Nathan's Movie Collection: O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)
"Even if that did put you square with the Lord, the State of Mississippi's a little more hard-nosed."
Note: Most of these movies have been around for a considerable amount of time, so assume there will be spoilers all throughout.
This one was released in the year 2000, which means we’re finally getting to the movies that have come out since I was born (1990). This is one of the movies I have watched the most times to the point where I can almost lip-synch along with it, which I wouldn’t do if we were watching together because that would be really annoying. The movie is O Brother, Where Art Thou?.
I think I was fifteen when I saw this for the first time. It was my first Coen Brothers movie, although at the time I had no idea who the Coen brothers were. I did know who George Clooney was, so to me, it was a George Clooney movie. And since none of the humor landed with me, it was a bad George Clooney movie. I’ve since gone on a journey with the Coens and have come back around to say it’s a very funny Coens/Clooney movie and now one of my favorites of all time.
The Coen Brothers are my number one filmmakers with a bullet, so much so that all of Nathan’s Movie Collection could easily just be their entire filmography, even The Ladykillers. The movie is unbelievably weird, and it doesn’t get less weird each time I watch it. Coen diehards might be questioning my choosing O Brother over more celebrated titles like Fargo or The Big Lebowski when discussing my love of the Coens. The short answer is that Fargo is a masterpiece that doesn’t need my praise (same with their other masterpiece No Country for Old Men) and Lebowski is a fun, properly-rated romp that runs out of steam halfway through. I’m gonna throw my phone into the ocean now.
I spent a long time writing several paragraphs trying to explain why I love Joel and Ethan Coen’s movies and immediately hit BACKSPACE for a very long time when I remembered this funny Letterboxd review for Blood Simple, their debut, that says it all in one sentence: “Sometimes I watch a movie and think I’d be very good at crime, but when I watch a Coen brothers movie I am reminded that if I ever did a crime, I would definitely be dead or in jail.” Things are a lot messier in reality and that’s where the humor comes from in a Coen brothers movie. The first movie of theirs I watched and knew going in to be a Coen Brothers movie was No Country, a movie that basically rearranged my brain. I remember watching that early scene in the police precinct and basically holding my breath for the rest of the movie on. I was always scared of gore and violence and while I still don’t really go for anything particularly brutal, I could deal with the way it’s handled in No Country. It’s never a spectacle; it’s always abrupt and disorienting.
The protagonists of O Brother make to the end alive, even if it’s unclear if they’ve learned anything from their whole ordeal. Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney), Pete (John Turturro), and Delmar O'Donnell (Tim Blake Nelson) are convicts in 1930’s Mississippi who’ve escaped from a chain gang. Loosely adapted from Homer’s Odyssey1, Everett takes Pete and Delmar on a wild goose chase looking for a hidden treasure. They go up against law enforcement, sirens, a mentally unhinged bank robber, a violent Bible salesman, and eventually the literal Ku Klux Klan. Along the way, they also meet Tommy Johnson, a blues musician that gets them into a recording studio. There they become the Soggy Bottom Boys and record “I Am A Man of Constant Sorrow,” which becomes important later in the story when the law catches up to them once again.
This is the first of four movies George Clooney’s made with the Coen’s thus far, the others being Intolerable Cruelty, Burn After Reading, and Hail Caesar!2 The year after this, Ocean’s Eleven came out, which is the image I had of George Clooney in my head when I watched O Brother for the first time, so I was probably reacting to him playing against type. He gets dogged a lot for appearing almost too eager to play the clown in a Coen Brothers movie, but I think that energy is appropriate for characters like Ulysses Everett McGill, a charmer who never shuts the hell up. The big reveal later is that there is no hidden treasure: Everett talked both men into breaking out with him so he could stop his estranged wife from getting remarried. A grand quest spurned by petty jealousy. Also, he was imprisoned for practicing law without a license, not knocking over an armored car like he’d led the other two to believe. This revelation enrages Pete and leads to one of the best exchanges in the movie, punctuated perfectly by the great Tim Blake Nelson:
PETE: I had two weeks left on my sentence…
EVERETT: I couldn’t wait two weeks! She’s getting married tomorrow!
PETE: With my added time for the escape, I don't get out now 'til 1987...
EVERETT: Now I am sorry about that.
PETE: I'll be…eighty-four years old.
DELMAR: I guess they'll tack on fifty years for me too.
EVERETT: Boys, we was chained together. I had tell you something! Busting out alone was not an option!
PETE: Eighty-four years old.
DELMAR (cheerfully): Well, I’ll only be eighty-two!
While the critical reception to the movie was so-so, the T-Bone Burnett-produced soundtrack was a hit and what ultimately got me to appreciate O Brother more. It was recorded before filming started, so it was always going to be a major component of the story, not just something cobbled together to sell the movie. There’s a very cool story about “Po’ Lazarus,” the prison work song we hear at the very beginning of the movie. The original singer was James Carter, a prisoner in the Mississippi State Penitentiary who was recorded by Alan Lomax and Shirley Collins in 1959 leading a group of prisoners singing “Po ’Lazarus.” This recording was licensed for use in the O Brother soundtrack, prompting Lomax’s daughter to track down Carter, who’d worked for years as a shipping clerk after getting out of prison and didn’t remember having recorded the song. He was paid $20,000 and credited on the soundtrack as “James Carter and the Prisoners.”
I don’t think this is the best Coen Brothers movie, but if I want to throw something on that’s fun and goes down smooth, O Brother is what I go with. It’s a shaggy dog story, like Lebowski, so it’s fun to not worry about the plot and just vibe with the movie, as the kids have been known to say. I guess what I’m trying to say is that this is my Big Lebowski.
Having now googled “homers odyssey what happens in it”, I get most of the references now. Although I do remember hearing the Coens admit in a Fresh Air interview that they hadn’t read The Odyssey. But they are also known to screw around in interviews, so it’s hard to tell if they were joking or not. As you watch the movie though, it becomes clear that none of that is important to understand.
Technically, there’s a fifth collaboration, Suburbicon, which is Clooney directing a discarded Coen Brothers script. I haven’t seen it but from what I hear, there’s probably a reason they put the script back in the drawer.
Great stuff as always Nathan!