By EWAN McDONALD
(Herald rating: * * * * * )
Once upon a time, a silver-tongued charlatan named Everett Ulysses McGill broke free from his prison chain gang with two other inmates and hid out in the wilds of Depression-era Mississippi to escape the state marshals.
He hooked up with a
blues guitarist who had just sold his soul to the Devil, stopped off at a roadside radio shack to record a song for a quick buck, and
followed a convoluted path back to his home and his wayward wife, utterly unaware that the record he and his friends had made was turning into a monster hit.
Colour this with bluegrass music, sharecropper shacks,
cotton fields, populist politicians, river baptisms, hobos on freight trains, patent medicines, 25-watt radio stations, Klan rallies and (to justify the throwaway line that this was all somehow adapted from Homer's tales) a Cyclops, sirens bathing on rocks, a hero named Ulysses and his wife Penelope, plus the cockeyed view of the world that Joel and Ethan Coen have displayed in their other hits, The Big Lebowski, Fargo, Raising Arizona and Blood Simple and you have ... well, we loved it, as you can see.
We don't often give out five stars at the top of the column.
Quite unlike any other video you will rent this year, it's a loosely sewn-together patchwork of comic episodes in the life on the lam of the vain opportunist McGill (George Clooney, who gives the impression he's having the time of his life), half-witted Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson) and brooding Pete (John Turturro),
as they seek McGill's buried treasure.
Or that's what they think they're doing. It's not giving anything away to reveal that McGill's real aim is to get back to his wife, Penny, played by Holly Hunter, and their daughters.
All he has to do is get past various perils, digressions and other strange, lost travellers. All done to the tunes of the best soundtrack you'll hear in many years, too.
Running time: 103 mins
Rental: Today
