The question is first posed (as we've all now been re-minded) in Preston Sturges's 1941 Sullivan's Travels. As that film begins, rich white-boy director John L. Sullivan is convinced that his screwball comedies are wasting both his own gifts and his audience's time. The project he really wants to undertake is 0 Brother, Where Art Thou?, based on a grim-looking novel writ-ten by one "Sinclair Beckstein"—a garbling of the names of the two best-known social-realists of the 1930s. But by the end of his tribulations, Sullivan has abandoned his "serious" pretensions, having realized that escapist comedies bring joy and relief to the lives of the suffering masses. To his credit, he's also learned how little his didactic, eggheaded socialist vision—allegorical figures of Labor and Capital wrestling atop a moving train—has to say about the realities of American poverty, prison, oppression, and despair.

Now Joel and Ethan Coen have made his masterpiece for him. The Coen brothers, from the start less naive than Sully, know that pious "message" films are box-office poison and that laughs put asses in the seats, so they've filmed his bleak epic as a series of antic adventures and escapes with a cast of cartoonish characters. They've given it a full three happy endings, complete with a big musical number, a pardon from the governor, a wedding, and even a miracle.

But the film's reversals of fortune are so abrupt, its escapes from disaster so flimsily contrived, and its happy endings so improbable that they can't quite make us forget its disquieting moments of real cruelty. Its ostensibly comic tone is also belied by the bleached colors of its desiccated fields and dirt roads, and by a knowing selection of mournful "ol'-timey" songs about joblessness, hunger, prison, and death.

The Coens' borrowing of Sturges's title is not an in-jokey homage, like the recall codes from Dr. Strangelove graffitied on a gas station men's room wall in Raising Arizona. In 0 Brother's most explicit allusion to Sullivan's Travels, a chain gang is marched into a movie theater and ordered by an overseer with a shot-gun to "Enjoy yer pickcha show!" In Sturges's film, the gang of convicts crack up at an animated cartoon, stomping and weeping with laughter, showing Sullivan how much escapism means to people without any real hope. The chain gang in 0 Brother, however, watches in disconcerting silence.

The Coens aren't content to crank out merely diverting Hollywood comedies; beneath the broad caricatures and genre-bending of 0 Brother, John Sullivan's do-gooder agenda is intact. The Coens have sneakily taken on the least saleable subject of our time—the whole messy tangle of class, family, and race.

Almost all the Coens' comedies are set against the backdrop of an American crisis. Raising Arizona takes place among the trickled-down-upon underclass, with "that sumbitch Reagan in the White House"; Barton Fink ends with America's patriotic rush into World War II; The Big Lebowski is set during the Gulf War and its main characters are a counterculture casualty and a Vietnam vet.

0 Brother is set in the Great Depression, when antagonism between the government and its citizens, between the haves and have-nots, was starker and more open than at any time since the Civil War. Its episodic plot can be understood the same way the hard-knock Christianity of its old gospel songs teaches us to understand life—as a series of moral trials.

Specifically, we see the loyalty and solidarity of the poor tested by the temptations and threats of the rich. The film's protagonists encounter a series of grotesques who embody the institutions of the wealthy and powerful in allegorical guises a mite subtler than Labor and Capital atop a train. Our heroes, more fully human, either rise to the occasion by identifying with their fellows or fail by abandoning or betraying them.

Yet the most crucial of these tests is put not to the film's characters, but to the audience. Will we see as clearly as do the three white fugitives that their fate is cast with that of their black brethren? Ultimately, the Coens' latest film endorses those old American ideals that seem so quaint and naive now—the solidarity of the oppressed, resistance to abusive power, and the embrace of a universal brotherhood that transcends race.

0 Brother, Where Art Thou? is a question posed in earnest. It's the same question the lawyer put to Jesus: "Who is my neighbor?" Jesus answered him with the parable of the Good Samaritan, the story of a man who saw someone he had been taught to despise lying beaten and helpless in a ditch, and felt moved to compassion. We're repeatedly asked—along with the film's protagonists—whom we're passing by on the other side.

