...Or, How I stopped worrying and learned to love the bluegrass.
It took me longer than I should to warm to the Coen Brothers. Maybe I shouldn't have started with The Big Lebowski, but everybody seemed to love it so much and I suppose I wanted in on the action. Instead, it left me baffled and nervous, feeling like an idiot because no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't work out exactly what was happening and why. I've watched it again on a few occasions since that first time and it's always been the same, until three or four months ago when I had the revelation that maybe I wasn't stupid and maybe not knowing was the point. Perhaps this should have been some sort of great cosmic epiphany, but honestly? It mostly feels like the excuse I've needed to finally give up and move on. In the meantime, I've become acquainted with many of the Coens' other movies, and in a lot of cases it was love at first viewing - The Hudsucker Proxy in particular took my breath away, although I'll never quite understand why their remake of True Grit didn't clean up at the Oscars in its year.
I didn't fall for O Brother, Where Art Thou? on first watch, but that would have been because of the ex-boyfriend who talked loudly and continuously over it because he really wanted to be watching Oliver and Company instead. I ditched the jerk in fairly short order, met and married a real man, and before long I was able to give O Brother the attention it so clearly merited.
You have to wonder what made the Coens dream up a musical reworking of Homer's Odyssey set in 1930s Mississippi. I mean, the concept isn't ludicrous, not exactly, just, well... outside the box, I guess. In most other respects we're in typical Coens territory, though, inasmuch as there ever is such a thing - stylised dialogue, forthright female characters and unobtrusively gorgeous cinematography that lingers far longer in the memory than it ought.
While the Coens tend not to cast quite so incestuously as the likes of, say, Wes Anderson, there's no denying that they have their favourites. George Clooney, for instance, who's never made a bad movie that he hasn't directed. Here he's one Ulysses Everett McGill, ringleader of a group of three chain gang fugitives on the run from a lawman who wants to see them burn. McGill is a resourceful sort, which is handy, given that his two companions (John Turturro as Pete and Tim Blake Nelson as Delmar) are the sorts of people who might easily confuse their age and their IQ. McGill, though? He has an urgent reason to escape and go straight, in the form of a gaggle of daughters and their frankly terrifying mother Penny (Holly Hunter), who's already told them that daddy was hit by a train.
A chance encounter with black musician Tommy Thompson (Chris Thomas King) leads them to become hit recording artists The Soggy Bottom Boys, but they're too busy fleeing from an increasing number of pursuers to be able to notice.
It's all pretty much the dictionary definition of picaresque (I know this because I just looked it up), and far more about the journey than the destination. Our heroes meet a host of colourful characters along the way - John Goodman was never more terrifying, and as a baby-faced bank robber, Michael Badalucco damned nearly steals the entire show.
In the end, though, the real star of O Brother is the music. I'd always avoided bluegrass like the plague before this, sitting as it does on the unpleasantly jagged line that divides country music from full-on religious propaganda. The soundtrack here, however, is a revelation, with some of the most beautiful vocals I've ever heard. It was here, in fact, that I had my epiphany; that life in those times was painfully, dreadfully hard, and that the hope of an afterlife might have been all these people had. The voices in O Brother seem to encompass whole lifetimes of suffering, with all artifice flayed away until all that remains is the red-raw emotion underneath. It's heartbreaking and strangely comforting all at once, a beautiful counterpoint to the film's broad, farcical comedy.
Full of visual and narrative invention, O Brother, Where Art Thou is that rarest of beasts, a film that engages the heart and mind in equal measure, as much of a joy on a bored Sunday morning as a dog-tired midweek evening. Treat yourself - you probably deserve it.
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