Hey folks, Harry here... sigh... O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU is apparently opening this weekend in the UK.... ARGH!!!! Now I feel the sting of an ocean (literally) of time (Figuratively) between me and the film I'm dying to see. After reading this review... I'm shaking in anticipation. I've read the script... and remember crying like a child as though the evil uncle was tickling ya to the point of self-urination. Hopefully I won't have to wait too long... I might just have to leap an ocean... if I must.
Harry.
Heres the Oh Brother review:
It barely needs to be stated that The Coen Bothers are film-makers steeped in movies. Over the course of their career they have carved out an alternate universe where (mainly American) film genres all get very precisely mixed up and combined to create works of outstanding entertainment and technical skill. From BLOOD SIMPLE onwards, each of their films rests archly on a specific bed of references and sly jokes. O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU is no excpetion, it takes its title from the film-within-the-film in Preston Sturges 1941 comedy SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS. In that film, a Hollywood director sick of making comedies goes on the road to research poverty for his supposed masterpiece called O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU– and ends up on a chain-gang realising that actually slapstick comedy is the thing that people want to watch.
The Coens have taken a typically freewheeling approach to this source, so that their O BROTHER is slapstick comedy with some chain-gang scenes. Its also very much infused with the spirit of Sturges, who for those who don’t know, wrote some of the funniest, fastest and most brilliantly inventive dialogue in American Cinema. The Coen boys have always had a yen for Sturges, most explicitly in the 40’s screwball stylings of THE HUDSUCKER PROXY, but O BROTHER is where they really go for it and crank out that fast-paced wit, with the dialogue constantly surprising you, and hitting you with so many gags, you almost want to rewind some scenes to make sure you got everything. They also borrow the satirical, political edge of Sturges’ best work and feed that into the plot, not to mention the way they use a constantly expanding repertory of great actors who are utterly on their wavelength (Johns Turturro and Goodman, Charles Durning, Holly Hunter), the way Sturges used people like Rudy Vallee and William Demarest…
The other couple of big reference points for O BROTHER are Homer’s Oddysey, the ancient Greek ballad about Ulysees, a mythological dude who goes off to fight a war and gets stuck far from home and his wife, and on his way back he stumbles into some incredible adventures – involving prophecy, seductive sirens, a cyclops and loads more besides. Now the Coen’s have figured Oddysey for a damn good road movie and tell us from the outset that they’ve freely plundered from the classical yarn. It may also just be their little joke that Ethan gets to share writing credit with someone who’s just called Homer.
To make things a little bit more interesting, O BROTHER is also a quasi-musical. The story is ingeniously laced with characters singing “old timey” country and western, folk, blues, and hymns, which fits in perfectly with the steaming hot, slightly surreal atmosphere of the movie.
The Plot: Fast-talking Ulysees Everett McGill is on the run from Johnny Law in the deep south at some point in the early 1920’s. McGill takes with him his buddies from the chain-gang Pete (John Turturro) and Delmar (Time Blake Nelson), who believe McGill is taking them back to his homestead where he’s buried some treasure that’s going to make their fortunes. McGill, like his Greek counterpart is also returning home to reclaim his wife (Holly Hunter) who is on the verge of remarrying.
Ulysees is played here by someone called George Clooney, who’s made up to look quite a lot like Clark Gable, but has a style and patter that is very much his own creation. George turns in a superb, eye-rolling, self-mocking performance as a particularly vain and frequently stupid hero. McGill believes completely in his “gift of the gab”, and doesn’t hesitate to demonstrate his skills. His spiritual cyncism and fondness for “Dapper Dan” hair pomade provide plenty of opportunities for banter and sparring with his two comrades. They’re perfectly cast with Turturro as the aggressive one, and Nelson being the sweet one.
The trio un-maliciously lie, steal and cheat their way across the wide open spaces of the South, running into trouble in the shape of a manic-depressive Baby Face Nelson, the aforementioned seductive Sirens, the Ku Klux Klan, and plenty of other stuff, while being pursued by a some particularly noose-happy troopers. As usual the Coens effortlessly sketch in the backdrop. Rural America is in the grips of depression, radio as a form of mass communication is in its infancy, and ‘the south’ is torn politically between the corrupt boss Papa O Daniel (superb, blustering Charles Durning) and the supposed reformist politician, a guy who campaigns alongside a dwarf and a broom. Inevitably these highly comic political wranglings crucially intersect with our boys progress towards the final stages of their quest.
Early on they meet up with a Robert Johnson-esque blues guitarist and raise cash by recording a marvellous country number in a radio shack called “I’m A Man Of Constant Sorrow”, under the name The Soggy Bottom Boys (on account of them being wet), which unbeknownst to them becomes a rapid-fire hit across the region.
OK, aside from the dazzling dialogue and a lot of action, we’ve got all of the Coens’ favourite motifs in place. There’s plenty of dogs, a shed-load of cows, and many fat men yelling. There is a recurring wise prophet and a satanic state trooper with fire burning in his shades, there’s machine guns, a bank robbery and all manner of bizarre and funny details and images that you’d expect from the Coens. Its an ‘entertainment’ in the mode of LEBOWSKI, and as usual with their work, there’s no point in reading too heavily into it. It’s a lot of rollicking good fun, and quite often its breathtakingly clever, funny and visually magnificent all at the same time.
The nearest I’ll dare come to analysing this film is by observing that ultimately the reference in the title is a neat comment on how unlike so many directors/writer/actors who try to get serious after they feel they’ve done the lightweight stuff, The Coens are happy to keep making us laugh like drains, and keep doing it brilliantly.
Finis
Ben Chip
