Recencies van critici

Individual setpieces shine — especially a Ku Klux Klan rally that turns into a musical number — and Clooney's turn as a vain ex-con trying to win back his wife announced to the world that, yes, he could be funny in a movie. It has its pleasures, but this is possibly the messiest film in the directors' body of work.

[This] was the first film that confirmed that the Coens could make a genuinely cheap joke. Suddenly, the humor that had coasted along the line of condescension had crossed that threshold and every character was treated as if they were pure evil or truly ignorant, prideful fools or scoundrels devoid of any real humanity... This, however, is not to say that O Brother, Where Art Thou? is necessarily a bad movie. In fact, it's a largely enjoyable one, not lacking in intriguing stylistic flashes.

The ornate rhetoric and the air of studied proficiency are customarily so potent in a Coen Brothers picture that they almost dare you to offer too simple a rejoinder. But let's try: O Brother sounds great, looks luscious, and has some moments of shambolic charm, but it's also desperately performed, indifferently directed, and parodistically ill-structured, with a streak of real callousness slashed right down its middle.

O Brother, Where Art Thou? which offers a technically precise and culturally astute recreation of 1930s deep-south America but frames the narrative using Homer's The Odyssey. The mixture of historical detail with an archetypal fiction narrative is a postmodern paradigm.

From moment to moment, "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" is a pleasure. But when the Coens are really cooking, when the acting and the conception and the music all come together, it's something more — Dogpatch rapture.

Had the Coens attempted any kind of verisimilitude in their depiction of the Depression-era South, O Brother would have been as authentic and meaningful as Barton Fink's crying fishmongers. Instead, they've crafted something far richer and more entertaining: a loving homage to '30s Americana assembled from popular icons and artifacts, and told with the intoxicating energy of a Warner Brothers cartoon.

Often clever but fundamentally shallow, this shaggy-dog story is greatly enriched by its extraordinary bluegrass soundtrack, supervised by T Bone Burnett and performed by a phenomenal collection of artists.

A loose, sloppy affair that feels like it was written in one day before lunch.

For all its originality, O Brother doesn't seem to have a point, or enough spark to distract us from the lack thereof.

Basically, O Brother warms up a tepid gumbo of Deep South clichés: brainless Gomers, zombie Baptists, the colored boy who sells his soul to the devil to play the blues, the loudmouthed bank robber who turns out to be Baby Face Nelson. The art direction is impeccable, but this is a pop-up book that I was impatient to slam.

Despite its numerous incidental pleasures, however, O Brother ultimately feels turgid and overconceptualized, as if it's been expressly designed to fuel cinema-studies dissertations for the next hundred years. The cartoonish performances and broad slapstick recall Raising Arizona, but Joel and Ethan seem determined to leaven the yuks with Significance this time around.

This is a fun and inoffensive film. I won't deny that. I also won't be accused of expecting the Coens to simply make another Miller's Crossing or Blood Simple. But when I can see what they're capable of, and then I see them wasting their talents on something as frivolous and inconsequential as O Brother I can't help but be disappointed.