The first scene depicts an all-black chain gang, breaking rocks in cadence to the mournful chant of "Po' Lazarus," a song about a fugitive the sheriff wants "dead or alive." We then see Everett McGill (George Clooney), Pete Hogwallop (John Turturro), and Delmar O'Donnell (Tim Blake Nelson) popping up out of a soybean field, accompanied by the peppier "Big Rock Candy Mountain." The lyrics of this song are a sad paean to a fantasyland where jails are made of tin, cops have wooden legs, and there's a lake of stew. This is the pipe dream of men accustomed to harassment, hunger, and hard labor. It's not clear whether the gang from which they've escaped is supposed to be the same gang we've just seen, but these opening shots suggest the three white convicts' fortunes are inextricably entwined with the plight of blacks.

As Everett mentions later in the film, he and his companions have escaped from Parchman Farm, an almost all-black prison camp established in 1904 by James Kimble Vardaman, a notoriously racist Mississippi governor who believed prison labor could provide young black men with proper discipline, work ethics, and an appropriately deferential attitude towards whites—and that these young blacks could in turn provide cheap labor for the state's business barons.

Parchman Farm remained in operation until the 1970s, a legacy of which the Coens are certainly aware, since the performance of “Po’ Lazarus” which leads off the film's soundtrack is Alan Lomax's 1959 field recording of a group of Parchman inmates. Vardaman's system criminalized an entire class of citizens, but its selective enforcement went further in dividing the popular majority of poor Mississippians: it singled out blacks for the harshest punishments, frequently working them to death.

Throughout 0 Brother, the three white fugitives are repeatedly mistaken for blacks. They even try to "pass" for Negroes: they assent when the blind DJ at WEZY asks them whether they're colored, and although they soon abandon this ploy, he later recalls them as "colored fellas, I b'lieve." When Big Dan Teague snatches white hoods from their heads at a Klan rally and exposes faces still blackened from their latest jailbreak, the horrified Wizard blurts out, "The color guard is colored!" Later, outside the music hall, the same Wizard (now unmasked as gubernatorial candidate Homer Stokes) mutters that only mulattos would dare desecrate the Confederate flag as they've done, and then denounces them before their fans, crying, "These men are not white!"

Everett, Pete, and Delmar are not only labeled black, they also suffer the unduly harsh, arbitrary treat-ment that typically distinguishes the experience of black men. Pete is lashed with a bullwhip under the shadow of a lynching noose, while one of Sheriff Coo-ley's sadistic posse derides him as an "unreconstructed whelp of a whore." This punishment and this description imply both slave status and suspect parentage. After Everett's rival for his ex-wife punches him out in the five-and-dime, the manager hurls Everett into the street, shouting, "And stay out of the Woolworth's!" (It was the Greensboro, N.C. Woolworth's where in 1959 four young black civil rights activists defied the "legitimacy" of segregated lunch-counter seating.)

Being second-class citizens and hunted men themselves, Everett and his companions identify at once with the black characters they meet. Encountering the blind Tiresian seer pumping his handcar, they fall into conversation that's not just familiar but familial: he addresses them as "my sons," and they call him "grandpa" in return. They pull over and make room in their getaway car for the hitchhiking Tommy Johnson (Chris Thomas King), a black man they've never seen before. And when they see Tommy about to be lynched by the Klan, they risk their lives to save him after barely a moment's discussion—Pete, who's just been threatened with lynching himself, says in horror, "The noose. Sweet Jesus! We gotta save 'im!" They embrace their black friend's fate as their own—which, in fact, it is.

The point is not just the sociological lesson that poor, rural "white trash" have their own history of prejudice and persecution, nor even that working-class whites criminalized by poverty have more in common with black people than with rich white people. It's that the natural solidarity of universal brotherhood arises out of shared suffering. 0 Brother, Where Art Thou? echoes the Depression-era refrain "Brother, can you spare a dime?," showing us this empathy and identification as natural.

The film indicts both the state and its representatives for making an issue of race and using it to set poor men against one another. Homer Stokes (Wayne Duvall) begins his Klan rally speech by invoking the term "brothers," but then proceeds with a roll call of invented enemies: blacks, Jews, Catholics, evolutionists. With his appeals to a common "culture'n heritage," he may claim to be a uniter, not a divider, but his real agenda is exposed when he announces the event's true purpose: "So we're gonna hang us a neegra!"

