If there's one common thread in the work of the Coen brothers, it's this: They like centering their movies around characters who are in over their heads and don't know it. But after seeing their latest, O' Brother, Where Art Thou?, you may think it's the Coens themselves who need to come up for air.

This time the duo attempts to derive comedy by transplanting Homer's Odyssey to the Depression Era South. This gives them an excuse to nudge us in the ribs with knowing references. George Clooney plays an escaped convict named Ulysses (ha!) who leads two other escapees on a journey (ha!) back home, only to find his house is no longer in order (ha-ha!). Along the way they encounter obstacles, such as three beautiful young women whose singing lures them off their path (sound like the Sirens, anyone?). They also meet a big one-eyed Bible salesman who turns out to be a monster (one-eyed monster, like the Cyclops, get it?!).

While these parallels may entertain the English majors in the audience, there's not much else to giggle at, save for the escaped trio's accidental recording success as a bluegrass group. There's just something funny about seeing members of a chain gain break into song at the drop of a hat -- in perfect harmony, no less. Clooney's goofily pompous delivery of his every line also had me grinning.

Later on, we're treated to a Klan rally that looks like it was choreographed by Busby Berkeley. This is meant to be ironic, I guess, but it just comes off as creepy.

For all the Homeric inspirations, though, the movie seems to rely equally on biblical references. There's a lot of talk about the devil, characters bathe in the river to cleanse their souls of sin and there's even a flood to deal with. Characters who struggle with the gift of sight is also a running theme. But when the credits roll, you're left scratching your head to figure out what it all means. Like many of their previous films (I'm thinking Barton Fink, for example) there's a lot of stuff that looks like symbolism, and you get signals that you're seeing something very "deep," but in the end, it never adds up to a whole lot. The Coen's took the title from the movie-within-a-movie in Preston Sturges's Sullivan Travels, the 1942 comedy about a director who tries to make a pretentious "important" film. So, we're left to wonder if the Coen's intended to make a challenging complex work of art, or if they were merely satirizing one.

For quality Coen brothers, stick to their brilliant trilogy of kidnapping comedies: Raising Arizona, Fargo and The Big Lebowski.
(c) Copyright 2001