O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) Review
8/10
Three convicts escape a Mississippi chain gang in 1937 chained together at the ankle. Everett has told them there’s treasure. There’s 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 film is held together by a man who can’t 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.
This is the Coen comedy I find easiest to love. Clooney talks himself into and out of trouble like a man selling encyclopedias to a chain gang, the songs are good enough that I’d listen to the film with my eyes closed, and the film has a warmth I didn’t expect from a story about three convicts. The 8 is where it sits because a couple of the Odyssey stops feel like homework.
The Adaptation Nobody Read
The credits state it’s based on Homer. The Coens said repeatedly that they hadn’t read the Odyssey, and whether that’s 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’s 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. That 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’s 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. Delmar isn’t stupid and Everett isn’t right, and the film declines to adjudicate between them.
The baptism is the scene I’d show anyone who doubts this film. Delmar’s serene certainty that a river wiped his slate clean kills me, and Everett’s legal objection is the best line reading in the picture.
Taking the structure of an old story and none of its content is the most productive form of adaptation available. The shape supplies momentum and the new setting supplies everything the reader will really notice. The failure mode is reverence. An adaptation that preserves the source’s specifics inherits its priorities, and those priorities belonged to a different audience with different assumptions. Test it by asking what a reader who doesn’t know the source would experience. Here they’d experience a comedy about three escaped convicts. That’s the correct answer.
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’re on the run and unaware of it.
That’s an elegant piece of construction, and it’s the plot mechanic I admire most in the film. The thing they did casually for eight dollars each is the thing that saves them at the end, and it’s 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 beautiful and the men are 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 tone nobody around him uses, deploys words he’s clearly acquired from reading, and is constantly correcting people who aren’t listening.
The pomade is the running gag and it’s doing character work. A man on the run from a chain gang who won’t use a different brand of hair product, and who checks his hair in a window while being pursued, is a man the film has established completely.
Turturro and Nelson play the other two as simple instead of as comic idiots. That 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’s 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.
A verbose character is funny when nobody around him understands the tone and the story never acknowledges the gap. The moment another character remarks on his vocabulary, the joke becomes shared and stops working. Give the vanity a physical object. The pomade converts a character trait into a running action with plot consequences. That’s more useful than any number of lines about vanity.
Differentiate your comic ensemble by what they believe instead of by how stupid they are. Three fools who are foolish in the same direction are one character with three bodies.
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 isn’t. 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 reads as a period photograph, and the film looks like the documentary images of the era it’s set in. I think the grading is the single best decision anyone made on this film, and I’d forgive every lazy imitation that followed for the sake of this original.
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. That’s 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’s the one who will be killed if this goes wrong. The joke is never at his expense. The Klan number is the scene where I hold my breath, and the Coens deserve every laugh in it. They keep the joke pointed at the robes and the choreography, and they never let me forget whose life is on the line. The flood at the end is the other tonal risk. A valley is drowned for a dam, the man who ordered it presents it as progress, and the film lets the ending be both a rescue and the erasure of everywhere they’ve been. The blind man on the railcar bookends it. He tells them at the start that they’ll 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.
Broad comedy can carry serious material if the target is precise. The rally is funny because the ritual is absurd, the threat inside it’s never treated as a joke, and the rule is that the person in danger is never the one being laughed at.
A comic world still needs a floor. If nothing can go badly wrong, the jokes have no weight, and this film keeps a real lynching about four feet below the surface of a musical number.
Endings that are at the same time a resolution and a loss are worth reaching for. The flood saves them and destroys everything, and the film refuses to pick one.
Should you watch O Brother, Where Art Thou??
Yes, and listen to it as much as watch it. It’s an 8 because most of the episodes land and a couple feel like the writers ticking boxes off Homer’s list. Clooney wouldn’t change his hair product to save his neck, the soundtrack became more famous than the film it came from, and I’d happily take both over most comedies of their decade.
