"O Brother, Where Art Thou?"

Dogpatch rapture! The new film from the Coen brothers turns the Depression into a crackpot American fairy tale.

By Charles Taylor

Dec 22, 2000 | If Mad magazine had attempted to do "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" the result might be "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" The Coen brothers' new movie is a monkeyshines ramble through the iconography of the Depression South. It invokes the images familiar from the photographs of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange -- shanty shacks, ragamuffin children, big-bellied bosses in summer suits -- as well as books and movies of the era, like "The Grapes of Wrath" and "I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang" and the musicals of Busby Berkeley.

It pauses for a nod to the musicians recorded by the blues archivist Alan Lomax or later collected by Harry Smith in his "Anthology of American Music," and pauses again to put a twist on the myth of Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil at the crossroads. And it encompasses the sort of kitsch touchstones so embedded in our collective memory that the Coens seem to be teasing them to the surface. This is a movie where a tough-talking little kid wields a shotgun and drives a getaway car; where a fleeing bank robber brandishes a Tommy gun and taunts, "Come and get me, coppers!"; where apple pies cool on windowsills and scoundrels are literally run out of town on a rail.

In her famous essay on "Bonnie and Clyde" Pauline Kael talked about how when she was in college in the late '30s, "We used to top each other's stories about how our families had survived [the Depression]." She went on: "Though the American derision of the past has many offensive aspects, it has some good ones, too ... The toughness about what we've come out of and what we've been through ... is a good part of American popular art."

That's as fitting a description of any of the good-spiritedness at the heart of "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" And it's a measure of what Joel (who directed) and Ethan (who produced and co-wrote the script with his brother) Coen have achieved here that you can speak of their movie as having a heart.

With the exception of "Raising Arizona" (which I love), my reaction to the Coens' movies has ranged from boredom to loathing. I detested the way they used the Minnesota accents in "Fargo" to classify the characters as morons, and the slanders perpetrated upon Clifford Odets and William Faulkner in "Barton Fink." (I'll never forget one young admirer of that movie telling me that she and her contemporaries knew nothing about those men, so what did the brothers' inventions matter?)

The convict-heroes of "O Brother" aren't worldly. They're yokels, and their astonished reactions to the scrapes they land in is the chief source of the movie's jokes. But there's a way to laugh at yokels without meanness, and though meanness has traditionally been the Coens' specialty, it's mostly absent here.

Even the caricatured supporting players -- like a blind radio-station manager whose dead eyes stare off in opposite directions, or a dime-store manager whose jowls flap as he warns one of the cons to "stay out of the Wool's Worth" -- are so robustly odd that you laugh you ask yourself, "What the hell was that?"

The movie takes its title from Preston Sturges' "Sullivan's Travels." In that film, the movie-director hero (Joel McCrea) plans to abandon comedy to make a film called "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" -- something that will prove him a "serious" artist. The Coens have no intention of abandoning comedy. The opening credits claim the film is "Based on 'The Odyssey' by Homer." Like the credit claiming "Fargo" was based on a true story (it wasn't), that's a Coen joke. The brothers recently admitted to never having read "The Odyssey." Perhaps they've spent some time with the Classics Comics version. "O Brother" has a soothsayer and a Cyclops, watery Sirens who lure journeying men to doom on the rocks and a hero whose middle name is Ulysses.

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