The neegra he has in mind is Tommy, who's led to the gallows pleading "I ain't never harmed you gen-tlemen." His absurdly polite appeal is of course just a survival tactic—one instance of the broad repertoire of traits and mannerisms assumed by a captive population subject to arbitrary violence. Stokes, however, can only hear such a plea as evidence that blacks recognize themselves as his naturally deferential social inferiors. He cannot conceive of black men disrupting a Klan rally (much less defiling his beloved Confederate flag). For him, such an act of defiance could only be the product of blacks and whites racially intermixing. Like the state he both serves and represents, Stokes abhors the possibility of any kind of solidarity among blacks and whites because such a union presents a real challenge to the state's domination of the masses.

As 0 Brother illustrates, the state uses not only differences of race to divide people, but other short-term incentives as well, from banal bribery to social disgrace to brute force. Pete's cousin Washington Hogwallop and the three seductive laundresses in the stream turn traitor at the lure of bounty. Everett's ex-wife, Penny, succumbs to her fear of being "not bona fide" when she abandons him for a better "provider." Pete sobs "Godfer gimme" as he chooses to save himself from the sheriff's noose by ratting out his fellow escapees. Tommy Johnson is not the only character in this film to make a bargain with the Devil.

The first betrayal we see reveals how the state ex-ploits "family values" to pit members of the underclass against one another. Washington Hogwallop, a farmer who's resorted to eating horsemeat even after it's "started to turn," miserably justifies selling his own cousin up the river for coin: "I know we're kin! But they got this Depression on, and I gotta do fer me an' mine!" Even Wash's eight-year-old son—who was obediently prepared to shotgun anyone from the bank or the census who set foot on his daddy's farm—rejects this treacherous logic. He rescues the three strangers from a blazing barn amidst a hail of bullets and decides to "R-U-N-N-O-F-T" from a father who's revealed such warped values.

For all his outrage at Wash, Pete himself turns Judas in the very next scene, betraying Wash's son. "Go home and mind yer paw," he yells, throwing a dirt clod after the boy. Pete's blind adherence to the nar-rowest of family ties undermines the greater good of human solidarity. The utter misguidedness of his in-doctrination in the sanctity of blood ties comically resurfaces when he learns Everett has "borrowed" Wash's gold pocket watch. "You stole from my kin!" he screams. This jarring sequence encapsulates 0 Brother's central challenge to its audience. We're all supposed to honor the officially sanctioned "brother-hood" of blood relations, but Wash's narrow and selfish interpretation thoroughly exposes it as inadequate compared to the real brotherhood of equal dignity.

Sex, like money, is used to sow jealousy and mis-trust. When Everett asks Pete for an introduction to the three laundresses, he hisses, "I seen 'em first!" One temptress keeps pouring a jug of Triple-X hooch down Everett's throat, equating the effects of corn licker and lust, which make men first bestial and then unconscious. The lyrics of the women's lullaby become not only sinful ("You an' me and the Devil makes three! Don't need no other lovin' baby") but spooky and sepulchral ("Come lay your bones on the alabaster stone/and be my everlovin' baby"), an inducement not into bed but the grave. These women are not only sirens who lure the men to their ruin, but also Circe the sorceress, who turns them into animals (specifically swine).

As Everett says of the toad who hops out of Pete's shirt, "If that's Pete, I am ashamed of him. The way I see it he got what he deserved—fornicating with some whore a' Babylon." One might dismiss this as the sort of callous misogyny expressed in Everett's blanket condemnation of women as "deceitful!" and "two-faced!" But Everett too has merely snapped up the state's ideological lure. Volunteering for the war between the sexes, he wastes energy better directed against bosses and politicians.

