Film: Unwise blood

The Ladykillers

By Anthony Allison

What happens when you drag a moldy, old English comedy out of mothballs and update its farcical plot about bumbling thieves to the Bible-belt underbelly of the deepest, Delta South? You get an unhappy hybrid, a heist spoof with Southern-fried Gothic flavoring that's more apt to elicit a rictus of indulgence from bemused viewers than peals of laughter.

Joel and Ethan Coen's remake of The Ladykillers is an interesting failure. It doesn't even come close to matching the stratospheric expectations that the Coen imprimatur raises in fans of everything from Blood Simple to The Man Who Wasn't There, via The Hudsucker Proxy, Fargo and The Big Lebowski.

The Minnesota siblings' greatest talent has always been pastiche and parody--of everything from Homer (O Brother, Where Art Thou?) to Dashiell Hammett (Miller's Crossing). But having made the creative misstep of directing a non-original story, Intolerable Cruelty, they now compound the felony by remaking a mediocre screenplay with its structural flaws intact.

Not that they don't add a few distinctive, Coenesque touches. The deliberately unreal setting seems promising: a sleepy Mississippi town whose most notable landmark is a gargoyle-bedecked bridge beneath which tugboats drag barges down-river toward a huge, island garbage dump.

There, smooth-talking stranger Goldthwait Dorr, Ph.D. (Tom Hanks) rents a room from feisty widow Marva Munson (Irma P. Hall, at her expressive best), explaining that he'd like to use her root cellar to rehearse chamber music with four friends. In reality, of course, Dorr's criminal quintet wants to tunnel from the Munson basement into the count room of a nearby casino. And when Marva catches the crooks red-handed, they decide to try to dispatch this dangerous witness.

The 1955 Ladykillers was one of the last, and least, of the comedies produced by Ealing, the oh-so-English studio that for a heady, postwar decade spotlighted the best of British humor and acting talent--most notably Alec Guinness in The Lavender Hill Mob, The Man in the White Suit and, best of all, Kind Hearts and Coronets. But William Rose's script was unexceptional, and Alexander Mackendrick's movie was memorable only for its superior cast, including Guinness, Katie Johnson and future Pink Panther stalwarts Peter Sellers and Herbert Lom.

Here, the comedy depends mainly on Hanks' histrionics. Clad in bow tie and top coat and sporting a Colonel Sanders goatee and mustache, the self-styled classics professor peppers his sotto voce spiel with old-fashioned vocabulary (commodious, lucre, betimes, immure) and reveals a hammy penchant for reciting "To Helen," a poem by someone he calls "Ed-Gallen Poe" (cue heavy-handed "Raven" reference). It's a courageously out-there performance, but ultimately too forced for comfort. Seems Hanks found Guinness' intimidating legacy as hard an act to follow as Ewan McGregor did, playing the young Obi-Wan Kenobi.

More damaging is the over-reliance on a supporting cast whose tics and mannerisms soon become labored. There's J.K. Simmons as an explosives expert afflicted with Irritable Bowel Syndrome, who locks horns with incongruously foul-mouthed inside man Marlon Wayans. Ryan Hurst's turn as a dimwit muscle man gets old even faster than tunneling expert Tzi Ma's cigarette-swallowing trick. And the period instrument subplot allows the Coens to include limp jokes involving the sackbut (the renaissance trombone) and the ancient Hebrew ram's-horn trumpet, the shofar.

The Coens' regular cinematographer, Roger Deakins, provides atmospheric lighting, and there's rollicking gospel singing from the golden-robed Abbot Kinney Lighthouse Choir. Besides, any film that features both Boccherini and Blind Willie Johnson on the soundtrack can't be all bad. But although the witty ending is satisfying, ultimately the film feels as misbegotten, and ill-judged, as Professor Dorr's nefarious scheme.