I figured the leader should be the one of us with the capacity for abstract thought

O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)

Previously on the Coen Brothers: series intro, Buster Scruggs, Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, Hudsucker Proxy, ten-year career check-up, Fargo, and The Big Lebowski

Confession time: O Brother, Where Art Thou? has always stood as my least favorite Coen Brothers film (with the caveat we have several upcoming I’ve still never seen). I have my reasons and I’ll get into a couple of them below. But I remember the huge amount of goodwill this film enjoyed in the years immediately after release—it’s one of Joel and Ethan’s genuine hits, returning nearly 3x its budget and spawning a concert film, Down from the Mountain, featuring the performers and music from the film. I was curious if this goodwill had persisted to the present day so I asked as much on Notes. Wow!!! People still LOVE this movie! One replier even said this is Clooney’s only good role, which, come on man. So, believe me guys, I’m trying. I’m really trying to see what you love so much. And if you want to yell at me, the comments are open.

To start with the most obvious: O Brother’s opening credits state it’s based on The Odyssey and it begins with an epigraph of Homer’s opening invocation to the muse. Our Odysseus is Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney), an escapee from a chain gang in Depression-era Mississippi. His “crew” are the two convicts chained to him, Pete (John Turturro) and Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson). Everett has fed the other two a lie about some treasure he stashed away before he was arrested but really he needs to get home to prevent his wife Penny (Holly Hunter) from getting remarried.

It isn’t worth dwelling on the Odyssey comparison. Beyond Everett’s motivation, there is an obvious run-in with three Sirens doing laundry in the river, evoking Nausicaa’s handmaidens in Phaeacia, and whom Delmar believes turn Pete into a frog, evoking Circe’s transformation of Odysseus’ men into pigs. They also suffer a mugging at the hands of one-eyed charlatan Bible salesman Big Dan Teague (John Goodman), who we see eating meat off the bone in Cycloptic fashion. And they encounter a blind seer—Tiresias—who says he has no name reminding us of Odysseus telling Polyphemus his name is No Man.

In every interview I read, Joel and Ethan cautioned against taking this reading too far. They maintained they had never actually read The Odyssey and all the resemblances are things they learned via cultural osmosis. According to them, the only person involved in the whole production who had read Homer was Tim Blake Nelson, who has a classics degree from Brown and studied under Martha Nussbaum (!!!). There’s a great exchange recorded by Jonathan Romney for The Guardian in 2000 where Ethan gets stuck on whether Nelson has read The Odyssey in the original Greek or only in translation:

[Ethan]:“I wonder if he read it in Greek? I know he read it.” “Yeah,” confirms Joel. “Did he?” Ethan insists. “I don’t know if he read it in Greek,” says Joel. “I know he read it.”

The Coens love to mess with interviewers so I’m of two minds on their claim they never read it. On the one hand there’s an interview where they betray a little more knowledge than they might have meant to. As they disavowed close fidelity to the poem to Jim Ridley of the Nashville Scene, Ethan said “I don’t want any of those Odyssey fans to go to the movie expecting…” “Where’s Laertes?” Joel picked up, laughing. “Where’s his dog?” Ethan adds. Do you guys know his whole domestic situation on Ithaca or don’t you?? On the other hand, Romney from The Guardian seems to genuinely stump them when he brings up Scylla and Charybdis:

“Scylla and Charybdis? Where were they?” puzzles Ethan. The whirlpool at the end, surely? “Oh,” the brothers chorus, “the whirlpool.” Ethan grins pensively. “Oh, yeah, sure, Scylla and Charybdis.” Joel says, “It’s very, you know, selectively based on The Odyssey.”

Anyway, O Brother burns through all these references within its first hour, at which point it feels like it should be over. I’m going to go out on a limb and posit the continuing affection for this movie stems almost entirely from its first half. The Sirens scene is good. Big Dan is the only character with the verbal dexterity to spar with Everett; it’s the best part of the movie. I hate musical performance interludes with a passion but even I can admit that their rendition of “Man of Endless Sorrow” at the radio station is fun. The way Clooney pops his eyes in bewilderment as he sings, as if he doesn’t know where the words are coming from and can’t believe he’s pulling it off—we might wonder if he’s possessed by the Muse—is undeniable.