As with sex, so with the family that's supposed to sanctify it and keep it respectable. We meet Penelope McGill (Holly Hunter) as she's buying nipples at the five-and-dime. Penny, less patient than her Homeric namesake, has divorced Everett "from shame," claiming it was for their daughters' sake. "They look to me for answers," she states, but the answers she gives them are lies; she's told them their daddy was run over by a train. She's disowned Everett in favor of a higher-class con artist, campaign manager Vernon Waldrip (Ray McKinnon), who can provide not only a steady income but the trappings of upward mobility such as "lessons on the clarinet."

The deepest betrayals, however, are prompted not by money or sex. Horsewhipped, faced with a noose, and convinced by the sheriff's lie that "your two friends have abandoned you," Pete spills his guts about Everett's plan to retrieve $1.2 million from an armored car heist. His life in the wake of this desperate choice seems worse than death. He stares up slack-jawed from the chain gang, a forlorn phantom vanishing in a cloud of dust.

Later, in a scene echoing Odysseus' colloquy with the dead in Hades, Pete is illuminated in a darkened theater by the flickering beam of the projector as he hisses like a tormented shade at Everett and Del-mar, "Do not seek the treasure! It's a bushwhack!" Sleepless in his prison bunk that night and haunted by a vision of the noose, he moans, "I could not gaze upon that far shore…” Perhaps the intensity of his guilt and grief redeems the crime he knows he's committed against his fellow fugitives, but the scenes of Pete's suffering reveal that even the state's final, and most terrifying, resort—coercion under the shadow of death—does not absolve him for betraying his brothers.

Reviewers have made an easy game of matching characters in this film with their supposed counterparts from the Odyssey—the baptismal congregation are lotus-eaters, the laundresses are sirens, Penny is Penelope, etc. This is not always the most illuminating approach. Menelaus "Pappy" O'Daniel (Charles Durning) may be as wealthy as the king of Lacedaemon, but he doesn't share much of the latter's kindness or wiSdom. And Big Dan Teague is far more complicated than the savage Cyclops. The film's obvious villains, the "monsters" of this odyssey, can be seen more revealingly as a symbolic rogues' gallery of human institutions—business, politics, education—that corrupt us, dividing brother against brother.

The blind DJ who records Everett, Pete, and Delmar in their impromptu incarnation as the Soggy Bottom Boys offers them ten dollars a head for their performance. He makes it sound like real money. None of them grasps the implications of this newfangled recording and broadcast technology or understands the rip-off. The fugitives never know that there's big money being made from selling their recordings even as they themselves have to hide from the law. We see the DJ chuckling as he fondly recites the businessman's creed: "Oh mercy, yes. You gotta beat that competition." And let's not forget who owns that radio station: WEZY is a tool of "mass communicatin"' sponsored by Pappy O'Daniel, incumbent governor of Mississippi.

Few films in recent memory have displayed such contempt for venal politicos and their self-serving motives. Pappy, a stereotypical Good Ole Boy, has no platform except to get himself re-elected. His only political affiliation is Opportunist—"Goddamn! Oppitunity knocks!" he cries in a moment of inspiration, determined to climb onstage and bask in the reflected glory of the Soggy Bottom Boys. Likewise, his challenger, "reform" candidate and Klan Wizard Homer Stokes, calls himself the "Friend of the Little Man," and promises a "new broom to sweep the state clean"—but these are just slogans to show off his trademark props, a midget sidekick with a miniature broom.

This movie's most curious figure is George "Baby-face" Nelson (Michael Badalucco)—not exactly a villain, but so broadly drawn that he must also be an allegory: celebrity. As an original partner of the three, he cares less about money than about the adrenaline high of the hold-up and the chase. In both phases of his bipolarity, he focuses on the aggrandizement of his image. He screams his name over and over in exultatation, and rages and pouts at the use of his hated nickname. Like other unaccountable glory-seekers from Dillinger to Clinton, he's obsessed with his own legacy, micro-managing public perception. After the heist, Nelson loses interest in his three new friends, and wanders off, disconsolate. George may be an enemy of the state, but he's only in it for the glory.

