O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU?
Kings of the Road
The brothers Coen wryly cite The Odyssey as the template for O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the latest in their loopy riffs on classic Hollywood genres which commenced in l983, with Blood Simple. The Coens' uncredited, to my mind more intriguing cinematic derivation is Sullivan's Travels (l94l), a curious blend of madcap comedy and social commentary by that inimitable master of the screwball film, Preston Sturges.
Sturges' eponymous hero is himself a director, disgusted with shooting assembly-line farces and musicals while America flouders in economic misery. Instead, he wants to make O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a searching depiction of life on the bum with the brotherhood of the road. Studio honchos sardonically advise him to stick to his usual lightweight fare, gibing that he's a child of wealth who knows zip about the poor (Sturges actually came from just such a priveleged background).
The chastened director promptly dons tramp duds and takes off to experience hobo existence at first hand. He ends up knocked on the head, amnesic and condemned to hard labor on a chain gang. After his rescue the studio seeks to profit from his newfound fame by undertaking O Brother, Where Art Thou? after all. Sullivan refuses; he's had a moment of truth while he and fellow inmates laughed their troubles away at a church movie night, watching Mickey Mouse cartoons. He'll keep on creating his signature zany comedies, implying they bring more happiness into a burdened world than the dreary "engaged" movies intent on reforming it.
The Coens' O Brother, Where Art Thou? articulates -- and pushes to a cockeyed limit -- the conventions of the Warner Brothers Depression era picture which the fictive Sullivan flatly refused to make (e.g., The Grapes of Wrath, I Was A Prisoner on A Chain Gang), with the hallmarks of Sullivan's Travels itself -- in which the quirky characters, improbable plot, ratatat dialogue of screwball comedy are informed by a dreamlike, surreal quality Sturges never achieved elsewhere. Other Coen references include the same period's road and gangster films, and The Wizard of Oz, of which more presently.
O Brother is also unique in the Coen oeuvre for its extraordinary lyricism. Music binds and interprets the narrative flow, such that the movie seems not only to show, but to sing itself out to the viewer. The score is a marvelous collection of period blues, work songs, jaunty gambling-man tunes, and old time gospel melodies of astonishingly pristine beauty.
O Brother opens upon a chain gang smashing rocks on a rural Mississippi road in the l930s. The camera pulls back to cover three linked convicts escaping through deep grass. Credits begin unrolling to the tune of "The Big Rock Candy Mountain", the famous hobo ballad in which a bum tells his buddies he's lighting off to a tramp Shangri-la, where "there's a lake of stew and whiskey too/you ride around in a big canoo". The Coens are subliminally telegraphing their project: reshaping Ulysses' mythic wanderings into a road trip through American tall-tale territory, towards a homely paradise yet unknown.
Short on common sense (often intelligence as well), Coen protagonists doggedly pursue some cracked scheme which inevitably goes awry. O Brother features a trio of typical Coen chuckleheads: Ulysses (!) Everett McGill (George Clooney), a small-time con artist whose ethics are oily as the Dapper Dan hair pomade with which he's obsessed; and his even more dimwitted companions, petty thieves Pete (John Turturro) and Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson).
McGill has convinced his partners that he masterminded a daring robbery; needs their help recovering the "treasure" he buried in a site that's about to be flooded by a New Deal dam project. Actually, he was arrested for impersonating a lawyer: he only busted his buddies out because he was fettered to them. He aspires to return to his home town, Ithaca, and his mulish wife, Penny (Holly Hunter), who has tired of his roving ways. Unlike her Homeric namesake, she's declared herself a widow, and is eager to marry a likely suitor so that her six -- soon to be seven -- children can have a reliable father.
The jailbird trio is nearly captured at a railroad siding when a handcar materializes, propelled by a grizzled, blind ancient. Driving them out of harm's way, he declaims: "You seek a great fortune, and you will not find the one you are seeking...first you must travel a long and difficult road, fraught with peril (which) fate has vouchafed you...until your salvation."
The oracular tone of this backwater Tiresias is overblown, ridiculous -- yet also strangely moving. The split between absurdity and poignancy anticipates the film's delicate balance between barnyard farce and touching pathos. One smiles at Penny's inane yearning for a "bona fide" husband; or McGill's ludicrous insistence that Penny can't cannot put him aside because he's the "pater familias" of his family. But they are never objects of cool derision, as in earlier Coen movies. One doesn't mock at their innocent, quintessentially American optimism; or their hope to retrieve a slim measure of happiness in a destitute depression landscape, where hope is everywhere in short supply.
O Brother unfolds in picaresque fragments, peopled by larger than life characters -- including folk legends like Robert (here Tommy) Johnson, the bluesman who supposedly acquired his guitar mastery by selling his soul to the Devil at a country crossroad; and Baby Face Nelson (here, an extravagant rapid-cycler who plunges into misery -- as it were, wrecked by success -- after breaking a one day record for bank robberies, then has a manic flight at the prospect of his impending electrocution).
Carny flimflam rubs elbows with unfeigned intimations of grace throughout a succession of Ulyssean scrapes and escapes, interpolated with cunningly revised scenes from Sullivan's Travels. Inter alia, the fugitive three are pursued by their chain gang's demonic overseer; cut a hit gospel record; are savaged by a giant one-eyed Bible salesman (John Goodman as a glib Polyphemus); lullabyed into insensibility by three riverbank 'sireens' out for reward money; become entangled in a gubernatorial campaign between impossibly corrupt opponents; and are nearly lynched during a bizarre Klan ritual.
Directly after being pardoned, and reconciled with Penny, McGill is captured with his friends by the implacable sheriff, who sets about a quick hanging according to his law. McGill fervently renounces his jaunty atheism, prays for rescue. In a marvelously surreal reprise of The Wizard of Oz's tornado, a tidal wave from the new dam sweeps the old world away. Cans of Dapper Dan, a cow, an accordion, tumble in eery slo-mo past one's astonished view, then the brothers of the road pop to the surface.
One has emerged halfway between Kansas and Oz; plugged, as McGill observes, into the grid of an electrified America bursting with New Deal enthusiasm. But McGill's return to his Ithica is ironically untriumphant. At least for the moment he's on the straight and narrow, but Penny still bitterly grouses -- this time about the wedding ring he never recovered from their homestead, now several hundred feet under water. The couple's status is definitively quo ante.
The Coen's concluding allusion isn't to Homer's hero, but James Joyce's common-man/schlep Ulysses: to Leopold Bloom, a hawker of newpaper adverts ever seeking to pacify his perennially dissatisfied, unfaithful wife, Molly. The magic has dissipated from the Coen's idiosyncratic piece of cornpone magic realism, replaced by Virginia Woolf's 'cotton wool of everyday life'. One knows not whether to laugh or weep -- as noted, the driving ambiguity of this singular and very lovely film.