{"id":19846,"date":"2016-05-27T20:34:46","date_gmt":"2016-05-27T10:34:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=19846"},"modified":"2016-05-27T20:34:46","modified_gmt":"2016-05-27T10:34:46","slug":"o-brother-where-art-thou-2000","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=19846","title":{"rendered":"O Brother Where Art Thou? [2000]"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Directors: \u00a0<\/strong>Joel and Ethan Coen
\nWriters: \u00a0<\/strong>Joel and Ethan Coen
\nCast: \u00a0<\/strong>George Clooney, John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson, Holly Hunter, John Goodman<\/p>\nU<\/span>lysses Evertt McGill, Pete Hogwallop and Delmar O\u2019Donnell are escapees from a Mississippi chain gang.<\/p>\n

With the full brunt of the law still bearing down on them, the three small time crooks decide to band together as Ulysses promises the others that he knows the whereabouts of a fortune in buried treasure.<\/p>\n

This fools errand leads the three hapless vagabonds through the American South during the era of the Great Depression.\u00a0 They come across a colourful and eclectic cast of misfits including a talented blues singer who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for guitar-riffing talent, beautiful sirens that may possess the power to turn man into frog, a terrifying one eyed preacher and the KKK.<\/p>\n

O Brother Where Art Thou?<\/em> released to mixed reviews back in 2000 but I believe it is now rightly looked upon as a Coen Brothers classic and one of the definitive cinematic showcases of Southern folklore.\u00a0 Its soundtrack \u2013 featuring the Soggy Bottom Boy\u2019s hit song Man of Constant Sorrow <\/em>and Alison Krauss\u2019 Down To River<\/em> \u2013 received rave reviews and was a huge success in its own right.<\/p>\n

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The title credits of O Brother Where Art Thou?<\/em> claims that the film is a retelling of Homer\u2019s Odyssey<\/em> but not unlike Fargo<\/em>\u2019s deceptive claim to be based on true events, the Coen Brothers have stated that they haven\u2019t actually read Odyssey<\/em>.\u00a0 Instead, the film unfolds as a series of loosely connected sketches, playing out like the twelve trials of Hercules as Ulysses, Pete and Delmar face one bizarre turn after another.<\/p>\n

Many of these moments will feel familiar to the audience \u2013 remember the prophetic blind man who pushes a handcar on a set of train tracks or the guitar playing prodigy who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his talent.\u00a0 They are Southern fables whose origins I can\u2019t specifically place, but it\u2019s a delight to see them all mixed together in a single film and so vividly brought to life by the talented cast of performers in this film.<\/p>\n

With a film like O Brother<\/em> that has such a meandering and ramshackle story, it is the quirky and loveable characters that inhabit its world that makes the whole thing shine.\u00a0 This was the first film where the Coen Brothers partnered with George Clooney and it is a rousing success.\u00a0 His performance as the highfalutin hair-cream obsessed huckster Ulysses fits so neatly with the Coen Brothers sensibilities that he would essentially go on to play the same character three times over as a divorce lawyer in Intolerable Cruelty<\/em>, an adulterer in Burn After Reading<\/em> and as a vain Golden Age movie star in Hail, Caesar!<\/em><\/p>\n

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Clooney is ably accompanied by John Turturro who plays the perpetually angry Pete and Tim Blake Nelson as the sweet natured half-wit Delmar.\u00a0 They are a trio of loveable losers, forever on the precipice of making the big score but always coming undone by a twist of rotten luck or simply their own hubris.<\/p>\n

O Brother Where Art Thou?<\/em> is a film set in a dusty, rough hewn bygone era and yet it looks and sounds like a million bucks thanks to the work of Roger Deakins\u2019 fantastic cinematography which beautifully captures the rustic charm of the American South.\u00a0 The film\u2019s two major set pieces remain impressive to this day for their sense of scale and scope.\u00a0 The singing congregation performing the baptism at the lake (memorably accompanied by Alison Krauss\u2019 Down to the River<\/em>) and the all-singing, all-dancing Klansman rally which is simultaneously mesmerizing and absurd.<\/p>\n

In a career spanning 21 films to date, the Coen Brothers have never produced an out and out musical but at times they have tapped into a love of music and interwoven it through their films (think The Big Lebowski, Inside Llewyn Davis <\/em>and Hail, Caesar!<\/em>).<\/p>\n

O Brother Where Art Thou?<\/em> is also fondly remembered for its soundtrack and the Soggy Bottom Boy\u2019s impromptu performance of Man of Constant Sorrow<\/em> serves as a key plot point in the film that transforms the escape convicts into folk music superstars.\u00a0 O Brother<\/em>\u2019s climactic scene at the political rally in town remains one of my favourite musical moments in the Coen Brothers catalogue.\u00a0 It remains my hope and wish that one day Joel and Ethan have a crack at doing a full blooded musical.<\/p>\n

Revisiting O Brother Where Art Thou?<\/em> today, I found the film has aged handsomely.\u00a0 It is an entertainingly absurd, funny and sweet natured film full of affection for its characters \u2013 even if they are mostly two bit criminals.\u00a0 The film exists in a strange, otherworldly imagining of the American South where poverty, opportunism and mysticism blend together.\u00a0 It is one of the weirdest road movies ever made and the Coen Brothers at their creative best.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the deep south during the 1930s, three escaped convicts search for hidden treasure while a relentless lawman pursues them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":19848,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1800,5],"tags":[763,2526,1121,2528,2525,1573,2527,2529],"class_list":["post-19846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-classics","category-films","tag-coen-brothers","tag-ethan-coen","tag-george-clooney","tag-holly-hunter","tag-joel-coen","tag-john-goodman","tag-john-turturro","tag-tim-blake-nelson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19846"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19846\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19853,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19846\/revisions\/19853"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/19848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}