**½/**** Image A+ Sound A
starring George Clooney, John Turturro, Time Blake Nelson, Charles Durning
screenplay by Ethan Coen & Joel Coen
directed by Joel Coen
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover We can start by making two things perfectly clear. One: despite an opening credit to the contrary, the new Coen Brothers opus, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, has almost nothing to do with Homer's Odyssey–a few episodes notwithstanding, the bulk of the film is radically different from the great classical work. Two: it bears only a passing resemblance to the films of Preston Sturges, whose Sullivan's Travels provides the title; a ridiculous deus ex machina ending aside, it has none of the affection–if all of the wildness–of that writer-director's memorable oeuvre. So, having been smokescreened by these red-herring references, you have to ask: If it has nothing to do with Homer or Sturges, what the heck does it have to do with?
Having asked that, we must note that we are already deep in the thickets of Coen country, surrounded by the enemy fire of multiple simulacra that cuts off any hope of escape from the sprawling symbolic system that has made the boys in charge gods to hipster kids and movie freaks the world over. So vast and dense is it that it leaves the audience at once overstimulated and bewildered; faced with a level of imagery that goes off like a string of firecrackers, one either commits totally to the sensory pleasures of the film–and thus relents to the sometimes questionable nature of the imagery–or goes through hoops trying to figure out what the whole thing means, shortchanging oneself of the film's very tactile pleasures. The Coens themselves yield no signposts in the riddle of the care and feeding of their contradictory films, which feature intellectually precise anti-intellectualism, an apparently mad dash through slapstick and stereotypes that is in fact a carefully worked-out series of symbols fulfilling a very definite belief system. But what sort of system? And how to separate that system from the distractions of their form?
To demonstrate the difficulty in approaching the Coens intellectually, let us consider their latest. Set in the 1930s, O Brother, Where Art Thou? deals with three escapees from the same Mississippi chain gang: Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney) is the de facto leader, guiding his somewhat dim partners Pete (John Turturro) and Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson) to what he claims is a treasure of $1.2 million. Getting to it, however, proves to be more difficult than they had imagined: not only do they have to elude the authorities who come hot on their heels, but they face an enormous obstacle course of freaks, criminals, and siren-like lasses who threaten to derail the project of the escapees. Their failure to reach the treasure is even foretold by a black seer they encounter near the beginning of the film, and the episodic nature of the whole enterprise serves mostly to thwart the forward motion of our heroes in their quest for the hidden million-plus.
This situation is only fitting for a trio of Coen protagonists. Plans of any sort are anathema to the Coen Brothers. As their most popular film, Fargo, served to tell us, people with plans generally live to see them blow up in their faces. So our heroes must find their salvation some other way, one which is less willed than happened-upon. Having picked up a black hitchhiker named Johnson (Chris Thomas King) in their stolen jalopy–naturally, he's sold his soul to the devil for blues guitar greatness–the boys cut a record for a tiny radio station at $10 apiece, simply for the short-term cash. But the record goes on to sell like crazy throughout the state, prompting the question of where "The Soggy Bottom Boys" can be found. So a chance encounter yields an unexpected result, blazing new conceptual trails and opening new possibilities for those who can see where those trails lead. For the most part, the film shows how the thwarting of the heroes' quest ultimately turns out to be beneficial, every obstacle–from the one-eyed Bible salesman (John Goodman) who beats and robs them to the sirens who distract the boys and turn Pete over to the police–teaching them to embrace the deliberate workings of fate and to place their trust in higher powers.
The problem with this, however, is that it has the effect of justifying the status quo of the world in which they live. This is nowhere more apparent than in O Brother, Where Art Thou?'s juxtaposition of two candidates for the governor of Mississippi, Pappy O'Daniel (Charles Durning) and Homer Stokes (Wayne Duvall). O'Daniel, the incumbent, is getting creamed in the polls by Stokes, whose populism and down-home directness have greater appeal than the stagnant, cronyist sentiments of O'Daniel's campaign. For most of the film, we watch Pappy harangue his campaign mangers and his obese and idiotic son about how inept they are, while Stokes engages in corny but effective theatre in his attempt to reach out to the little man. But Stokes has a secret–which I obviously can't reveal here–that disqualifies him for audience sympathy, and O'Daniel picks up the slack by getting our boys out of a tough jam. Thus the business-as-usual of the questionable O'Daniel government is justified by its links to the natural order of things, which are by definition immovable and eternal. Change–which would require the kind of forward motion the filmmakers tend to deride–is also anathema to the Coens, who do everything but invoke the Force in their belief in something big that control us all.
