O Brother Where Art Thou?
Joel Coen, USA/France, 2000, 107 mins
Review by Gerald Houghton (2000)
Music's always been mighty important in their oeuvre, but who would have thought those quintessential cinematic siblings the Coen brothers would have gone right ahead and made a musical? Not a Guys and Dolls, all singing, all dancing musical, you understand (although there is a KKK rally - pointy white hoods flapping in the breeze - choreographed like a ham-fisted Busby Berkeley number), but a film nonetheless with designs to tell its story as much through song as its Homeric borrowings.
Star George Clooney - an eye-rolling ringer for Clark Gable - does get to mime though. 'A Man Of Constant Sorrow', recorded by the Soggy Bottom Boys - Clooney and fellow fugitives from a chain gang, John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson, plus black guitarist Tommy (Chris Thomas King) who just traded his ever-loving soul at a midnight crossroads - goes on to become, unbeknownst to them, a State-wide smash. And meanwhile the boys themselves have to get back to Clooney's hometown in time to recover the loot from an armoured car heist before the valley is flooded for a hydro-dam.
Hence that clumsy affectation. This not just any old odyssey; a title card tells us as much as while we're still taking off our coats: 'Based on The Odyssey by Homer.' Clooney is Everett Ulysses McGill, the yellow-streaked, word-spinning cad almost pathologically obsessed with hairnets and pomade. And his journey across 30s Mississippi to save erstwhile wife Penny (Holly Hunter) from the unwarranted attentions of a new suitor will be one beset by all manner of strangeness. There's a blind seer on a hand-crank railcar, homicidal cyclopean Bible salesman Big Dan Teague (John Goodman), even a trio of watery sirens not above seducing our heroes with wine and song just so's they can turn them in for the bounty.
The brothers, of course, make a virtue of protesting actual ignorance of The Odyssey, hanging their screenplay on an episodic but unsurprisingly literate comedy of character. It's an anarchic picture more twinned with the loose freewheeling of The Big Lebowski or the unjustly ignored Hudsucker Proxy than the tightly twisted Miller's Crossing or Blood Simple. Its humour walks the tightrope between verbal sophistication and out and out slapstick.
It also has as much to do other films as Greek tragedy, purloining that dizzying title straight from the socially conscious epic Joel McCrea proposes in Preston Sturges' 1941 gem Sullivan's Travels. (A Simpsons episode too, incidentally.) And you can be sure the cinematic siblings are well aware - not least in the on-going political campaign that strings through the picture - of the baggage that demands.
Visually, Roger Deakins' luminous cinematography bathes the whole thing in an extraordinary blonde light; what it doesn't turn sepia is left a vivid corn yellow. The effect is like a hand-tinted postcard. The music - the ragged ends of country, bluegrass and popular song - acts as a brilliantly woven commentary.
In the end, O Brother, Where Art Thou? is that oddest of beasts - a post-modern comedy with a pre-modern sensibility. It is as much taken with Americana as it is happy gently mocking of it. For all their rib-poking and technical genius, this is first and foremost - like Lebowski - a film made with real love. One of their very best.