O Brother, Where Art Thou? movie review (2000)

Bluegrass music is at the heart of the film, as it was of "Bonnie and Clyde," and there are images of chain gangs, sharecropper cottages, cotton fields, populist politicians, river baptisms, hobos on freight trains, patent medicines, 25-watt radio stations and Klan rallies. The movie's title is lifted from Preston Sturges' 1941 comedy "Sullivan's Travels" (it was the uplifting movie the hero wanted to make to redeem himself), and from Homer we get a Cyclops, sirens bathing on rocks, a hero named Ulysses, and his wife Penny, which is no doubt short for Penelope.

If these elements don't exactly add up, maybe they're not intended to. Homer's epic grew out of the tales of many storytellers who went before; their episodes were timed and intended for a night's recitation. Quite possibly no one before Homer saw the developing work as a whole. In the same spirit, "O Brother" contains sequences that are wonderful in themselves--lovely short films--but the movie never really shapes itself into a whole.

The opening shot shows three prisoners escaping from a chain gang. They are Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney), Pete (John Turturro) and Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson). From their peculiar conviction that they are invisible as they duck and run across an open field, we know the movie's soul is in farce and satire, although it touches other notes, too--it's an anthology of moods. McGill (played by Clooney as if Clark Gable were a patent medicine salesman) doesn't much want company on his escape, but since he is chained to the other two, he has no choice. He enlists them in his cause by telling them of hidden treasure.

What was The Odyssey, after all, but a road movie? "O Brother" follows its three heroes on an odyssey during which they intersect with a political campaign, become radio stars by accident, stumble upon a Klan meeting and deal with McGill's wife, Penny (Holly Hunter), who is about to pack up with their seven daughters and marry a man who won't always be getting himself thrown into jail.

Hunter and Turturro are veterans of earlier Coen movies, and so is John Goodman, who plays a slick-talking Bible salesman. Charles Durning appears as a gubernatorial candidate with the populist jollity of Huey Long, and the story strands meet and separate as if the movie is happening mostly by chance and good luck--a nice feeling sometimes, although not one that inspires confidence that the narrative train has an engine.

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