O Brother, Where Art Thou?

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Movie Details

• Genre: Comedy, Drama
• Release Date: 2000-12-22 LA/NY
• Running Time: 102 min.
• Director: Joel Coen
• Cast: George Clooney, Holly Hunter, John Goodman, Tim Blake Nelson, John Turturro
• Producer: Ethan Coen
• Writer: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
• Distributor: Buena Vista
• Official Site: O Brother, Where Art Thou? Official Site

Representing another half-step back toward the studio-film opulence of their sole commercial disaster, The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), the Coen Brothers' latest continues their longtime penchant for recapitulating American movie classics while combining seemingly incompatible genres. Following an amiable trio of escaped cons (George Clooney, John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson) through an embellished rendition of the Depression-era South, the film is, by definition, a rambling widescreen odyssey (with music!)--a mode that justifies more than usual the kind of quirky self-indulgence that has become a Coen trademark. Still, notwithstanding its emphatically argued point that the Ku Klux Klan is bad (imagine a Busby Berkeley-choreographed KKK rally and you have a sense of O Brother's most elaborate set piece), this is little more than a barely adequate diversion--the film Preston Sturges's Sullivan might have made after deciding at the end of his travels that the mass audience really just wants to be entertained. (Rob Nelson)