But one man's junk is another man's collectible, and I am happy to add The Ladykillers to my boxed set of Coeniana. Compared with O Brother and The Man Who Wasn't There it is unquestionably minor, perhaps deliberately so, but it is nonetheless intermittently delightful.
The cinematography, by Roger Deakins, is as toothsome as homemade praline, and there are the requisite grisly touches: a severed finger that becomes a cat toy, a spate of sudden fatalities at the end. What keeps the movie going -- aside from the rambunctious performances of Hall and Hanks -- is the Coens' obsessive devotion to the American vernacular.
Few screenwriters take such virtuosic delight in the cacophonous music of American English, and these hyperactive filmmakers seem happiest when they sit still and listen to the various cadences of speech, from Professor Dorr's high-flown erudition to Munson's righteousness to Gawain's profane improvisations. You sometimes suspect that the whole enterprise was cooked up to produce nonsensical lines like "I was a positive lemur" and (my personal favorite) "Othar never blowed no shofar."
Perhaps not. But The Ladykillers nonetheless swells with sanctified harmonies. As they did for O Brother, the Coens, aided once again by T Bone Burnett, have assembled a rich soundtrack full of half-forgotten, unforgettable American music, in this case mostly gospel.
The sublime sounds of the Reverend Thomas Dorsey, the Soul Stirrers, Blind Willie Johnson and the Swan Silvertones (whose version of A Christian's Plea is sampled in an amazing hip-hop track by the Nappy Roots) are immune to mockery, and they provide a curiously effective counterpoint -- and a measure of redemption -- for the worldly, and sometimes world-weary, humor the Coens purvey.
RSS