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O Brother, Where Art Thou? Customer Reviews (55 - 57 of 87 Reviews)

Decent, but expect more from Joel and Ethan
It sounds cool, right? The Coen Brothers ("Fargo," "The Big Lebowski") doing a retelling of Homer's The Odyssey, set in depression-era Mississippi, filled with a stellar soundtrack, the usual Coen cast plus George Clooney, and an homage to Preston Sturges. And it is pretty cool, but it's not great, and perhaps doesn't live up to its expectations. Undeniably, the music in the film is fantastic, and the soundtrack album is well worth buying. Clooney turns in a great performance in his first outing with the Brothers, and John Turturro, Holly Hunter, and John Goodman are great as well. Any fan of Homer or Sturges would be proud. However, the movie seems to fall short of what the viewer wants. It lacks the humor and the precise attention to complex and fascinating characters that we found in previous Coen Brothers films. The three bumbling escapees (Clooney, Turturro, and Tim Clarke Duncan) are the expected dim-witted good-hearted Southerners, and in the course of their odyssey to uncover the $1.2 million that Clooney stole and buried, meet a fanciful enough cast of weirdos. There's no laugh-out-loud oddballisms, no endearingly pathetic losers, no poorly thought out crime capers, to keep us really engaged. If it weren't for the music, I'd have checked out. In short, the film's worth seeing, but not keeping. Hey, we can't expect the best of these guys all the time.

A rare cinematic odyssey
You don't necessarily need to enjoy bluegrass, but it sure don't hurt because some of the finest bluegrass in the world is probably heard in this video. Norman Blake does a terrific rendition of "You Are My Sunshine," and you'll find a real "old timey" sound coming from The Whites, The Cox Family, Allison Krauss, and other Newgrass artists. The movie is charming, gutsy, and hugely entertaining. George Clooney-- who happens to look remarkably like Clark Gable in this movie-- shows his talent for the comedic in his role as Ulysses Everett McGill, the smooth talker in the trio of escapees fleeing a chain gang in 1920s Mississippi. Adventures, escapades, and political predicaments follow hot on their recently-freed heels, and all of it is accompanied with unforgettable music. Buy the soundtrack if, for nothing else, the "Soggy Bottom Boys'" rendition of 'Man of Constant Sorrow.' O Brother is a treasure.

Interesting...
Fans of the Coen brothers are sure to enjoy this offbeat movie, which tells the tale of three escaped cons in the south during the depression who somehow get mixed up with Missippi politics, the Klan, popular music, con men, and many other strange comic adventures. George Clooney is good as the calm, conniving leader of the escapees, and his dirty sidekicks are hilarious. John Goodman has a notable appearance as a smooth-talking cyclops, and the man who plays the governor (whose name alas eludes me) is absoloutely superb in his role as corrupt politician. The film is visually beautiful, shot entirely through some kind of yellow filter that gives it a bleached appearance that feels very appropriate both to the American south of the period in which it is set, and to the ancient Greek world of Homer's Odyssey on which the story is based. The old-timey music that the convicts perform (at one point they become a singing trio called "The Soggy Bottom Boys!") is appealing as well. You will enjoy watching this odd and unpredicatble effort, but I must say that it is not perfect. I have a problem with the way the Odyssey parallels are handled. Simply put, they don't make much sense in the modern setting unless you know that they are meant to be from the Odyssey. There is no subtlety in the parallels, so that basically what we are given is the Odyssey set in 1930s Missippi, for no apparent reason. I wish they could have done a better job of making events ring true in the modern setting - so that if you watched the movie and didn't know the Odyssey, it would all still make some kind of sense, however odd. But this is not the case, and I feel disappointed, in that they could have made it into a truly great movie this way instead of merely an interesting and good one. It works on some levels, but not on others.

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