What Time Frame Did O Brother Where Art Thou Take Place
The opening titles inform u.s.a. that the Coen Brothers' "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" is based on Homer's The Odyssey . The Coens claimed their "Fargo" was based on a true story, only later confided it wasn't; this time they confess they oasis't actually read The Odyssey . Withal, they've absorbed the spirit. Like its inspiration, this movie is one darn thing after another.
The film is a Homeric journey through Mississippi during the Depression--or rather, through all of the images of that time and place that have been trickling downwards through popular civilisation e'er since. There are even walk-ons for characters inspired past 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 motion-picture show, 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 moving-picture show'southward title is lifted from Preston Sturges' 1941 comedy "Sullivan's Travels" (information technology was the uplifting movie the hero wanted to brand to redeem himself), and from Homer we become 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 ballsy grew out of the tales of many storytellers who went before; their episodes were timed and intended for a dark'south recitation. Quite possibly no one earlier Homer saw the developing work every bit a whole. In the same spirit, "O Blood brother" contains sequences that are wonderful in themselves--lovely short films--merely the flick 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 confidence that they are invisible as they duck and run across an open field, we know the pic'due south soul is in farce and satire, although it touches other notes, also--it'southward an anthology of moods. McGill (played past Clooney every bit if Clark Gable were a patent medicine salesman) doesn't much want company on his escape, just since he is chained to the other two, he has no choice. He enlists them in his cause by telling them of subconscious treasure.
What was The Odyssey, later on all, but a road flick? "O Brother" follows its 3 heroes on an odyssey during which they intersect with a political campaign, become radio stars past blow, stumble upon a Klan meeting and deal with McGill's married woman, Penny (Holly Hunter), who is about to pack up with their seven daughters and marry a man who won't always exist getting himself thrown into jail.
Hunter and Turturro are veterans of before Coen movies, and so is John Goodman, who plays a slick-talking Bible salesman. Charles Durning appears equally a gubernatorial candidate with the populist jollity of Huey Long, and the story strands run across and carve up as if the motion-picture show is happening more often than not past run a risk and good luck--a nice feeling sometimes, although non ane that inspires confidence that the narrative train has an engine.
The most constructive sequence in the movie is the Klan rally (complete with a Klansman whose centre patch means he needs just i pigsty in his sail). The choreography of the ceremony seems poised somewhere between Busby Berkeley and "Triumph of the Will," and the Coens succeed in making it await ominous and ridiculous at the aforementioned time.
Another sequence nearly stops the show, it's so haunting in its self-contained fashion. It occurs when the escapees come across three women doing their laundry in a river. The Sirens, obviously. They sing "Didn't Leave Nobody but the Babe" while moving in a slightly slowed motion, and the result is--well, what information technology's supposed to be, mesmerizing.
I besides similar the sequence of events beginning when the lads perform on the radio as the Soggy Mount Boys. By now they take recruited a blackness partner, Tommy Johnson (Chris Thomas King), and later when the song becomes a hit, they're called on to perform before an audience that is hostile to blacks in particular and escaped convicts in general. They wearable simulated beards. Actually false beards.
All of these scenes are wonderful in their different means, and withal I left the movie uncertain and unsatisfied. I saw it a second time, admired the same parts, left with the same feeling. I do not need that all movies accept a story to pull the states from first to end, and indeed 1 of the charms of "The Large Lebowski," the Coens' previous motion picture, is how its stoned hero loses track of the thread of his own life. But with "O Brother, Where Are M?" I had the sense of invention fix adrift; of a serial of brilliant ideas wondering why they had all been invited to the same film.
Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sunday-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.
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O Brother, Where Art Yard? (2000)
103 minutes
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Source: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/o-brother-where-art-thou-2000
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