Impostors take on one good lady

By A. O. Scott
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Friday, Jun 11, 2004, Page 20

Tom Hanks, center, appears to enjoy his role as the scheming professor in the Coen brothers' latest comedic journey. PHOTOS COURTESY OF BVI

After many years of clean-shaven, all-American affability, Tom Hanks has lately begun to explore the possibilities of facial hair and regional accents: the harsh New England vowels of Catch Me if You Can, for example, and also the thin mustache of Road to Perdition and the shaggy four-year growth of Cast Away. In The Ladykillers, an uneven, prankish caper comedy by Joel and Ethan Coen, he sports a resplendent Old South Vandyke, with orotund diction to match.

Giddy the joy of playing, at long last, a bona fide villain, Hanks swans through the role of G. H. Dorr, Ph.D., a supposed professor of classics whose true vocation is crime, with a vaudevillian relish that would be unseemly if it were not contagious. His laugh, issuing through what appears to be prosthetic (and in any case none too clean) teeth, is a stuttering whinny, and his mouth also unleashes a flood of florid Mississippi nonsense.

Hand heart he reels off lines from Edgar Allan Poe and paeans to the bygone glories of Greece and Rome. To hear Hanks pronounce the word cinquecento -- if this were a play you might need an umbrella -- is almost worth the price of the ticket.

PHOTO COURTESY OF BVI

Since Miller's Crossing the Coen brothers have frequently dabbled in an inimitable form of antiquarian pastiche, mining old styles and genres to remake movies that were never made in the first place. The Ladykillers, which follows last year's underrated neo-screwball Intolerable Cruelty, is an actual remake, transplanting Alexander Mackendrick's 1955 British farce into the rich topsoil of the American South.

Film Notes Written and directed by: Joel Coen and Ethan Coen Starring: Tom Hanks (Professor Dorr), Irma P. Hall (Marva Munson), Marlon Wayans (Gawain MacSam), J. K. Simmons (Garth Pancake), Ryan Hurst (Lump), Tzi Ma (the General) and George Wallace (Sheriff Wyner) Running time: 104 minutes Taiwan Release: today

There is, as ever, a strong argument for leaving the original alone -- it would be hard for any cast to measure up to one that included Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers -- but while this Ladykillers is a bit of a throwaway, it does have its moments.

It starts on a high note, with a verbal barrage that is one of the funniest opening scenes since Preston Sturges's Sullivan's Travels, to which the Coens paid homage in O Brother Where Art Thou. Marva Munson, a devout African-American widow (played with stereotype-destroying gusto by the amazing Irma Hall), arrives at a small-town sheriff's office in high dudgeon, complaining about young people and their "hippety-hop" music, much to the puzzlement of the impatient sheriff (George Wallace).

Soon Professor Dorr arrives at the house Munson shares with her orange cat and a glowering portrait of her late husband, Othar, inquiring about renting a room. With the help of a raggedy crew of crooks -- absurdly masquerading as an amateur early-music ensemble -- he plans to dig a tunnel into the vault where proceeds from the local riverboat casino are kept.

The plans, as you might expect, are complicated both by Munson's inconvenient presence and by tensions within the gang of would-be master thieves. Pancake, the phlegmatic demolition expert (J. K. Simmons), is perpetually at odds with Gawain (Marlon Wayans), who is full of hippety-hop attitude. Simmons and Wayans, irrepressible showboaters, overshadow the two remaining conspirators, a Vietnamese general (Tzi Ma) and a dumb football player (Ryan Hurst), who are pretty much one-joke characters.

The movie itself is one long joke, and there are long stretches where its inventiveness flags and its humor wears thin. It would be hard to think of a more threadbare premise -- I will not bore you with a catalog of recent heist pictures; if you have seen any besides Oceans Eleven and Heist you will be plenty bored already -- and the Coens do not seem interested in investing it with new life. Rather, the story is a flimsy frame to be ornamented with diverting bric-a-brac, and the movie as a whole is something of a paradox: a work of elaborate and painstaking craftsmanship that is at the same time a piece of junk.

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 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 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.