Joel and Ethan Coen have long established themselves as film stylists without peer: from Blood Simple to Fargo, their movies have never been less than fascinating, and there has never been any question that their films could not have been made by anyone else. In T-Bone Burnett, the producer of the soundtrack for O Brother, Where Art Thou?, they have finally met their match: Burnett's work in assembling a collection of pieces for the Depression-set film is as skilled and entrancing as the film itself.
Despite the presence of Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch, Alison Krauss and bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley, the stars here are the songs themselves, a hos...
This is a production rife with odd pairings: English actor Daniel Day-Lewis joining up with the Mohawks; James Fenimore Cooper adapted by Michael Mann; disparate composers Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman teaming up. This last pairing seems a suspicious attempt to endow the score of this modern film adaptation of a junior high school literary evergreen with both a golden age of Hollywood dramatic bent (Jones) and a '90s-slick guitar-muzak veneer (Edelman). A strange amalgam that doesn't quite work. --Jerry McCulley
