Beyond the film's elements lifted from Homer's Odyssey -- the blind prophet Tiresias, beguiling Sirens, even a Cyclops (an underused John Goodman) -- little homages to classic movies abound. The title itself is the name of the "serious" film comedic director John Sullivan (Joel McCrea) wants to make in Sullivan's Travels, one of my favorite films (though Sullivan's movie doesn't use the "O"; maybe that's meant to stand for "Odyssey"). The mirror-glassed ruthless sheriff who pursues the trio of prison escapees is a dead ringer for the mirror-glassed ruthless boss from Cool Hand Luke, the best chain-gang movie ever made. And the Ku Klux Klan musical number (no kidding) looks like a scene from Busby Berkeley's remake of Birth of a Nation.
Leading the fugitives is Ulysses Everett McGill, a two-bit bum with a ten-dollar vocabulary, played by George Clooney. Clooney is terrific, suavely goofy, like Clark Gable with a dash of Jim Carrey. Tim Blake Nelson is hilarious and sweetly charming as the amiable, dim-witted Delmar (whose family tree don't branch). My brother said Nelson reminded him of Spike Jonze in Three Kings, and in fact the trio has a dynamic much like the group in Three Kings. The only sour note is John Turturro (as Pete, the third companion), who doesn't do anything one-tenth as funny as his cameo in The Big Lebowski. (Well, except for a goofy dance toward the end of the film.) He looks too creepily hostile for the light-hearted action; you get a sense of menace, not comedy, from him. My brother noted that Steve Buscemi is missing from this movie (and therefore doesn't get to be killed in some inventive way), but I think he would have been great in Turturro's role.
A subplot is a political campaign between a Huey Long-ish governor, Pappy O'Daniel (Charles Durning, who does a stunning little dance of his own just after Turturro's), and a "reformer," Homer Stokes (Wayne Duvall), who claims to be a friend to the little man (and to prove it, he travels with a midget). In one scene, as Pappy's inept campaign staff debates how to fend off Stokes' rising challenge, one notes, "People like that-there reform. We gotta get us some of that." Which, I imagine, is precisely the dialogue that went on in George W. Bush's campaign headquarters after John McCain won the New Hampshire primary.
Well, now that I've mentioned the Idiot Heir's name, I've depressed myself enough to tarnish the happy glow O Brother left me with. If you, too, are dreading January 20th, O Brother will lift the gloom for at least a little while.
[I'm hardly a PETA member, but I did take exception to some graphic violence in the movie against cows. Between this movie and Me, Myself & Irene, cows have had a pretty hard time of it at the movies this year. I haven't seen so much bovine mistreatment since 1996, the year of Mars Attacks! (flaming cow) and Twister (airborne cow).]
[My clever friend Ed replied to this review:
BTW, Pappy O'Daniel is the actual name of an actual Governor of Texas; more
properly, he was Lee O. "Pass the Biscuits, Pappy" O'Daniel, a former flour
ad star (I believe his band was called the Syrup Drippers or something like
that) and right-wing shill. O'Daniel won national fame by beating LBJ in his
first bid for the U.S. Senate in 1941 (the climax of Robert Caro's brilliant
"Path to Power," the first volume of his doomed multi-volume bio of LBJ). It
was a political classic: O'Daniel was a prohibitionist, so the liquor
industry heavily bankrolled his Senate race to get him out of Austin.]
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