O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) Review

Three convicts escape a Mississippi chain gang in 1937 chained together at the ankle. Everett has told them there is treasure. There is no treasure. His wife is about to marry somebody else and he needs to get home before the valley is flooded.

The 8 is for a comedy with an unusual amount of structure underneath it. Every episode is a set piece with its own logic, the songs are diegetic and drive the plot, and the whole thing is held together by a man who cannot stop talking.

What keeps it from higher is that the episodic construction occasionally shows. A few sequences exist because the source structure requires an equivalent, and those are the ones where the film feels like it is completing a list.

The Adaptation Nobody Read

The credits state it is based on Homer. The Coens said repeatedly that they had not read the Odyssey, and whether that is true matters less than what it produced.

What the film takes is the shape instead of the content. A man trying to get home, delayed by episodes, a wife with suitors, a blind prophet, sirens, a one-eyed man, and a journey that is really about the delay.

That looseness is the reason it works. An adaptation faithful to the text would have to carry the text’s priorities, and this one carries only the structure, which leaves the Depression South free to supply everything else.

The Delmar baptism scene is the method in one sequence. Two convicts watch a congregation walk into a river singing, one of them joins on impulse, and comes back believing he has been absolved of a crime he definitely committed.

Everett’s response is the joke that makes it. He explains that the state of Mississippi is unlikely to accept a river as a defense, and Delmar is entirely untroubled, because the two men are operating in entirely different systems and neither of them is ever going to persuade the other of anything, which is where the joke lives. Delmar is not stupid and Everett is not right, and the film declines to adjudicate between them.

The Music Is the Plot

They record a song for money at a rural radio station under a made-up name, and the record becomes a hit across the state while they are on the run and unaware of it.

That is a genuinely elegant piece of construction. The thing they did casually for eight dollars each is the thing that saves them at the end, and it is planted an hour before it pays.

T Bone Burnett assembled the music and most of it is period or period-derived, recorded live where possible, and none of it is scored over the action. Every song is somebody singing in the world of the film.

The soundtrack sold in the millions, won the Grammy for Album of the Year, and started a commercial revival of old-time American music that outlasted the film’s own reputation by a decade.

The sirens by the river are the best single use of it. Three women washing clothes and singing, filmed as a seduction with no menace in the sound at all, and the sequence works because the song is genuinely beautiful and the men are genuinely stupid.

Clooney Is Doing Comedy Properly

Everett McGill is vain, verbose, dishonest and entirely convinced of his own leadership, and Clooney plays him without a single wink at the audience.

The vocabulary is the joke. He speaks in an elaborate register nobody around him uses, deploys words he has clearly acquired from reading, and is constantly correcting people who are not listening.

The pomade is the running gag and it is doing character work. A man on the run from a chain gang who will not use a different brand of hair product, and who checks his hair in a window while being pursued, has been established completely.

Turturro and Nelson play the other two as genuinely simple instead of as comic idiots, which keeps the trio from becoming a routine. Delmar believes things, Pete resents things, and neither of them is stupid in the same way.

Holly Hunter gets four scenes as the wife and uses them to establish somebody considerably more formidable than her husband. She has invented a story about his death, is engaged to a man with prospects, and is entirely unmoved by the return of a person she describes as a suitor.

It Looks Like Nothing Else

Roger Deakins shot it and the film was one of the first features to have its color digitally graded throughout, pulling the green out of Mississippi summer to produce a dry, sepia-toned landscape.

The reason was that the location was verdant and the Depression South of the imagination is not. Instead of waiting for a season that would never come, they shot it and changed it afterward.

That decision has aged into a whole visual grammar. A great deal of what color grading became in the following two decades is downstream of this film, and most of it is worse.

What makes it work here is that the palette is doing something specific. It is not a mood, it is a period photograph, and the film looks like the documentary images of the era it is set in.

Deakins has said the process took months and was the first time a feature had been graded this way end to end. What it bought is a film where the sky, the dust and the cotton all belong to the same photograph, which is difficult to achieve on location and impossible to fake in a laboratory.

The Comedy Has a Floor

The film is broad and it contains a Klan rally staged as a Busby Berkeley musical number, a lynching interrupted, and a politician whose entire campaign is a performance.

The Klan sequence is the film’s riskiest and it works because the target is precise. The ceremony is choreographed, pompous, and full of men following a routine, and the comedy is about how seriously they take the pageantry.

Tommy Johnson, the guitarist they pick up at a crossroads, is the character the danger attaches to, and the film is clear that he is the one who will be killed if this goes wrong. The joke is never at his expense.

The flood at the end is the other tonal risk. A valley is drowned for a dam, which is presented as progress by the man who ordered it, and the film lets the ending be both a rescue and the erasure of everywhere they have been.

The blind man on the railcar bookends it. He tells them at the start that they will find a fortune, though not the one they seek, and the film delivers exactly that. A prophecy that comes true in a way nobody wanted is the oldest structure there is and it still works.

Should you watch O Brother, Where Art Thou??

Yes, and listen to it as much as watch it. A comedy built on a structure the writers claim not to have read, carried by a man who will not change his hair product, with a soundtrack that became more famous than the film it came from.

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