Remember your high school English teachers’ warnings that, without a solid understanding of such classics as “Romeo and Juliet,” “Great Expectations” and “The Odyssey,” you wouldn’t catch most of the vital literary references in today’s pop culture?

Turns out they were right.

The Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, help prove the point with their latest trip through weirdness, “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” Set in Depression-era Mississippi, the film stars the ever-grizzled George Clooney as fast-talking, well-spoken convict Ulysses Everett McGill.

With the promise of a $1.2 million booty he stashed away before being hauled off, Everett convinces his fellow, somewhat dimmer chain gang pals Pete (John Turturro) and Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson), to escape and live life on the lamb.

What follows is an adventure that spans fields, dirt roads and towns of Mississippi. Along the way, the wanted men encounter a trio of singing seductresses, a violent one-eyed Bible salesman, and a bank robber prone to wild mood swings. Sound like anything you’ve read before? While the film’s title comes from the 1941 Preston Sturges comedy “Sullivan’s Travels,” the Coen brothers borrow heavily from the epic poem “The Odyssey” by some guy named Homer. The story of the Trojan soldier’s journey home to reclaim his estranged wife merely serves as inspiration, though.

Using the template, the makers of such landmarks as “Raising Arizona” and “Fargo” craft a story about friendship and spiritual redemption.

Although mired in racism, flawed transportation and slang-throwing country bumpkins, the population revels in the advent of radio, telephone lines and electricity. “A veritable Age of Reason, like they had in France,” as Everett puts it.

The technological revolution is reflected in virtually every aspect of the movie, however slowly. The pacing is often times reminiscent of a silent film from this era, where the dialogue is taken care of with cue cards and the soundtrack provides the only sound.

Heavily reliant on its music, “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” frequently transforms into a musical itself. How often do we see the Ku Klux Klan performing a choreographed dance sequence?

But for all the spiritual awakening and social change, “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” is still a Coen brothers movie. And one of their zanier ones, at that. Clooney hams it up as a modern-day Odysseus, replete with a better-than-average vocabulary and an affinity for hair gel that borders on obsession.

The rest of the cast, including Turturro, Nelson, John Goodman and Holly Hunter, all play second fiddle to Clooney’s hero.While the device is funny, much of the cast - and often Clooney himself - turn into caricatures of the very things into which they’re supposed to be breathing life.

So we’re left with a fast-paced carnival of a film that often ignores its own points, and singing and dancing cardboard cutouts do little to help drive the points home.

Funny stuff, but it won’t help you get through that half-finished copy of “Ulysses” collecting dust on your bookshelf.