(PG-13, 103 mins)
A road trip story (based so loosely on Homer’s “The Odyssey” that the Coen brothers never even read it), about three guys George Clooney, John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson on the run from an escaped chain gang. En route they encounter disasters, fantasy and Homeric-scenarios-in-the-making, including a run-in with a railway man who predicts their future, a violent bible salesman (John Goodman) who tires to kill them, the sexy sirens who try to seduce them, the mother of six kids (Holly Hunter) who is fed up with them, and an incumbent governor (Charles Durning), who pardons them. Unlike “Fargo” or “The Big Lebowski” there aren’t any unsettling, often offensive antics that manage to have a lot more going on than meets the eye/surface. Named for the Preston Sturges dream project “Sullivan’s Travels” with full-blown out southern Mississippi camera work, the Coens mix mythology with humor, musical with 1930s style comedy, and the KKK in an escapade that only the Coen’s would attempt, with George Clooney coming off as a dumb version of Clark Gable in “It Happened One Night.” It’s good, not great, it’s at least creative (it’s Coens), but in the end there are single sequences that somehow don’t add up despite the big showdown in town hall. Clooney’s silver-tongued, sexy, often animated character of Everett Ulysses McGill who lives for his Dapper Dan hair pomade, takes a refreshing risk after “The Perfect Storm” which will be the movie’s biggest draw. The only thing missing was Steve Buscemi and the only thing we could have done without were the dead toad and cow.
