O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) Review
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The Coens claimed to be adapting the Odyssey without having read it, which is either a joke or the most useful thing anybody has said…
Director: Ethan Coen
Ethan Coen worked as half of a directing partnership with his brother Joel for nearly four decades, sharing writing, directing and editing duties on all of it, with the editing credited to the invented name Roderick Jaynes. Their films won four Academy Awards for No Country for Old Men, including Best Picture and Best Director.
The Coen sensibility is recognisable within a scene: dialogue with a period cadence that nobody actually spoke, sudden violence played without music, and a fondness for characters explaining things at length to people not listening. Fargo, Barton Fink and Burn After Reading all run on that engine.
Since the partnership paused he has moved to documentary and to comedies made with his wife and longtime editor Tricia Cooke, which is a smaller and looser register than the work he is known for.