The second half of the film is a total mess. They arrive in Everett’s town without any indication to the audience, and before he’s confessed his true motivation to win his wife back, leading to a truly disorienting moment when he charges at some young girls performing at a political rally who turn out to be his daughters. So much time is suddenly given over to a plotline about the governor’s race between incumbent Menelaus “Pappy” O’Daniel (Charles Durning) and Homer Stokes (Wayne Duvall), who turns out to be a KKK Grand Wizard. This plot and Everett’s efforts to convince Penny to give him another chance come together in an excruciatingly long scene at another rally, which Everett and the boys have snuck into disguised as a hillbilly band. And then once that seems to have resolved their marital problems and humiliated Stokes for being a racist worm, there’s this whole coda with the sheriff and the flood that also feels like it will never end. I was praying for sweet release by the time the credits rolled.

I think the election plotline is ill-conceived because it has so little to do with our main characters but I would probably forgive it if it were funny. The main problem with this movie is it’s just not very funny. Clooney gets a lot of elaborate speeches with over-the-top vocabulary choices but for once the Coens have neglected the rest of their cast. Turturro is totally wasted as Pete; his job is to be sulky and withdrawn the entire film. Hunter has nothing to do as Penny. The film’s other great sin is turning faithful, ingenious Penelope into a resentful shrew with no other personality. Other little comic episodes like their run-in with the bank robber George “Babyface” Nelson are mostly head-scratchers—I’m unclear on what the joke is and the part where he tommy guns some cows for no reason is actively unpleasant.

Scenes often have a lot of dead air. This is the Coens’ weakest script so far. Characters state what’s going on or what needs to be done without anything humorous being added, which is perhaps a problem inherent to an episodic adventure narrative. O Brother is enlightening for illustrating the danger the Coens constantly put themselves in with their scattershot plotting. Lebowski would be exhausting if it weren’t so consistently funny. The minute I stop laughing I’m checking my watch.

The film’s saving grace is Clooney. He’s a natural with the Coens’ signature dense dialogue. As I watched him sweet-talk his way through each scene, wryly above it all, somehow simultaneously unruffled and totally ruffled, I wondered, “Is the entire Clooney persona just Odysseus?” Obviously Clooney had been in a number of prominent films prior to this—From Dusk Till Dawn and Three Kings come to mind—but we cannot underrate the work O Brother did to establish the Clooney archetype (to be solidified by Ocean’s Eleven the following year, obvi). Perhaps it’s not a coincidence then that Clooney became their most reliable leading man. Despite developing their deep bench of supporting actors, the Coens tend to be one-and-done with their male stars. But Clooney returned for Intolerable Cruelty, Burn After Reading, and Hail, Caesar!.

In fact, I think this is another under-appreciated quality of the Coen Brothers’ oeuvre. There are so many actors who owe their actorly identities to defining roles in their films. I cannot count the number of projects that have cast Nic Cage clearly hoping they can have H.I. McDonough from Raising Arizona without writing Raising Arizona. When Steve Buscemi shows up on 30 Rock to say “How do you do fellow kids,” he’s doing something in between Carl Showalter from Fargo and Donnie from Lebowski. In The Righteous Gemstones John Goodman plays a prosperity gospel huckster man of God, a template the Coens built in this very film! Jeff Bridges is The Dude!

The other major element of this movie of course is the music. Its mix of blues, gospel, and bluegrass was put together by music producer T-Bone Burnett, who assembled a stellar group of performers to record it including Ralph Stanley, Norman Blake, Alison Krauss, Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch, the Cox Family, the Whites, Chris Thomas King (who plays their fourth bandmate Tommy Johnson), and the Fairfield Four (who play the gravediggers at the end). I really don’t know who any of these people are (my dad is screaming right now). Joel described the process of selecting and working with them:

A lot of them were people that we knew and like and are fans of… But they were brought in by T-Bone. At an early stage we decided what music we wanted. Then T-Bone brought in a lot of different people who all played and sang together. And we got a feeling for who was right. But it was a great experience, meeting all these people and hearing them play. It was unbelievable.

