, Where Art Thou? never transcended itself – it never became anything more than a two-hour, embodied cinematic curiosity. It has all the mood of a Coen Brothers classic with only a fraction of the genius.


Recommended:
Yes

Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older