There and back again: "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" at 25

It's shrewd timing to reissue 2000's O Brother, Where Art Thou?, for a brace of reasons. Yes, a full quarter-century has gone by, faster than any of us who saw the movie the first time around could have imagined. But this was also Joel and Ethan Coen riffing on The Odyssey, a text now being afforded feverishly anticipated treatment by Christopher Nolan. They're all here, relocated to the Deep South of the 1930s: the sirens, the blind men, a Penelope and the fearsome cyclops (the latter represented by John Goodman as an evangelist in an eyepatch). Yet Homer proves but one of the influences at play in the Coens' film. The title, of course, is a nod to the film-within-a-film in Preston Sturges' beloved Sullivan's Travels, a comedy informed by experiences of the Depression. The narratively pivotal damming of a river evokes the New Deal, at a point in time when America was about to lurch decisively to the right. And the characters suggest some youthful exposure to The Three Stooges: a trio of goofballs - a vain motormouth (George Clooney), an irascible brute (John Turturro) and a slow-on-the-uptake ding-dong (Tim Blake Nelson) who might be claimed as an American Stan Laurel - loosed from a chaingang and set across Mississippi on a futile quest for treasure, bickering as they go. The influence that most chimed with the general public, however, was musical: the old-timey songs the trio encounter on their travels. T Bone Burnett's soundtrack has arguably had a greater legacy than the film itself, not just selling like hotcakes and spawning a live concert movie (the same year's Down from the Mountain), but encouraging the Coens to try and repeat the trick with 2013's folk-themed Inside Llewyn Davis, their strongest 21st century film.

The movie that returns to us this weekend is a sunny crowdpleaser: a few songs, a few laughs, an upbeat finale to send us all out beaming. Though one early setpiece involves a river baptism, the searching spiritual inquiries of 2009's A Serious Man were still some years away; for now, the Coens would wind up what was a breakthrough decade doing what makes them - and us - happy. Hanging out with character actors, first and foremost: Michael Badalucco as a Baby Face Nelson who hates cows nearly as much as he dislikes people (prompting the hilarious-in-context line "oh George, not the livestock"); Charles Durning as Pappy O'Daniel, flour magnate, governor, radio DJ (as he tells one of his flunkies: "we ain't one-at-a-timin', we're mass communicatin'") and - most crucially - the kind of character at which only the Coens could have arrived. (One reason the brothers appear to have arrived at a creative impasse - and gone their separate ways - of late is that there are fewer character actors at their disposal than there were 25 years ago; either the river's run dry, or these storied figures and impact subs have been diverted elsewhere.) It's episodic, sure - setting all its characters running, then checking in with them - but then arguably so was the source. And given everything that's followed, the film now seems canny if a touch blithe on the subject of race in Thirties America, although staging a Klan gathering as a cross between the Nuremberg Rally and a Busby Berkeley extravaganza yields one great (not to mention literal) sight gag, as a one-eyed hood reveals that badman Goodman's back in town. At no point, however, does the movie lack for diverting pleasures, and in its very best stretches, O Brother feels both mythic and lyrical. One thing's for certain: the Nolan version is likely to be much longer and feature far fewer chuckles.

O Brother, Where Art Thou? returns to selected cinemas from today.