This music is not really my vibe but I know I’m an outlier here. I’m told the soundtrack sells to this day. Clooney and Turturro are fully lipsynched throughout but Nelson, not a trained singer, performed one of the songs himself. Did he do his own singing in Buster Scruggs? I leave googling that as an exercise for the reader. The Sirens voices are done by Krauss, Harris, and Welch. My favorite song in the movie is the one over the montage directly preceding that scene, which I presume is their voices as well.

The Coens typically have such an eye on the past we don’t think of them as technologically minded filmmakers but O Brother is notable for being one of the first films to be digitally color-corrected, to give it its semi-sepia color palette. Let’s be honest: movie looks like shit. It’s been desaturated in the wrong way somehow, a way that has pulled the vividness out of the imagery leaving it looking amorphous, sickly, and grey. Based on a YouTube video a friend showed me once where the guy made the Marvel movies look significantly better just by punching up the contrast on the black, I suspect the problem is they desaturated the black along with the color. It really does the movie and the actors no favors. I’m sorry but Holly Hunter looks like a corpse.

The Coens mentioned in an interview for Lebowski that the shot in The Dude’s dream of him floating down the bowling lane under the legs of all the women had to be constructed in the computer because there was no way to actually shoot it. Along with the color correction, O Brother is the Coens’ furthest foray into playing with the computer. There’s the shot at the end after the floodwaters crash over the characters where the camera holds still under the unnaturally blue water and we watch a bunch of stuff float by—a tire, the sheriff’s dog, cans and cans of Dapper Dan pomade. It sucks! It’s a bunch of CGI crap for the sake of unfunny gags. I thank God they pulled back from the brink and didn’t follow the Ang Lee/Robert Zemeckis/James Cameron path of wasting their careers fiddling with mo-cap and framerates and dead-eyed uncanny valley Tom Hanks.

But those floodwaters are worth something. They happen because the Tennessee Valley Authority is rerouting water as part of its project of southern electrification. Everett, reflecting on this, says, “The south is going to change. Everything is going to be put on electricity… Out with the old spiritual mumbo-jumbo, the superstitions, and the backward ways! We’re going to see a brave new world where they run everybody a wire and hook us all up to a grid. Yessir, a veritable Age of Reason.” I think this is beautiful and perfect. This is the essence of The Odyssey. I have always held that The Odyssey is about the end of the age of wonders and the dawn of the age of men, ironic of course for what we might call the original fantasy novel. Unlike the other heroes of the Trojan War, many of whom, like Achilles, were demigods, or could trace their ancestry back to the gods, Odysseus is merely mortal. Despite enjoying Athena’s favor and being cursed by Poseidon’s rage, Odysseus seems a distinctly less devout religious subject than his Trojan War compatriots who immolated hecatombs of cattle to Zeus. Having sailed the Aegean and looked upon the wonders of the mythological age, his last task is to beach his boat and carry his oar to a place where the people have never seen the sea and plant it in the earth, a gesture my old tutor Natalie Elliot perceptively reads as erecting the first fencepost. In the Iliad, the gods appeared to mortals in their full splendor; the haunting final lines of the Odyssey describe Athena visiting Odysseus in the guise of his old teacher Mentor. With that fencepost will come the rise of agriculture, new forms of hierarchy, and a diminished place for the miraculous, or rather, new forms of miracles, like electrification. Odysseus always looked toward a brighter future. So too does Ulysses Everett McGill.

Stray Notes

The title, btw, comes from the Preston Sturges film Sullivan’s Travels, where it’s the book about the hardship of life in the south that Sullivan wants to adapt into a film.

Not to be a bummer but the speech Stokes gives at the Klan rally is indistinguishable from the rhetoric we hear from prominent government officials on a daily basis now.

John Goodman playing a loquacious salesman with murder in his heart—Big Dan is just Charlie Meadows from Barton Fink!

The boys perform at the radio station in order to get paid a day rate—sing, get paid, end of story. This is the same deal Llewyn makes when he records “Please Mr. Kennedy in Inside Llewyn Davis. He has no claim to any royalties, which hurts badly when the song becomes a hit. In O Brother, their song also becomes a hit and record labels are trying to track them down to sign them. I had never noticed that the plot mechanics are exactly the same but here it provides a happy ending whereas next time it will be a devastating missed opportunity. This film is about the blues, Llewyn Davis is about folk. This film is the Odyssey, that film might just be something else… We’ll talk about that when the time comes.