O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU
Starring George Clooney and John Turturro
Directed by Joel Coen
Starts Friday, January 12
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A small musical industry has sprung up around the CD re-release of the Harry Smith Collection, a landmark set of field recordings made in the ’20s and ’30s by the eponymous ethno-musicologist. Joel and Ethan Coen's latest is the first movie in that genre, with vintage American songs playing as large a role in this almost-musical as any of the cast.
O Brother, Where Art Thou is a slightly manic conflation of Old South and Greek mythology, set in depression-era Louisiana and very loosely based on Homer’s Odyssey.
Each of their previous films was inspired by a particular region of the U.S., but, like Fargo, Blood Simple, Barton Fink, The Big Lebowski and the rest, O Brother is not an exploration of the region or culture in which it is set – it’s more a wild fugue based on the themes those places have contributed to pop consciousness.
Oddly, the various elements balance each other out. The pristine re-recordings of early bluegrass, gospel and blues give the film the soul that the furiously overacting cast forgot, and some of the cultural citations are pleasantly insightful. For example, George Clooney's Clark Gable imitation, while providing comic contrast to his hillbilly companions, suggests a deeper distance – that between the life depicted in Gable's classic films and the one lived by most of his audience at the time.
Like its predecessors, this is an enthusiastically tossed salad of clichés and iconography, proudly devoid of a political conscience or the rudimentary narrative structure and character development that road movies normally impose. But unmediated reality has never been a major preoccupation of Hollywood, and the Coens are happy to underline this point rather than argue with it. O Brother is as good an American film as any you are likely to see this year. |
