Homer stokes the Coen canon: “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”

One of the Coen’’s funniest and less misanthropic films is 21 years old and I have to admit that I had forgotten how ridiculously enjoyable it is.”O, Brother, Where Art Thou?” surprised a lot of people for a number of reasons.

That it was funny came as no surprise, but the star-making turn by George Clooney was. While Carter Burwell had scored many of their films, the T-Bone Burnett curation propelled the soundtrack into an arguably bigger hit than the film. And while the Coens had essayed the Depression Era before, they somehow drew a portrait of the period that represented the tensions between day to day life and the poverty of the times with the bull goose looney tunes antics of screwball comedy that was played to the hilt here…and deeply. 

Unlike “MIller’s Crossing” and “Barton Fink”, there is a definite shift in how the Coens take fugitives from a chain gang in the South and gleefully smash genre into genre with the end result being one of their more, well, optimistic films. Seriously.

Once it was over, I realized that it isn’t that they’re strangers to optimism or even something like a happy ending (“Fargo”, “The Big Lebowski”, and “Raising Arizona” come to mind), but that their view of humanity may not necessarily be as bleak as much of their work lets on. 

“You seek a great fortune, you three who are now in chains. You will find a fortune, though it will not be the one you seek” - the Blind Seer (Lee Weaver)

The throughline in the bulk of their narratives is that people are often just pawns, at best, in a larger narrative web; hence, the shaggy-dog nature of a large percent of their story-telling. But for the most part, happiness is not lasting and all too often, the dopes in their stories think that it is an easily got commodity. Unless, of course, you are the Dude, or Marge Gunderson, the one is a pretty happy (if consistently stoned) Zen master/“hippy deadbeat” and the other is a rather contented, unflappable servant of the law, pregnant and sharper than she lets on. In “O Brother…”, Clooney’s Everett may be on a quest, but his optimism pulls him through in the face of what should be immanent disaster, particularly, at the denouement.

I don’t know for sure that the Coens are thorough fatalists, but I do sense that they feel that most people in their stories make really bad decisions and the ones who come out smiling are the characters who are already to some degree fulfilled, either innately (Marge, Jeffrey Lebowski) or possessed of a goal not completely based on something as materialistic as money (often the MacGuffin in their tales), as in Everett’s case. 

What makes Ulysses Everett McGill a different ball of wax is that his quest is to reunite with his wife, Penny. In one of the many threads connecting, however loosely, the film to Homer’s “Odyssey”, we get a very clever man who had been imprisoned for practicing law without a license, separated from his wife and children. We discover Everett’s real quest after a bait and switch. He had told his compatriots, Pete and Delmar, that there was a $1.2 million treasure waiting them but - spoiler - he confesses later that there never was one but he needed help in escaping the chain gang. Not a great idea; but not a bad one, either. McGill may have played his partners for fools, but they turned out to be decent human beings.

It may not be Homer, exactly…

Everett: Well, you lying... unconstant... succubus!

Vernon T. Waldrip: Whoa, whoa, whoa! You can't swear at my fiancé!

Everett: Oh, yeah? Well, you can't marry my wife!

The Coens claimed not have read Homer and that they framed the story’s structure on other movies they had seen. Tim Blake Nelson (Delmar) thought they had hired him because of his degree in Classics from Brown. The interesting thing, for me, in relation to Homer, is how much “O Brother…” actually fleshes out the human and therefore, timeless, elements of the epic. That is probably not one of the intentions of the film, but a nice side-effect, nonetheless. Hell, I’d use the film in a class on Homer.

In any case, the humanity in this film is portrayed far less cynically than in many of their other films. There is a giddiness in the filmmaking here that shows up in some of their other work (“Burn After Reading”, “Hail Caesar”, and - again - “Raising Arizona”, for example) and that mitigates from the outset some of the grimmer qualities they often bring to the proceedings. In many ways, “O brother…” stands in opposition to “A Serious Man”. The God of that latter movie is unrelenting (not so different from Chigur in “No Country for Old Men”, if less immediately vengeful), whereas here, I wonder if the purity of Everett’s quest and his motivation are the alternative means by which the filmmakers would have us believe one needs to possess in order to survive in a world of peril.

And oh, what perils: aside from escaping a chain gang, there’s aiding and abetting Pretty Boy Floyd in a bank robbery, there’s robbery of their money from Floyd at the hands of Cyclops as a Bible salesman, there’s repeated confrontations with a sheriff and his posse from hell (almost literally), a tight night at a Klan rally to save Sonny Johnson - a Black musician who sold his soul to the devil in return for which he would become a great guitar player - yes, yes, Robert Johnson’s story, I know), and so much more. The trials of this Ulysses are no less desperate than those of Odysseus himself. At the end, of course, there is - and always was - Penny. 

After all the travails along the road back to her, the stakes are no less high for Everett than they were for Odysseus. His now ex-wife is betrothed to a suitor and unlike Penelope of the epic, Penny is not reluctant to enter this union. In other Coen Brothers’ works, it would not have been a surprise to have seen this turn to tragedy, to see Everett lose Penny to Vernon T. Waldrip. Of course, as luck would have it, music comes to save the day and here is where the most prominent non-actor character come in. 

