The Coen brothers (Ethan produces, Joel directs, nominally at least; both write the scripts) have always had a quirky take on things, so it’s not an enormous surprise to find that their new movie, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, is based on Homer’s Odyssey. James Joyce did the same thing with his novel Ulysses, so there is precedent, but the Coens, naturally, make the transposition in their own inimitable way.
For those without the benefit of a classical education (or an encyclopaedia), Odysseus, also known as Ulysses, hero of the Odyssey,
spent 10 years trying to get home after the Trojan war, hindered by various peeved deities and distracted by a range of monsters and wonders. A crafty (indeed duplicitous) man, Odysseus was the inventor of the Trojan horse, the strategem by which that long siege was finally brought to an end, and he had to use all his wiles to get home to the isle of Ithaca and reestablish his kingship there.
The Coens’ movie is, however, a very loose adaptation of the story, so if you don’t know the original you won’t miss much apart from a few sly jokes that refer directly to Homer. George Clooney, who makes very intelligent choices about the movies he does, plays the fast-talking “tactician” Everett Ulysses McGill. Along with the rather jumpy Pete (John Turturro) and the none-too-bright Delmar (Tim Blake), he has just escaped from a Mississippi chain-gang and is heading for a stash of gold hidden in his hometown of Ithaca.
The trio’s misadventures on the road back to Ithaca form the picaresque tale of O Brother, Where Art Thou? They encounter policemen, Baptists, sirens, politicians, a bank-robber and a cyclopean Bible-salesman, among others. The setting is the Deep South of the Thirties, or a stylised version thereof, which gives the movie a very particular style and feel.
The movie’s pretty cinematography has the hand-coloured look of old photographs, and the music – put together by veteran musician T Bone Burnett – is either of the period or a very careful reconstruction. In fact, the music plays an important role in the movie, structuring it in some ways, as well as having key plot significance. Like Stanley Kubrick’s use of György Ligeti’s Musica Ricercata II in Eyes Wide Shut, sequences of O Brother, Where Art Thou? seem to be choreographed around the music, which adds a lyrical, elegiac touch to the screwy comedy.
Clooney is excellent, looking like a cut-price Clark Gable, obsessing about his hair-cream while sweet-talking his way through the various crises confronting him and his co-escapees. Turturro, who seems to talk out of the side of his mouth and through clenched teeth at the same time, is as good as always, and there are delightful supporting roles filled by Holly Hunter (as Everett’s estranged wife Penny), Charles Durning and John Goodman (as the Cyclops).
As in Barton Fink, the Coens find a resonance of evil in the outwardly charming, rolypoly Goodman. Turturro and Durning, too, are among those who have worked with the Coens before, and it is piquant to compare their present roles in O Brother, Where Art Thou? to the characters they’ve played in previous Coen films. The Coens, like Woody Allen, have built a partial repertory cast, using these faces and figures to sound echoes between their movies – appropriately, as their movies so wittily echo and play with film history.
O Brother, Where Art Thou? is not one of the Coens’ dark films, not a Blood Simple or a Miller’s Crossing, and I, for one, miss what could be seen as their tragedies – while, nonetheless, highly enjoying their comedies. No other film-makers could have created quite so delightfully oddball an Odyssey.