Watched: O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Have I done all the straight Coen comedies, now? Not that this is always played for laughs - scenes with the Ku Klux Klan, while comic, also have an overtone of menace that was missing in (for example) Django Unchained, but this lacks the bleakness of, say, Burn After Reading, and feels a lot closer to Intolerable Cruelty.
I think the music saves this, as it well should - the musical landscape of the film is really a fourth protagonist, weaving in and around the characters and filling every shot with life. The parallels to The Odyssey were also fun when I could spot them (which wasn’t often - it’s been about a decade since I read the book).
I think the real standout actor in this film was Tim Blake Nelson, who I’m not massively familiar with (I last saw him in Detachment, but he didn’t leave an impression). As a lovable fool, he shines in this film, delivering most of the (unwitting) one-liners and holding considerable emotional depth despite having brain cells in single figures.
Still not my favourite film by the Coen Brothers (The Big Lebowski is more or less impossible to beat, and there are a few brilliant ones that keep pushing this down), but this was certainly fun and had heart in unexpected places.