O Brother Where Art Thou

The first time I saw O Brother Where Art Thou was in a theatre at the Mall of America and I remember sitting there as the credits rolled and the lights came up feeling a bit dumbfounded as to what I had just watched. It was completely unlike anything I had ever seen before, yet I knew I liked it. On subsequent viewings, I grew to love it and with each passing viewing I got more and more into it's unique groove and as I did I found myself laughing harder and more often each time. This is not an uncommon response with me to a Coen Brothers film. 

Ulysses Everett McGill (played by George Clooney) is a fugitive from a chain gang along with two other men, Pete (played by John Turturro) and Delmar (played by Tim Blake Nelson), in Great Depression era Mississippi. They are three men on a mission to retrieve the stolen loot Everett stashed at an old cabin in a valley that is about to be flooded as part of the creation of a Hydro-electric plant. Along the way, the three escaped convicts cross paths with Pete's cousin, who helps them out of their chains, but then promptly turns the trio in for the reward money and they narrowly escape. From there, they steal a car, crash a church revival where both Pete and Delmar get baptised. From there, they encounter a young black man named Tommy Johnson (played by Chris Thomas King), who states he had met the devil and sold his soul in exchange for being able to play the guitar real good. Their travels also have them crossing paths with a crooked bible salesman (played by John Goodman), a Ku Klux Klan rally, two competing candidates for Governor and notorious gangster George "Babyface" Nelson, among assorted others. 

There is a unique rhythm to the film that might throw audiences the first time they watch it. It certainly threw me, with it's unique and stylized dialogue through out, especially from the hyper-articulate Everett. Every line of dialogue he has is golden, with a ridiculously large vocabulary, all delivered to perfection from a very game George Clooney, who is clearly having a blast with the role. Backing him up is John Turturro as the eternal sourpuss Pete, who can't quite seem to have anything go right in his life. Then there is the eternally loveable, if a bit dim, Delmar who is played wonderfully by Tim Blake Nelson. This trio of mismatched criminals makes for many of the best laughs of the film, even if Everett tends to look down on them, at one point remarking that Pete and Delmar are "dumber than a bag of hammers," (which happens to be one of my favorite quotes from the film).

The Coen Brothers and their Director of Photography Roger Deakins came up with a unique look for the film. They shot the entire film and then had the entire thing scanned into a computer and frame by frame adjusted the color to where it is almost, but not quite sepia toned. It makes for a very unique looking film, but yet in an odd way captures the time period quite well. Scoring the film with period folk and bluegrass music also helped capture the time period and the soundtrack for the film was a surprise best seller. The film also has a couple of funny inside jokes to previous films that the Coen Brothers worked on. Holly Hunter shows up as Everett's wife. She previously starred in the Coen's Raising Arizona as a childless woman who desperately wants a baby. In a cute little twist, this time around her character has several kids, including three daughters just as articulate as their daddy. The other one is the cabin that the trio is traveling to is modeled after the one in The Evil Dead, a movie Joel Coen worked on with that film's director, Sam Raimi. They were a couple fun little gags that always get a laugh from me.

Overall, O Brother Where Art Thou remains one of my all time favorite Coen Brothers films, with a trio of great comedic performances working their way through another unique and wild Coen Brothers film. I have barely touched on all the plot threads going through this film because part of the fun is discovering it for yourself. And if you do, I promise you it will be plenty of fun.