"O Brother, Where Art Thou?"

Clooney has figured out that the secret of comic fatuousness is to play it as straight as possible, and playing straight in the cartoon world of the Coens is no easy task. Everett's imitations of suavity and erudition mark him as a sucker ripe for the taking, so you laugh extra hard at gorgeous George Clooney playing a little man certain he's meant for success. It's as if he were using that Gable mustache to tickle the audience.

"O Brother" might get bigger laughs if it were less of a ramble and more of a spree, but it wouldn't be nearly as affecting. The Coens don't want just to call up the Depression South, they want to bask in it a little. The relaxed tone does wonders. The Coens don't bat you on the head with flashy cutting or camerawork, don't push the artificiality of a made-up world as they usually do.

The movie may seem to flirt with desecration -- it plays some of the most poignant imagery of the Depression for laughs. The pictures of the Depression poor in Evans and Lange are about as close to sacred as secular images can get in American life. But the movie turns the Depression into an American fairy tale where the hound dogs are yappin' at your rear end as you make a beeline for the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

The audacity of "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" is that the Coens view the mythology of the Depression through the indigenous American toughness Kael was writing about: the willingness to make fun of our past travails and bull our way through the present. That healthy, cheerful disrespect was, of course, one of the things that kept Americans going to the movies in the Depression. It characterized the chorus girls in "Golddiggers of 1933" stealing their neighbor's milk; the wisecracking forgotten men in "My Man Godfrey"; and the sassy gangsters of "The Public Enemy" and "Scarface."

In "O Brother's" movie's most outrageous sequence, white-robed Klansman chant like the Yellow Winkies in "The Wizard of Oz" and move in choreographed patterns around their intended victim like the dancers in "42nd Street." It's as if everyone in this America dreams of being in the movies, even the Kluxers.

But there's lyricism here, too. The scene where Everett, Pete and Delmar are waylaid by three lovelies (the "Sireens," as Delmar calls them) washing out their clothes in a river is typical of the movie's approach. It's funny, but it's also mesmerizingly lovely. The women move slowly and deliberately toward these cons on the lam, singing "Didn't Leave Nobody but the Baby" (actually sung by Emmylou Harris, Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch). The song starts up again just when you're sure the last notes have wafted away on the breeze, and you know the men would try to brush it off as a dream if they could just get their brains together long enough to signal their eyes to blink.

"O Brother" is the first Coen movie that makes it possible to talk about not just emotion but beauty. Shot by the great cinematographer Roger Deakins so that the vistas of fields and long dusty roads seem to reach us with their color diffused by the blasting Southern sun, "O Brother" doesn't subjugate its sources to fodder for another of the Coen's malevolent Rube Goldberg universes.

The lovingly compiled soundtrack (some of which was produced by T-Bone Burnett) is a beauty, too, mixing bluegrass and spiritual classics from Harry McClintock and the Stanley Brothers, with contemporary artists like Krauss, Welch, Dan Tyminski (of Krauss' band Union Station) and the Fairfield Four. In May the artists who contributed performed the music from the movie in a concert at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium, which was filmed for a documentary by D.A. Pennebaker.

A Baptist procession to the river is accompanied by the golden voice of Krauss singing "Down to the River to Pray," and the Soggy Bottom Boys's big hit is a bouncier version of the Stanley Brothers' classic "Man of Constant Sorrow." The music may not sound as fatalistic as bluegrass, at its darkest and most sorrowful, can. But the music both chosen and created for the movie shares an earth-deep perseverance that is the flip side of the hero's ability to come out on top. From moment to moment, "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" is a pleasure. But when the Coens are really cooking, when the acting and the conception and the music all come together, it's something more -- Dogpatch rapture.

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