Re-coen-sidering: O Brother, Where Art Thou?

This is the second in a bi-monthly 2018 series in which I'm reexamining my feelings toward six movies made by Joel and Ethan Coen, five of which I did not care for the first time.

If I'm considering the matter as broadly as possible, I'd say that Joel and Ethan Coen have two tones they work in, both of which start with the letter M: madcap and melancholy. And that while both tones are present at some point or another in most of their work, I vastly prefer the films where melancholy predominates.

Of course, as soon as I said that I would immediately provide a staggering contradiction to that preference. My favorite Coen brothers movie, which is also my favorite movie of all time, is Raising Arizona, and most people would consider the madcap to far outweigh the melancholy in that movie. But then all you need to do is look at my next three favorite Coen movies to right the ship on my perspective. Fargo, Inside Llewyn Davis and Miller's Crossing contain almost no madcap. (Though one of their movies with zero madcap, No Country for Old Men, falls in the bottom half of my Coen movies, so the system is nothing if not unpredictable.)

O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a movie where the madcap fairly suffocates the melancholy. The movie makes gestures toward melancholy, to be sure, but they always fall flat, in part because the madcap has done such a powerful job preventing us from really being introduced to our three main characters.

I don't know that I would have been able to put my finger on this as a contributing factor to my middling response to the movie the first time, but when I watched it a second time on Friday night, 18 years later, it was easy to identify. We are meant to take an immediate liking to Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney), Pete Hogwallop (John Turturro) and Delmar O'Donnell (Tim Blake Nelson) -- all great names by the way -- but the manner of their introduction really keeps me at arm's length. In short, they never are really introduced. Their first handful of scenes are very set piece heavy, and their reactions are often the reactions of three staring faces operating as one, leaving us little opportunity to differentiate between them. Broadly you'd be able to say "Oh, Ulysses is the handsome one and the other two are the hicks," but that, you will agree, is not really characterization. Belatedly we are given an idea what drives them in a scene by a campfire where they talk about their hopes for how to use the money, but this does not actually reveal as much about their characters as the movie thinks it does, plus it's too little too late.

The movie doesn't really have time to develop these characters because it's too fixated on producing the next madcap scene. And these scenes are madcap all right, full of the kind of mugging expressions that always made me feel this movie was more condescending toward its characters than it was loving toward them. (Whereas I feel like a movie like Raising Arizona stays on the other side of that divide.) It was Clooney's performance in particular that made me feel that, though the others bug out their eyes plenty as well. Nelson is the most credible, I suppose because he is the closest to the type of character he's actually portraying. Clooney and Turturro are hopelessly northern by comparison, which is not to say they can't do reasonable southern accents or inhabit their characters in other ways. It's just that they seem to be mocking these characters more than is good for the movie.

If I liked the set pieces a little more, I probably wouldn't have as much of a problem with it. But each set piece is anywhere from ten to 30 percent less satisfying than I feel like it should be. As just one example that illustrates multiple points I've made so far, I don't get the appeal of the scene where John Goodman beats up Nelson and Clooney with a branch he pulls off a tree. It's not that I don't get why he attacks them -- he's trying to rob them -- but I don't get why Clooney entirely fails to take evasive action. In the Coens' interest in cooking up some good slapstick, they've robbed all credibility from the characters by having Clooney sit there, without defending himself, after Goodman has already gone upside Delmar O'Donnell's head about three times. He's still sitting there saying he doesn't understand -- in that oh-so funny, linguistically aspirational, southern hick way -- when Goodman finally gets to him and goes all Babe Ruth on him as well (get it, Goodman played Babe Ruth). Goodman's also at fault here by having taken his time getting to Clooney without any worries that Clooney would defend himself. When you have unbelievable reactions by two different characters in the same scene, you have an unbelievable scene -- even in a movie where most of the scenes are supposed to be heightened and unbelievable in some way.

Speaking of unbelievable, I just don't buy that these guys would just waltz into a recording studio and record the year's (decade's?) biggest hit as a lark. These don't strike me as guys who could perform a song like this off the cuff, and only two days later I can't remember if the movie actually provides an explanation for their golden pipes. I should say, I was a man of constant distractions while watching this movie, as I was going down some internet rabbit holes while watching it. Don't worry, I did give it a fair shake -- I was mostly pausing it when I'd do this -- but I could tell early on that my impression of the movie was not likely to improve significantly, so I considered some level of distraction acceptable.

The recording studio scene does give the movie one of its two big ties to one of my favorite Coen movies, Inside Llewyn Davis. Probably the most obvious comparison between the movies is that they both make use of the structure of Homer's The Odyssey, this one explicitly (it credits Homer in the opening credits), the other a little less explicitly (the cat Llewyn loses is named Ulysses). But the more specific -- like, bizarrely specific -- thing they have in common is that both movies feature a musician or musicians recording a major radio hit, without having the foresight to profit from its success. Llewyn actually rejects the chance for long-term profit on "Please Mr. Kennedy" because he needs the quick influx of cash from doing a one-off job, and doesn't believe a song this vapid could have any legs. (Hence, engaging in his fatal flaw as he does repeatedly throughout the movie.) In another sign of the contrast in quality between the two movies, the Soggy Bottom Boys never even think to consider anything other than the $10 they get paid to record "A Man of Constant Sorrow" -- improbably record it, as I mentioned earlier. Although I suppose it's also part of their fatal flaws of being exaggerated, idiotic hicks.

I don't want to suggest to you there's nothing I like about O Brother, Where Art Thou? In fact, I had retroactively given in three stars on Letterboxd and would probably stick with that rating, or at least, bust it down no further than 2.5 stars. The things I enjoy most about it are its look -- the sepia tones were one of the earliest examples of digital color correction, and the Dapper Dan hair gel containers makes a great example of the production design -- and some of its small-scale visual gags. Like, I love the scene where Delmar looks over at Ulysses' body lying on the ground after their run-in with the sirens, and then looks over where we'd expect to see Pete's body, and there's just an empty shirt and pants. I like the way this establishes our expectations and then inverts them. The idea that Pete might have been turned into the toad is one of the ways I'll go along with their exaggerated hick-itude, even. Alas, the movie just doesn't have enough moments like this.

So now that I have re-coen-sidered O Brother, Where Art Thou?, I'd say that not only does my initial impression still hold, but I probably like it even a little bit less than I did then. It's still obviously the work of masters, and they're surely in command of the type of film they wanted to make. But that type of film is just not for me, in this case.

Next up in June: The Ladykillers.