After successfully fleeing the chain gang and acquiring a car, our getaways pick up Tommy Johnson at the crossroads where he had earlier made his deal with the devil (McGill: What'd the devil give you for your soul, Tommy? Tommy: Well, he taught me to play this here guitar real good. Delmar: Oh son, for that you sold your everlasting soul? Tommy: Well, I wasn't usin' it.) and from there, they make a foray to WHYY radio station to record a song for a quick payday as the Soggy Bottom Boys. The song - unbeknownst to the gang - becomes a smash hit and once we fast-forward to a fundraiser for the nefarious Klansman candidate for Senator of Mississippi Homer Stokes where Everett hopes to wrest Penny from Waldrip, they assume beards and ascend the stage as the Soggy Bottom Boys and sing their hit “A Man of Constant Sorrow”. Homer is revealed to be the racist clod he is, Waldrip quickly falls from grace with Penny having supported Stokes in his campaign, and Pappy Daniels, the incumbent senator grants a pardon on the spot to the Boys and hires them as his “brain trust” (I’d love to see the sequel, if only for that.)

But if music was the savior here, she was present throughout in one of the most glorious soundtracks for a film, ever. The muses are not without a presence in Homer and sound figures prominently throughout the epic; but here, it is persistent to the point where you could be forgiven for thinking that you had just been watched a musical. Burnett, along with Gillian Welch and Burwell, curated a remarkable song list that integrates each chapter and in itself reminds us that Homer was very likely sung. Nor is this a simple matter of “music advancing a narrative”; it is very much part of the narrative. None of it is ambient or diegetic; all of it plays a part. Some mighty fine tunes, throughout.

The dialog, likewise, runs on its own rhythm. There is very much the Ben Hecht/Preston Sturges/Julius Epstein percussive patterns and flows, particularly noticeable in Clooney’s verbosity, but equally in Turturro, Nelson’s and everyone else’s speech. If nothing else, the Coens give their actors some of the most delicious verbiage in modern cinema and this is in keeping with what might construe - not unreasonably - as an adaptation of a poem (I mean, sure, the brothers themselves call it an adaptation, but if they hadn’t actually read the book, is it really? That’s a whole other entry….(1) )

Oh. Right. The acting. In an ensemble of greats (Holly Hunter, Charles Durning, Turturro, and more), Clooney fully inhabits, not just the role, but a movie star. He turns in a mannered, funny, and wholly truthful performance that would not be out of place in movie like “It Happened One Night”. But this is in a movie very much of its time. We can dissect the allusions and the meta textual commentary in the film ad nauseam, but the real joy is in the performances and in this principal role in which Clooney finally arrives as a star. 

He’d proven himself a year or two before as a serious actor in Soderergh’s “Out of Sight” but prior to that had spent the better of part of two decades in various TV roles, most famously as Doug Ross on “ER”) and movies few have heard of. In other words, he was a journeyman actor who had paid his dues and finally, ascended the ranks through - frankly - hard work. In Soderbergh’s hands, Clooney registered a greater depth of feeling than he’d been given before and shades to character required to fill out a brilliant script and hold his own believably with Jennifer Lopez and a cast of other accomplished actors. 

Here, Clooney is able to shine, not just in comedic performance, but in what he brings to a man driven by his need to regain his family, if not his self-respect, and more. It’s more of a challenging role than at first might seem evident, but Clooney plays it with finesse and aplomb beyond expectation. If Soderbergh showed Clooney to be a credible actor to be taken seriously, the Coens made him a bona fide (I did that on purpose for fans of the movie) movie star. It is simply a genius turn.

The other side of the coin is that Turturro, Nelson, and Chris Thomas King (Tommy; who I wish had more screen time) were more than supporting players. Without any one of them, and I mean the actors, I don’t think this would have worked, The casting in a Coen Brothers film is so very key to the film working. This was Ellen Chenoweth’s first casting job with the Coens and she’s been their main casting director ever since. Her resume is littered with great movies but she must be particularly keyed into their vision to assemble actors that fill out their vision so well. 

There are no small roles in this film, either. From Durning and Hunter to Wayne Duvall, to - well, just about everyone - each performer has a chance to shine. It’s telling that this is the case for many of their films; the smallest screen time is usually a noticeable, if not important, part of the overall plan. 

Does Everett win Penny back? Well, pretty much. I say pretty much because she sets him one final task: he has to get the original wedding ring out of the roll top desk in the cabin that they lived in years before. Upon arriving at said cabin, yes, the Sheriff from Hell (okay, the character is formally “Sheriff Cooley”) arrives with henchmen and three nooses and no regard for the governor’s pardon (“The law? The law is a human institution.”)

As luck (or prophecy) might have it, floodwaters from an opened dam save our quartet (I still wonder if Everett read the headlines earlier and was stalling for time as Cooley was about to begin the lynching or what) and we see a cow on the roof of the floating cabin (“You shall see a... a cow... on the roof of a cotton house”) and Tommy atop the roll top desk.  

The ring he presents to Penny is not the one in the roll top, however, and she knows. Everett tells her it’s at the bottom of a 9000 hectare lake and after he tells her finding it would be a heroic task. As it is, she relents and admits that she’s not really sure where the ring is. 

  

In sum, let’s face it. Everett and Penny need to be together. I would seriously pay good money to see Hunter and Clooney reprise these roles (set in the early fifties, if we’re going to be timeline accurate). At the same time, as with most complete works of art, I’m happy to just let them be right as they are, strolling out of frame.

Footnote

1. I wonder if a whole entry on adaptations of novels, poems, songs, and plays is in order. Bergman once famously said that cinema has nothing to do with literature. Might be worth following that up, yes?