The three heroes could also be read—beyond the Homeric—as allegorical figures: Everett the rational skeptic; Pete the slave to passion; and Delmar the fool. In the scene closest to the film's heart, the escaped cons lie around their campfire, talking about what they'll do with their share of the loot. Pete wants to open a fancy restaurant where he'll be the maitre d', eat every day for free, and be called "suh" by the staff. Delmar just wants to get his family farm back from the bank. These dreams are poignantly small; more than the free board, Pete just wants to be shown some respect, and Delmar only wants to get back a little property that's already rightfully his. Their most extravagant fantasies are of being treated with common dignity. Everett, who invented the $1.2 million, has dreams even smaller than theirs. He desperately wants to be what his wife and daughters call "bona fide"—a respectable, middle-class professional.

George Clooney's performance as Everett, widely criticized as too broad and exaggerated, is a deliberate caricature of a man imitating everything he isn't. Everett's highfalutin' diction and harebrained scams are all misguided shortcuts to self-improvement; despite having been jailed for imper-sonating a lawyer, at the dance hall he assures his dismayed ex-wife that he knows someone who can print him up a dentist's license. But all these small human aspirations are as hopelessly out of reach as the Big Rock Candy Mountain. Watching the campfire scene, we know that they'll never really see that money. The song Tommy Johnson picks out on his guitar as they swap daydreams is "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues," about the humiliation of begging door to door.

0 Brother, Where Art Thou? comes to a frenetic close with not one, but three happy endings each as questionable as the next.

The film returns to its roots in the first of these, an extended musical number staged in a dance hall, during which Everett, Pete, and Delmar are finally discovered as the wildly popular Soggy Bottom Boys, candidate Homer Stokes exposes himself as a hypocritical bigot, and Pappy O'Daniel takes advantage of the musicians' surprise appearance to cement his reelection and grant them a full pardon. All this hilarity aside, the sequence puts to a public referendum the film's thesis that racial division is best understood as a deliberate tactic of the ruling class.

We are first signaled that racial identity is still at issue when Junior O'Daniel resists his father's attraction to the Soggy Bottom Boys, remarking: "But Pappy, they's intergrated." The Coens have given us plenty of evidence this means much more than Tommy Johnson playing guitar onstage. No one in the crowd has ever seen the Soggy Bottom Boys—their pirated recording has been distributed without their knowledge by a producer who vaguely remembers them as colored. The mystery of their identity has meanwhile become Page Three headline news.

As Pappy quickly discerns, "I guess folks don't mind they's integrated." The crowd has been galvanized by the performance of a traditional bluegrass tune, featuring the black Tommy Johnson on guitar, and a white lead singer who kicks up an impromptu buck-and-wing borrowed from black minstrelsy—with all four performers disguised in exactly the same false gray hillbilly beards. In this climactic scene, the Coens have staged the country's first great crossover phenomenon—a full generation before Elvis.

Homer Stokes is convinced not only that the Boys are black, but also that their fans' enthusiastic reception is based on ignorance of this fact. He hurries to shut down this "miscegenated" performance, and an-nounces, "These boys is not white!" The crowd starts rumbling at this disruption, but he, confident of his "constitchency," blathers on.

Gratifyingly, Stokes' fear that racial intermixing will rock the racist social order turns out to be well-founded: his constitchency literally rides him out of the hall on a rail to insure that the band finishes their song. Pappy O'Daniel, like the canny Southern politicians who saw which way the wind was blowing during the civil rights era, is quick to scramble onto the integration bandwagon. He offers the Soggy Bottom Boys a sweeping on-the-spot pardon, and even announces that, in his second administration, the Soggy Bottom Boys "gonna be my brain trust."

Immediately after this first happy ending, we see a second—similarly manic and dubious. George Nelson is dragged to his electrocution by a mob. His parting speech, including the megalomaniacal line, "Gonna shoot sparks out the top of my head and lightning from my fingertips!," is accompanied by a couple of village idiots playing a braying tune on their fiddles. In what seems initially like an idyllic coda, Everett, Pete, Delmar, and Tommy are unexpectedly confronted by the ultimate embodiment of evil, the Devil, incarnated as a murderous Lawman—a hard-faced sheriff with a badge, a bloodhound, and fire in his eyes.

