The Year 2000: O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Joel/Ethan Coen)

Following the cult classic success of 'The Big Lebowski', The Coen Brothers came up with yet another shaggy dog, goofball adventure, firmly lodged in the world of the screwball comedy. Filmed in sepia, accompanied by a fantastic bluegrass soundtrack and enough quotable dialogue to keep a student happy for a entire term, O'Brother Where Art Thou, although successful, was seen as something of a departure for the Coen Brothers and ardent fans of the directors felt let down. Roy See of Modern Post, his great blog, a mish-mash of movie reviews, pop culture and basically anything that takes his fancy, takes aim at a film that feels 'comparatively lightweight', to the brothers previous efforts, in this great submission to Counting Down The Zeroes.

The Coens deliver another screwball comedy straight out of left field, but not quite out of the park.

Described by the directors in a featurette interview as a "Three Stooges epic" and ostensibly based on Homer's "Odyssey" (Homer even shares the writing credit), O Brother, Where Art Thou? is more the Coen brothers' take on the Great Depression using Homer's poem purely as as a narrative frame. In other words, if you haven't read Homer before and aren't about to start, don't worry; reportedly, neither have the Coens.


The sepia-draped opening frames of a chain gang breaking rocks in the hot sun on a dusty road seems, singing "Po Lazarus" in deep, lamenting voices is almost elegiac, worthy of a Walker Evans exposure. But the somber mood is quickly dispelled as the scene fades to black; in the next frame, the leaves of the surrounding field feature in the foreground,and the prisoners are far away in the background, and the three fellow escapees, Everett (George Clooney), Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson), and Pete (John Turturro), the three symbolically chained together, alternately pop up, scramble for a bit, and dive back down into the foliage, all to the happy, dreamy tune of Harry McClintock's "Big Rock Candy Mountain."


Indeed, music plays a crucial role in the film—arguably more so than in any other Coens brothers movie—setting the tone, moving it along, or slowing it down. We're not just talking about incidental music: a lot of the music is "performed" on screen (the Soggy Bottom Boys, the Ku Klux Klan, the various performers backing Homer Stokes and Pappy O'Daniel); the music is very much a part of the narrative. For the benefit of those who have yet to see O Brother, I won't go into further detail here, but suffice it to say that music is as important here as in films like The Commitments, Dreamgirls, or 8 Mile. The soundtrack, compiled by T-Bone Burnett, justifiably took home a Grammy for Best Compilation Soundtrack Album in 2002. (A note on the used of the word "performed": Tim Blake Nelson, John Turturro, and Chris Thomas King actually lent their voices to the soundtrack. George Clooney, however, failed to make the grade, so he lip-synched all his "performances.")


Roger Deakins's cinematography for the film—his fifth collaboration with the Coens—deserves special mention here, especially for the extensive digital mastering work done to achieve the final look of the film. Shot at a time in Mississippi when the foliage would be rich and green, what we see instead is a canvas of sepia that gives O Brother its general "dust bowl" feel; but the surprise is in the colors artfully allowed on screen every so often: natural flesh tones, reds,and a familiar golden warmth that remind us that while the almost colorless landscape threatens to overwhelm, hope and life still abound.


Of all the "startlements" and "things wonderful to tell" in the film—a cow on a house floating in a lake, a Ku Klux Klan song-and-dance routine, a Southern mass baptism to the sound of Alison Krauss singing "Down to the River to Pray"—what I always remember about O Brother is strangely just a simple thing: during the "I'll Fly Away" montage, we see a freshly baked pie placed on a window sill, with a golden dusk and a big tree sitting on a hill in the out-of-focus background. A pair of hands from below the window outside warily take the pie, and just as warily, Delmar sticks his head up and leaves money behind (probably too much), taking care to weigh it down with a rock. For me, that moment defines the sweet-natured core of the film; and that's saying something for the Coens, whose works are characterized by some as snide and mean.

Another one of the Coens's characteristic traits is their knack for casting, and this comes across strongly in this film. Without exception (okay, maybe Holly Hunter), all—and I mean all—the performances are pitch-perfect. George Clooney's first collaboration with the Coens reveals an uncharacteristic comic genius, and each time I watch O Brother I am just amazed at how goofy Clooney can be. Tim Blake Nelson is utterly convincing and soulful as the slow but gentle Delmar. Coens-alumni John Turturro, Charles Durning, and John Goodman all turn in exceptional performances as Pete, Pappy O'Daniel, and Big Dan Teague respectively. Holly Hunter's performance Penny, however, doesn't seem to differ much from her previous turn in Raising Arizona, so strong praise might be unwarranted there.


O Brother clearly belongs to the Coens's canon of screwball comedies, alongside Raising Arizona, The Hudsucker Proxy, and The Big Lebowski: typically upbeat, lighthearted affairs, free of the charge of meanness that has sometimes laid on the brothers (like in the instance of Fargo). But lighthearted is not the same as lightweight; and therein lies the minor problem with this film. Whereas Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski (and yes, even the less well-received The Hudsucker Proxy) manage to inject depth through personal crises and character change and development, O Brother ends up feeling comparatively lightweight, as the three friends end up very the much the same people as when their joint adventures first started. Even The Dude, who doesn't look like he's capable of change in any sense, seems decidedly wiser at the end of Lebowski. ("The Dude abides.") For a couple of guys who have been imprisoned, escaped, hunted, shot at, baptized, almost burned to death, almost lynched, and almost drowned, Everett, Pete, and Delmar seem strangely impervious to change. Perhaps the Coens feel that in a fable (O Brother seems intended to be a fable, according to Deakins), moral lessons and creating opportunities to laugh at our own human follies take precedence over character maturity. But being the master genre benders that they are, I'm sure they could have sidestepped that generic rule with ease, and made O Brother more than the sum of its parts.