This, of course, brings us to the stereotyping that is the hallmark and curse of the Coens' filmography. While they can perhaps get around the label of bigots–they have been just as eager to mock their own roots in their films, to the point of creating nebbishy and/or venal Jews in Barton Fink and comical Minnesotans in Fargo–the use of the stereotype and their attendant mannerisms serve to rebuke the characters in the same manner that overweening ambition does. The quirks that make up those actions, gestures and mannerisms that create the stereotype suggest the permanence of one's location; if one cannot transcend the environment that created those tics, then the whole notion of free will is thrown away, burlesqued by the filmmakers by the hilarious prison of learned behaviour that denotes the limits of experience. For the Coens, they are one more indication that planning is a false dream. As they pile up the characters' involuntary tics, they undercut everyone's pretensions to being masters of their own fate.
This is never stated directly, mind you. The film practices what it preaches by not preaching at all, piling on the stylistic elan and sensuous surfaces in an attempt to attain the trance-like state that the Coen character tries to achieve. The filmmakers are exacting in their (largely bogus) details, from the articulation of the stereotypes and cliches of the milieu to the soothing, hypnotic bluegrass on the soundtrack; from the digitally tweaked greenery that surrounds the open road to the high amount of referencing that goes on; and from the resonances of Homer and the invocation of Sturges to the intrusions of Baby-Face Nelson and a Robert Johnson clone. And it all works like crazy: you are immediately drawn into the sensual maelstrom of the film, which surrounds you with so much information you can't process it all at once. For sensual overload, you can't beat the Coens, and they make O Brother, Where Art Thou? a thrilling, if minor, ride to take. Originally published: February 10, 2001.
THE DVD
In the past week, I've watched two of 2001's December theatrical releases for the second time, on DVD, and my estimation of both–O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Cast Away–has improved. Maybe I'm just a sucker for good video… Somehow "good" doesn't begin to suggest what you're in for with Buena Vista's DVD transfer of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which is far and away the best-looking non-Pixar/non-animated title I've seen from the corporation's myriad sub-divisions. As is explained in a bonus featurette called "Painting with Pixels" (9 mins.), cinematographer Roger Deakins (who's interviewed) employed a new in-computer process of colour timing the footage he shot, bypassing the lab until release prints were made, and I suspect what you're seeing on this disc is a direct-to-digital rendering. I noticed a single imperfection, a fleeting nick on the source print during The Soggy Bottom Boys' recording session, and that it draws attention to itself should indicate how flawless the 2.35:1, 16×9-enhanced presentation really is.
Touchstone has included DTS and Dolby Digital configurations for the film's playful 5.1 mix. While the former is louder, it's tough to tell them apart: I suppose the music sounds a bit 'brighter' in DD mode (a bad thing), and the collapse of a burning cross that's meant to fill the room sounds extra encompassing–less focused at the front mains–in DTS. Though irrelevant, bass is barely extant outside of the "I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow" reprise. Trailers for The Crew and Unbreakable start automatically upon inserting the disc. As for non-default supps: the aforementioned doc; another, more straightforward nine-minute making-of (wherein the Coens call O Brother, Where Art Thou?, "The Lawrence of Arabia of hayseed movies"); two sets of J. Todd Anderson's storyboards–a multi-angle feature that also allows you to view them in conjunction with how they were eventually shot; additional previews for O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Bounce; and the unimaginative video for "I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow." (It's very similar to the film's trailer.) Overall, this is the best Coen Brothers DVD yet.
103 minutes; PG-13; 2.35:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, English DTS 5.1; CC; Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Touchstone
