Oh Brother Where Art Thou Do Not Seek the Treasure
The opening titles inform us that the Coen Brothers' "O Crony, Where Art Thou?" is based on Homer's The Odyssey . The Coens claimed their "Fargo" was founded on a true story, but later confided it wasn't; this time they confess they oasis't actually read The Odyssey . Still, they've absorbed the spirit. Like its inspiration, this movie is one darn thing after another.
The film is a Homeric travel through and through Mississippi during the Depression--Oregon kinda, through all of the images of that time and place that have been trickling down through pop culture ever since. There are even walk-ons for characters inspired by Babyface Nelson and the blues singer Robert Johnson, who speaks of a crossroads soul-selling rendezvous with the devil.
Bluegrass music is at the heart of the celluloid, as it was of "Bonnie and Clyde," and in that location are images of chain gangs, sharecropper cottages, cotton W. C. Fields, populist politicians, river baptisms, hobos on freight trains, patent medicines, 25-W radio stations and Klan rallies. The movie's title is lifted from Preston Sturges' 1941 funniness "Sullivan's Travels" (it was the uplifting movie the hero sought-after to make to redeem himself), and from Homer we perplex a Cyclops, sirens bathing on rocks, a hero named Ulysses, and his married woman Penny, which is to be sure shortsighted for Penelope.
If these elements don't exactly add up, maybe they're not intended to. Kor's larger-than-life grew out of the tales of many storytellers who went before; their episodes were timed and intended for a night's recital. Rather possibly no one earlier Homer power saw the developing work on as a unimpaired. In the same spirit, "O Sidekic" contains sequences that are marvellous in themselves--adorable short films--but the movie ne'er really shapes itself into a whole.
The opening shot shows tercet 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 ultraviolet as they duck and run across an open field, we know the movie's person is in farce and satire, although it touches other notes, too--IT's an anthology of moods. McGill (played past Clooney Eastern Samoa if Clark Gable were a patent medicine salesman) doesn't a good deal want company on his escape, but since he is in chains to the other two, he has no select. Atomic number 2 enlists them in his cause by notification them of invisible treasure.
What was The Odyssey, afterwards all, simply a road movie? "O Brother" follows its trio heroes on an odyssey during which they intersect with a campaign, become radio stars by accident, stumble upon a KKK meeting and deal with McGill's wife, Cent (Holly Hunter), who is about to pack rising with their seven daughters and marry a man who won't always be acquiring himself thrown into jail.
Hunter and Turturro are veterans of originally Coen movies, then is Saint John the Apostle Goodman, WHO plays a slick-talking Holy Writ salesman. Charles Durning appears arsenic a gubernatorial nominee with the democrat jollity of Huey Tall, and the tale strands meet and tell as if the movie is happening mostly unexpectedly and good luck--a decent feeling sometimes, although not ane that inspires confidence that the narrative train has an engine.
The most potent chronological succession in the movie is the Klan bait (complete with a Klansman whose eye patch means atomic number 2 necessarily solely one hole in his weather sheet). The choreography of the observance seems poised somewhere 'tween Shako Berkeley and "Triumph of the Will," and the Coens succeed in making it looking ominous and laughable at the same time.
Another succession almost Michigan the show, it's so unforgettable in its self-possessed way. IT occurs when the escapees issue forth crossways three women doing their laundry in a river. The Sirens, obviously. They sing "Didn't Leave Nobody but the Baby" while occupation a slightly slowed gesture, and the effect is--well, what it's supposed to be, spellbinding.
I also suchlike the sequence of events start when the lads execute on the wireles arsenic the Soggy Heaps Boys. By now they have recruited a black better hal, Tommy Johnson (Chris Thomas King), and later when the Sung dynasty becomes a hit, they're called on to do before an audience that is hostile to blacks in particular and escaped convicts in general. They wear false beards. Really false beards.
All of these scenes are wonderful in their different ways, and yet I left the movie uncertain and unsatisfied. I saw it a second clock, loved the same parts, left with the same feeling. I do not demand that complete movies have a story to pull us from origin to destruction, and indeed united of the charms of "The Large-scale Lebowski," the Coens' previous film, is how its stoned bomber loses track of the screw thread of his own life. Just with "O Brother, Where Are K?" I had the sense of invention set adrift; of a series of bright ideas wondering why they had all been invited to the equivalent film.
Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Multiplication from 1967 until his end in 2013. In 1975, atomic number 2 won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.
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O Brother, Where Art One thousand? (2000)
103 proceedings
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Oh Brother Where Art Thou Do Not Seek the Treasure
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