A Film That Needs No Introduction (So Here You Go Anyway)
Released twenty-five years ago last month, Joel and Ethan Coen’s O Brother, Where Art Thou? has since become something of a cult classic.
Lauded by critics for its soundtrack—which launched a bluegrass revival—and its groundbreaking approach to color editing, the thing is otherwise essentially Coen: lovable freaks, strangely arresting camera shots, astute social commentary packaged in razor-sharp comedic dialogue.
Set in Depression-era Mississippi, the film follows Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney) and his two sidekicks, Pete (John Turturro) and Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson). The trio—escaped convicts first chained together on a prison work crew—travel across the state seeking a treasure that Everett has apparently hidden beneath his family abode. The stakes are raised, of course, by the fact that the local authorities have planned to flood the valley where said home sits—the clock is a’tickin’.
Beset by unfaithful lovers (and treacherous cousins), hounded by a particularly sinister representative of the state (with smoked-out spectacles, no less), making near-constant run-ins with the law, with local lawbreakers, with KKK rallies, with sirens and cyclops, and with (perhaps worst of all) the gubernatorial campaigns of local politicians—the three have their work cut out for them if they are to survive the long journey home.
But their return is never truly in doubt—it’s been foretold. A prophet (in the form of a blind guy driving a manually-powered railroad cart) tells them how the journey is going to go, right from the jump:
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. But first… first you must travel a long and difficult road, a road fraught with peril. Mm-hmm. You shall see thangs, wonderful to tell. You shall see a… a cow… on the roof of a cotton house, ha. And, oh, so many startlements. I cannot tell you how long this road shall be, but fear not the obstacles in your path, for fate has vouchsafed your reward. Though the road may wind, yea, your hearts grow weary, still shall ye follow them, even unto your salvation.
Like all great prophecies: just vaguely specific enough to make things interesting.
Speak, Memory!
Did that summary sound strangely familiar?
If you are a person of good movie taste, you’ve seen it, so it had better. If you are a person of good book taste (or just someone who grew up anywhere besides a desert island), it should be familiar to you as well. That’s because the film is based on Homer’s Odyssey, one of the foundational texts of civilization (and of any literature class worth its salt). And now that I think of it, even if you were born on a desert island, it’s probably familiar to you too. After all, Odysseus did visit a lot of those.
For what it’s worth, if you haven’t read the book (errr… poem), neither had the filmmakers: Ethan and Joel based the the thing on a comic book version of Homer’s epic. But it must’ve been a pretty good comic book, because Homeric tones ring throughout the film nonetheless.
At risk of insulting my readership, I’ll lay a few of them out for you.
Prologue
The film begins with Homer’s invocation of the muse, a move that will get my classically educated arse feeling some strange combination of sentimental and ready to charge the armies of Troy (which seems to be the near constant mental state of Odysseus in the poem, so I’m in good company) in no time flat.
O Muse!
Sing in me, and through me tell the story
Of that man skilled in all the ways of contending,
A wanderer, harried for years on end…
It leaves off the final lines—lines which I find important—but I like to think that it does so not out of ignorance but out of a kind of self-deprecating subtlety: “Speak! And tell the tale again in our time.”
This is, of course, exactly what the film seeks to do.
Tiresius
The whole blind prophet thing we discussed earlier is a parallel that is (foregoing potentially offensive jokes) hard to miss. There are some interesting resonances between what the OG Tiresias tells Odysseus and what his railroading (riding?) counterpart tells Everett.
Tiresius, looking into the future, says, profoundly, “I see a man who gets to make it home alive, but it’s no longer you.”
The find a fortune, though it will not be the one you seek bit in the movie seems to be a clear nod to this. And the line that follows could essentially be a translation of the original: “But first… first you must travel—a long and difficult road, a road fraught with peril. You shall see things, wonderful to tell.”
The one thing that is decidedly not in the original is the “cow on the roof of a cotton house.” Seems like an odd addition. To quote Jerry Seinfeld, “What’s the deal?”
Well, dear reader, stay with me. I’ll get to that.
Ulysses
And speaking of Everett, I realize that I should, at risk of further insulting my readers, explain the name. George Clooney’s character is called Everett throughout the course of the film, but we catch his full government name—Ulysses Everett McGill—anytime he is giving a typically formal and verbose introduction of himself to various side characters.
The name Ulysses is the Romanized version of Odyssesus, as we see in both Dante’s Inferno and Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses”—both of which cut distinctly different characters than the Ody that Homer drew up originally (but don’t get me started).
The Coens’ Ulysses does fit his namesake, at least in all the ways that count. Most importantly, he’s a man of wit. The one-liners here are too many to list—as evidenced by this bearded man on TikTok selling Etsy stickers of them.
All that to say, we have our wanderer, skilled in all the ways of contending. And while I’m here, I’m just gonna say that this is one of Clooney’s best roles, if not his very best. The wise-cracking, hair-gel-hawking, unnecessarily verbose Old Hollywood Leading Man is the kind of role ol’ George was just born to play.