But he represents more than the Law, which he scorns as a human institution. His is the final, unappealable sentence of Death. The Biblical deluge that reprieves the condemned men is the same sort of intervention in the laws of nature as the janitor's jamming a broom handle into the wheels of Time, literally at the eleventh hour, to save Norville Barnes from his fall from the 45th floor in The Hudsucker Proxy. Endings this self-consciously absurd can only be ironic concessions to Hollywood convention; the omnipotent hand that shows most clearly is not God's but the screenwriters'.

In reality, the Coens know and we know that big corporations do take advantage of and destroy "little people" and "nobodies" like Norville, and that innocent men get lynched, especially if they're poor. The tenebrous strains of "That Lonesome Valley," sung by three stoic grave diggers—the Fates—quavers and rises in the background, reminding us that all reprieves, whether from the governor or from God, are only temporary.

The real climax in this scene is not the arrival of a miraculous flood but an unexpected outbreak of genuine human emotion from Everett. In his extreme despair his fast-talking sharp-dealing demeanor finally cracks, and he falls to his knees and delivers a heart-felt plea unlike any other slick speech that's passed his lips in the last two hours. He begs God for clemency. Earlier he boasted of being the only Soggy Bottom Boy who "remains unaffiliated" with any supernatural agency; now, it seems, he's finally chosen sides.

But no sooner are Everett's prayers answered than he recovers from his bout of God-fearing humility. Borne above the flood waters by a coffin intended for one of them, he preaches to his two comrades about the promise of a shining, progressive future for the South: "Out with the old spiritual mumbo-jumbo, the superstitions and the backward ways. We're gonna see a brave new world where they run everyone a wire and hook us all up to a grid."

Electricity is a metaphor for the false promise of rationality and progress, an end to the Dark Age, a literal enlightenment. Everett also heralds "a veritable age of reason—like the one they had in France," but neither of his examples—Huxley's sterile, narcotic utopia or the bloodbath of Robespierre—inspires much confidence in the contemporary listener. In the film's last scene we see an optimistic vision of this “brave new world" in a public mural, like one of those upbeat billboards that 30s photographers loved to juxtapose with hobos or bread lines. That, and the fact that George Nelson will soon be shooting electricity from his fingertips, reminds us that "progress" has its victims, too.

The apparition of "a cow on the roof of a cotton house" reminds Everett and us that the blind seer's prophecies have been fulfilled: they have found treasure, although not the treasure they sought. Their reward is not newfound fame as the Soggy Bottom Boys, or fortune as the governor's brain trust. Their real answer is in the brotherly community they've formed together, and in the faith they've discovered.

This moral may sound mawkish, but all the prattling voices of skepticism and rationality in the film have been discredited by the woeful songs we've heard and the mute faces of suffering we've seen. There's an unmistakable strain of genuine, hard-assed, "ol' -timey" Christianity running through the core of this story. No other recent film has taken as seriously the presence of a merciful and sustaining God in the minds of the people—saved, sinners, and skeptics alike.

The Coens plainly revile hypocrites and demagogues like Homer Stokes and Big Dan, but their vision of brotherhood has unapologetic roots in grass-roots revivalism. For all the Coens' broad caricatures of bumpkins with funny accents in Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, The Hudsucker Proxy, and Fargo, there's nothing ironic or mocking about their depiction of Everett's gallows conversion and fervent prayer. Everett asks not just for mercy but for "deliverance," for divine intervention in his fate. The God he's appealing to is not the deistic clockmaker of the Enlightenment (and of America's founding fathers) but the personal Old Testament God who parted the Red Sea (and brought it crashing down on Pharaoh and his armies) and could occasionally be persuaded to make an exception for a single penitent man.

In the film's closing scene, Everett finds himself in bondage again, this time to his hectoring wife and their daughters, who trail behind them along a length of twine—another chain gang. As this ending and so many of the film's songs remind us, there's only one release from worldly strife and tribulation. The only rest from our ordeals, the only end to our odyssey, is in death. The best we can do in the meantime is to try to recognize each other as brothers, stick together, withstand the temptations the world throws at us, and sing our songs. Still looking for answers? There's your answer.

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