The Coen Brothers' latest is a sometimes funny hillbilly adventure (inspired by a never-completed Preston Sturges project of the same name) whose lack of narrative focus is unfortunately dressed up as homage to Homer's The Odyssey, but which is buoyed up by some great musical numbers. The movie's soundtrack tells a far more compelling story than the movie itself, and that's puzzling and disappointing. George Clooney is often good as Ulysses Everett McGill, an escaped convict trying to get back home to his estranged family, even as the mouth-marbles of his 1930's-speak and his regular-Clooney-speak knock against each other, but he's nowhere near as good as, say, Sean Penn doing 1930's patter in Sweet and Lowdown. Or as good as co-star Tim Blake Nelson, who basically steals the movie as Delmar, the ignoramus-est of a movie-full of dumb yokels. Nelson's ability to thoroughly inhabit Delmar allows him to escape Coen's general tone of pointless rube-roasting and deliver some priceless lines and a great rendition of "In the Jailhouse Now." The boobery of Coen regulars John Turturro and John Goodman falls flat, however, and as a wacky dummy-trio Clooney, Nelson, and Turturro can't compare to the crew of John Lurie, Tom Waits, and Roberto Begnini in the much funnier Down By Law. But as with any Coen movie, there are some laughs, and some extravagantly entertaining visual sequences, such as the underwater shot of a hound-dog and dozens of McGill's cans of Dapper Dan hair gel swirling around in a TVA-blasted flood.
