Pete at the End of O Brother Where Art Thou
A sking somebody to name their favourite Coen brothers motion-picture show is similar pondering which Australian political party is the most reprehensible – a conversational rabbit pigsty, with no possible chance of consensus. Quality-wise we are spoiled for selection, with so many nuggets of aureate to pan from the Coen reserve. Is it the Hitchcockian cross-country thriller No State for Onetime Men, the micturated-upon-on-my-carpeting stoner classic The Large Lebowski or is information technology the icy black comedy law-breaking antic Fargo? Yah? Oh yah.
But in my mind the greatest Coen brothers movie is the semi-musical, semi-satirical, semi-historical, semi-mythological and completely bright comedy O Brother, Where Fine art Thou?, which turns 20 this year. Its narrative earth exists very far from anywhere with the internet and memes, yet this absurdly entertaining and witty film is and so damn memeable, loaded with snackable dialogue fans will instantly recognise.
Based in the corn fields, concert halls and on the open roads of rural Mississippi during the Great Low, it is a ye olde adventure sprinkled with delectably passé American turns of phrase such as "damn his optics!" and "what in the Sam Hill?" A loose adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey, the film recasts the story of Odysseus's endeavour to return to his home island of Ithaca as a tale of three convicts, initially chained together, journeying to discover a treasure that doesn't exist. Everett (George Clooney) is using the promise of riches to trick the two men he is chained to, Pete (John Turturro) and Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson), into helping him locate his estranged wife.
Pete and Delmar aren't exactly the sharpest tools in the shed, their nincompoopery a source of abiding entertainment when contrasted against Everett's great intellect, cool silverish natural language and self-appointed condition as the grouping's high-muck-a-muck.
Later on the trio bump into a blind soothsayer who accurately predicts that the journey ahead of them will involve "a road fraught with peril" and an encounter with "a cow on the roof of a cotton fiber house", they embark on a kind of vignette-filled tour of folkloric America. The Coens insert historical figures such as Tommy Johnson (a black bluesman who claimed he sold his soul to the devil) and George "Baby Face up" Nelson (a atomic bank robber who partnered with John Dillinger), as well as fictitious figures cogitating of night aspects of the American psyche – including John Goodman'southward vehement, thieving bible salesman, and a popular politician (Wayne Duvall) who is a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
The film entangles history with mythology and spills over into magical realism. Music is used extensively, the era-specific and dazzlingly eclectic soundtrack selling over seven 1000000 copies in the United states solitary, enkindling America – in the words of this Guardian article – "to a musical heritage it had forgotten it owned". When Everett and co'due south band, chosen The Soggy Lesser Boys, go to the radio shack or accept to the phase to sing songs like Homo of Constant Sorrow the picture becomes, oh my lord, how to describe it? Eardrum candy? Yah, that'll practice: eardrum processed. The O Brother soundtrack awoke many of usa to a musical heritage nosotros never even knew we liked.
During an age in which the very concept of originality oftentimes seems like a dusty relic from a distant era, O Blood brother, Where Are Yard? stands autonomously in its uniqueness; I defy everyone to name a movie like it. I beloved the motion picture for the same reason Jacques Tati's Playtime is my favourite feature of all fourth dimension: it trades in a kind of filmmaking that never really existed. For Tati it was most space and architecture. But O Brother'due south singularity is harder to define – a combination of songs, history, mythology and one-act, mixing literature and theatricality with the language of music videos.
An absurdist time capsule of a period that sort of existed and sort of didn't, the film'south intellectualism is inseparable from its willing encompass of nonsense, farther muddying the waters in the already unclear fence about what constitutes "high" versus "low" art. Hither the Coens evidence a clever synergy with the film from which the title originates: the author/director Preston Sturges' brilliant 1941 motion-picture show Sullivan's Travels, about a bossy moving picture managing director who wants to brand a highfalutin social realist drama (called O Brother, Where Art Thou??) earlier somewhen embracing the value of featherbrained escapism.
And so much to honey; so much to revere. And even so trying to make sense of O Brother, Where Art Thou? comes part-and-package with the sensation that one is existence deliberately led down the garden path. Maybe, as Everett himself puts it: "It's a fool who looks for logic in the chambers of the homo heart."
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/jun/19/o-brother-where-art-thou-revisiting-the-glory-and-silliness-of-the-coen-brothers-classic
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