Well, it‘s been two long years since The Big Lebowski was released onto a patiently waiting world. Thankfully in the meantime, without prostituting themselves to the marketplace, the Coen brothers have managed to come up with another offbeat masterpiece. What‘s peculiar though is that O Brother, Where Art Thou? seems destined to reach only a select segment of the movie-going population; just like every other Coen film. Why is this? How can something so funny, so smart and so entertaining fail to be embraced by the ordinary man on the street?
Maybe Ethan and Joel Coen are just too erudite for their own good, in terms of what other people can bear? After all, this particular film is based upon Homer‘s epic poem The Odyssey, enough to surely make it unapproachable? Well, no. If this fact wasn‘t spelt out at the beginning, most folk would never make the connection. You certainly don‘t need to know anything about Homer to enjoy O Brother, Where Art Thou? and during the show you sure don‘t have time to ponder the similarities. As ever, the script writing is superbly balanced, efficiently hilarious, referential without being obvious and generally perceptive of human self-interest. It must be fun to work with such rich material.

　　Of course, it‘s true to say that the Coen‘s appear to favour certain actors, including them on a more-or-less continuous basis. John Turturro (coming close to being unrecognisable) returns here to play inbred Pete Hogwallop, while John Goodman lives up to his character‘s name, Big Dan Teague. Maybe the Coen‘s are seen to be perpetuating a clique, from which outsiders are actively excluded? Well, how come George Clooney, as Everett Ulysses McGill, gets the central role in O Brother, Where Art Thou? then? Could a more photogenic star have been selected? No, with Tim Blake Nelson along for the ride as self-effacing (and ugly!) Delmar O‘Donnel, this theory hardly seems tenable. Given the results, surely cast members are picked purely on the basis of