|
o
brother, where art thou? |
director
Joel Coen
screenwriters
Ethan Coen
Joel Coen
producer
Ethan Coen
cinematographer
Roger Deakins
music
T-Bone Burnett
Carter Burwell
editors
"Roderick Jaynes" (the Coens)
Tricia Cooke
cast
George Clooney (Ulysses Everett McGill)
John Turturro (Pete)
Tim Blake Nelson (Delmar O'Donnell)
John Goodman (Big Dan Teague)
Holly Hunter (Penny McGill)
Chris Thomas King (Tommy Johnson)
Charles Durning (Governor O'Daniel)
Del Pentecost (Junior O'Daniel)
Michael Badalucco ('Babyface' Nelson)
Lee Weaver (Blind Seer on Handcar)
Stephen Root (Lund)
Gillian Welch (Voice of Siren)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 106m
u.s.
release: December 22,
2000
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official website
other coen
bros. films
reviewed on this website:
- barton
fink
- the
big lebowski
- blood
simple
- fargo
- the
hudsucker proxy
- intolerable
cruelty
- the
ladykillers
- the
man who wasn't there
- miller's
crossing
- raising
arizona
|
I
sincerely hope that the inventive Joel and Ethan Coen aren't
tormented by their biggest success, Fargo,
for the rest of their lives. The Coens have bent over backwards
not to repeat themselves; their follow-up to the frozen, rigorous
Fargo turned out to be the amiable shaggy-dog Raymond
Chandler goof The
Big Lebowski, which annoyed some fans because ... it
wasn't Fargo. Their new one, O Brother, Where Art Thou?,
may already be suffering from non-Fargo-itis (the critics
have been unkind). Actually, the most relevant comparison to
O Brother in the Coen portfolio is the slaphappy, yodelling
Raising
Arizona; and, yep, it's not Raising Arizona, either.
On its own loopy terms, though, it worked for me.
Someone at Universal decided to give the Coens a lot of money
to recreate Depression-era Mississippi, right down to the period
clothing on every extra in the crowd shots. If nothing else,
O Brother is big Hollywood entertainment seen through
an indie lens (which, for this film -- a first for the Coens
-- is super-wide Panavision, the better to get that epic feeling).
Based, so we're told, on Homer's The Odyssey, the story
tracks three escaped chain-gang inmates -- Ulysses McGill (George
Clooney), Pete (John Turturro), and Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson)
-- on their quest to find some loot buried by Ulysses ("a
million-point-two dollars," we hear repeatedly, in a possible
spoof on box-office numerology).
If we're to have an anecdotal sketchbook movie, we might as well
unleash the Coens on it; they still bang out the most elaborately
eccentric dialogue never heard outside a Coen film (George
Clooney grins almost nonstop, aware that he's reading the deftest
wordplay of his career since snarling his way through Quentin
Tarantino's From
Dusk Till Dawn script), and they give their three heroes
three movies' worth of vivid, freshly minted characters to run
across during their journey. Some, like John Goodman's Cyclops-like
salesman and a trio of bathing, bewitching beauties, are imported
from Homer and given the Coen once-over; others, like soul-selling
guitarist Tommy Johnson (Chris Thomas King) and George "Baby-Face"
Nelson (Michael Badalucco), are postcards from the Depression.
O Brother is simply the Coens luxuriating in a period
setting and having a great time. Critics who dislike the Coens
always slam them for making fun of the characters and worlds
they so painstakingly build, but I've never gotten that sense
from their work; you either accept the Coens' deadpan-absurdist
sensibility or you don't, and their characters, for me, are never
quirky just for the sake of quirkiness. Even a borderline-slapstick
farce like O Brother, whose most memorable moments include
a Ku Klux Klan sequence that suggests an unholy union of Busby
Berkeley and Leni Riefenstahl, lavishes care and attention on
the kind of faces you'll never see in a typical youth-appeal
thriller starring Ryan Phillippe.
Whether it's a man apparently turned into a toad, a picnic that
turns into a beating worthy of WWF Smackdown, or a chain-gang
brought en masse to a movie and taking their seats in
perfect synchronicity, the Coens enjoy every bit of weirdness
they put on the screen. Nor do they make fun of the wall-to-wall
bluegrass music, which, as supervised by T-Bone Burnett, comes
to seem like the movie's heart and soul, approaching something
like grace even when our heroes are singing (as "the Soggy
Bottom Boys") while smothered in ridiculous fake beards.
I wouldn't rank O Brother, Where Art Thou? as the Coens'
best work (for me, Miller's
Crossing has yet to be unseated); then again, I wouldn't
rank it as their worst, either, perhaps because they have yet
to make a "worst" film. Least best, maybe? Let's just
say the Coens are still doing what they do, and nobody else is
doing anything remotely like it. |