The Sirens
In one of the film’s best-executed scenes, the three misfits are pulled off course by the song and beauty of three maidens bathing in the river. This leads to the disappearance of Pete and to Delmar’s assumption that he has been bewitched. When their paths eventually cross again, the latter is slack-jawed at his friend’s apparent resurrection: “WE THOUGHT YOU WAS A TOOOOAADD.”
The Cyclops
This is perhaps my favorite of the film’s Homeric nods. If you are trying to transpose the Odyssey into the Depression-era American south, what the Hades do you do with the cyclops?
If you’re Joel and Ethan Coen, the answer is obvious: Turn him into a one-eyed Bible salesman who beats the crap out of the boys at a picnic.
Penny and the Jets
First off, I apologize for that title. I have no excuse. It’s just the way I am.
But Ulysses’ wife, Penny (Holly Hunter), is, of course, Penelope. And the group that I have named The Jets would be (by no logical or linguistic connection whatsoever) the suitors.
Except in the film, there’s only one suitor (Vernon T. Waldrip). But he’s won Penny’s heart. And he’s nearly won the election for gubernatorial candidate Homer Stokes, for whom he serves as campaign manager. And he’s bona fide.
The Return
Like Odysseus of old, Everett can’t expect to just win back his wife by getting home and quoting John Wick. Instead, like the original Odysseus, he must prove himself.
But whereas for Odysseus, proving looked like stringing bows and actually going John Wick mode on the suitors, for Everett, it looks a bit different.
There are still strings involved. And bows. But it instead looks like his wife realizing that her husband is, in fact, the lead-singer on the hottest old-timey music radio hit in the state of Mississippi.
And it looks like us, the audience, realizing that we have been gifted with what is likely the greatest bluegrass track to ever come out of a popular film.
More Things In Heaven and Earth
The film already boasts an impressive multitask in being both a rollicking work of comedy and a thoughtful reimagining of perhaps the most most fundamental story of Western Civilization. But the Coens couldn’t stop there. They had to go for the hat-trick. The third goal of said hat-trick being, of course, a scathing critique of modern rationalism and a profound reflection on faith. Like most comedies, O Brother is, at bottom, a film of great faith.
The most ingenious piece of this movie lies in the Coens’ decision to script the cunning Ulysses not only as a witty intellect but as an intellectual rationalist. The first thing this does is create myriad opportunities for witty dialogue. Everett is what happens when you take Rene Descartes, give him a southern accent and a sense of humor, and stick him right in the buckle of the Bible belt. Just after Pete and Delmar join a group baptism (in a SPELLBINDING scene, sonically and cinematically), they pick up the hitchhiking guitar player Tommy Johnson, who claims he has sold his soul to the devil in exchange for skill on the strings. Everett quips: “Well, ain’t it a small world, spiritually speaking? Pete and Delmar just been baptized and saved. I guess I’m the only one that remains unaffiliated!”
But beyond opportunities for comic incongruity, Everett’s character allows the film to wrestle deeply (though never ham-handedly) with the very real issues of a world that at least appears to mean more to us as human beings than mere material and mathematics. It broaches discussions of disenchantment and re-enchantment that are perhaps more relevant today than when the film was released a quarter-century ago.
Throughout the film, Everett balks at what he sees as the uneducated spiritual mumbo-jumbo around him. But as the journey goes on, as strange and stranger things befall the protagonists, the viewer can see that the veneer of pure rationalism is a thin one indeed. When it looks, to all accounts, as if Pete’s beating heart lays beneath his shirt, shriveled up by the magic of the sirens, Delmar is not the only one with a look of religious fear on his face.
This comes to its zenith in the film’s climactic scene:
Returning to Everett’s farm, not to find the treasure they sought, but to retrieve his wedding ring, they are met by the bespectacled lawman who has dogged their trail all along. He has prepared nooses, graves—and even a haunting troupe of gravedigging singers.
“But we’s been pardoned! They announced it on the radio!” the three protest. The policeman replies with haunting simplicity: “We don’t have a radio.”
Faced with the impending reality of death, Everett puts up an earnest prayer for salvation. There are no atheists in foxholes.
And, like clockwork, the deus ex-es the machina. Floodwaters come streaming down that engulf both the just and the unjust in a torrent of household furniture and Dapper Dan pomade. Safely afloat a coffin Moby-Dick style, Delmar attempts to point out to Everett that his prayer worked.
But on the other side of peril, Everett is back to rationalizing. The valley was, of course, already scheduled to be flooded by local bureaucrats. It is not God, but modern technology that has saved them. Everett smugly concludes, “Yessir, we’re gonna have us a veritable age of reason.” But then something floats by which leaves both protagonist and viewer with the furrowed brow of recall.
The other cow just dropped. Memory has spoken. It has all come to pass, just as the old prophet Tiresias predicted.
The Coens’ comic masterpiece fits comfortably into the “Christ-haunted American South” of Flannery O’Connor. It muses, alongside Hamlet, “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy!”
It does not resolve all ambiguities but leaves viewers with a universe just a bit more complex—a bit more enchanted—than before they pressed the play button.
And perhaps that is the purpose of film.
