O Brother, Where Art Thou?

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by Sam Adams

There aren’t many directors who polarize critics and filmgoers as effortlessly as Joel and Ethan Coen. Without (apparently) courting controversy, their movies draw criticism as harsh as their admirers’ praise is ecstatic. They take heat for being smartasses, for reducing their characters to grotesques, for smirking at their audience, for making movies that are — as Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman recently charged, placing O Brother, Where Art Thou? at the top of his worst of 2000 list — "dehumanized." (Oddly, the lack of human emotion didn’t prevent him from including the distasteful Bamboozled in his year’s best.)

There are no absolutes in criticism, but I should mention up front that I’ve always found this argument to be complete and utter nonsense. Yes, the Coens make movies in high style, and occasionally lose themselves down a prettily decorated cul-de-sac. But even their most ornate, over-designed films — The Hudsucker Proxy, for example — have an emotional core belied by their occasional glibness.

It’s never been hard for viewers to be distracted by the Coens’ style, like children chasing after shiny objects. That’s what made Fargo their only unqualified critical and commercial success; stripping away nearly all of their characteristic traits, the Coens laid bare the sensitivity to character that had always been present in their films. O Brother, by contrast, offers plenty to tempt the wandering eye. Based (very loosely) on Homer’s Odyssey and set in Depression-era Mississippi, the film is crammed with cyclopean Bible salesmen, whip-smart ’30s-style dialogue and a KKK rally that looks suspiciously like a Busby Berkeley production number.

In the Coens’ hands, a period piece is not so much an opportunity to recreate a bygone era as it is a bygone style of filmmaking, and to explore the heady substance of movie-made myths. Balancing out the Homerian figures are the gangster Baby Face Nelson (Michael Badalucco), a bluesman (Chris Thomas King) who’s a dead ringer for Robert Johnson and a white-suited governor (Charles Durning) who looks like a cross between Huey Long and Col. Tom Parker.

Our guides through this cinematic Wonderland are a trio of escaped convicts — Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney, with Clark Gable moustache), Delmar O’Donnell (Tim Blake Nelson) and Pete Hogwallop (John Turturro) — who start out in search of "treasure" (a buried bank-heist haul) and end up careening through a series of disjointed misadventures before everything is (nearly) wrapped up Hollywood-style. Before the story’s over, they’ve not only seen most of the state of Mississippi, but they’ve been positioned at a critical juncture in American history.

O Brother begins with the image of black convicts breaking rocks on a chain gang, while the sound of James Carter and the Prisoners’ "Po Lazarus" — a modified field holler whose percussion is the simultaneous blows of dozens of sledgehammers — fills the air. The soundtrack then shifts to Harry McClintock’s "Big Rock Candy Mountain," and we see our trio of convicts scampering away from work detail. Later, after they’ve added the guitar-toting Tommy Johnson (King), they stop by a radio station where they’ve heard there’s "a man who’ll pay you ten dollars to sing into a can." The station’s engineer, a reptilian blind man (Stephen Root), immediately asks if the boys do any "Negro songs." A cagey Ulysses assures him that, in fact, they are Negroes (except for their accompanist). "I don’t record Negro songs," the radio man explains. "I’m looking for some old-timey material." That’s OK, Delmar shoots back: "We ain’t really Negroes!" "Except," Pete adds, "for our accompanist."

With its soundtrack, produced by T Bone Burnett, evenly split between country and blues, O Brother has much to do with the boundaries between "Negro" and "old-timey" music — and eventually with the assault on those boundaries. After being advised by O Brother’s Oracle, a blind black man on a railroad hand-cart, that they "will find a treasure, but not the one you seek," the convicts spend most of the film rambling around the countryside trying to get to Ulysses’ loot, unaware that the record they cut in the radio station is rapidly becoming a statewide sensation (just as unaware as their audience is that the "Soggy Bottom Boys" are an integrated group). The prize at the end of the convicts’ long road turns out not to be money at all (although there’s the implication that some is soon to follow) but the opportunity to play as what used to be called a "mixed-race group" in front of a white audience, and eventually to win them over.

In their previous films, the Coens have never made much of race, so it’s surprising that it’s so central an issue in O Brother. You can count on one hand the number of significant non-white characters in their films, and apart from Turturro’s Hispanic child molester in The Big Lebowski, the most memorable role was Hudsucker’s grizzled Ol’ Moses, who but for the veneer of genre would have seemed an unbearable stereotype. But if the Coens’ foray into strange territory isn’t always sure-footed — that KKK rally is a misstep, and one that’s already earned them quite a bit of ire — O Brother still comes off as a genuinely good-hearted paean to the joys of American cultural miscegenation. The Coens’ movies rarely have overt subjects, preferring to camouflage their themes with clever dialogue and film-buff stylings, but O Brother’s themes are fairly easy to decipher, even if much of the movie is still occupied with vaudeville-style routines and the Coens’ beloved screaming fat men.

Oddly enough, while O Brother is one of the Coens’ most lucid films, it’s also one of their most frivolous. (The convicts clearly share some DNA with the slow-witted jailbirds from Raising Arizona.) Especially towards the beginning, that frivolity can be frustrating, and their goofball humor is so arch and ironized that it less conveys humor than the idea of humor. But O Brother has a heart, and in that heart is a story about America: where we are, how we got there and the movies we watched along the way.

See the trailer!