By Mike Wilmington Wilmington@moviecitynews.com
Posted Tuesday, September 13th, 2011 - Comments Off on Wilmington on DVDs. Pick of the Week: Blu-ray. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Wilmington on DVDs. Pick of the Week: Blu-ray. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
CO-PICK OF THE WEEK: BLU-RAY
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Four Stars)
U.S.: Joel and Ethan Coen, 2000 (Touchstone/Disney)
O Brother, Where Art Thou? — for whose title alone Joel and Ethan Coen deserve a medal — is an outrageously entertaining and inventive movie that still hasn’t gotten its due. The Coen Brothers’ gaudy ‘30s-era road-movie-musical, is based, or so Joel and Ethan say, on Homer‘s “The Odyssey”, which supplies some sirens, a cyclops (John Goodman, at his Barton Fink darkest and meanest) and a really nasty Penelope (Holly Hunter) — but it’s also inspired quite obviously by Preston Sturges‘ 1941 comedy classic Sullivan‘s Travels, the movie that bequeathed “Brother“ its title. (Explanation: In Sturges‘ picture, “O, Brother, Where Art Thou?” is the name of the socially-conscious drama that Joel McCrea, as hit musical comedy director Sullivan, creator of the smash hit “Ants in Your Pants” musical comedy series, wants to make in defiance of his Hollywood studio bosses. They object.)
Sullivan finally decided not to make his serious heavy-political, Capital vs. Labor American magnum opus, but to make another comedy instead. The Coens’ “Brother,” on the other hand, set in ’30s Mississippi, has enough knee-slapping music and rowdy, smart, no-holds-barred humor to satisfy anybody — though Sullivan’s bosses would have probably asked for (and gotten) “a little (more) sex.”
The Coens’ movie, which I think is a bit of terrific , is about three convicts (played with rare idiot’s delight goofiness by George Clooney, John Turturro and Tim Blake Duncan), who escape from a chain gang and embark on their own dimwitted but hilarious quest to get Clooney, their Odysseus, back to his Penelope. In between, the doofus threesome run into a corrupt gubernatorial election, involving Charles Durning, and become hit bluegrass idols, with their amazing performances and recording of “Man of Constant Sorrow.”
There’s also, believe it or not, a Ku Klux Klan rally, as Busby Berkeley might have choreographed it, and a Bonnie and Clyde-style interlude with a notably manic-depressive Baby Face Nelson (Michael Badalucco). Roger Deakins is at absolute peak form, his colors shimmering like goldenlight. And if you don’t love T-Bone Burnett’s fantastic knee-slapping bluegrass “old-timey” score — well you’re nuts, get out of town.
I thought O Brother, Where Art Thou? was the best movie of 200o, and it’s held up. I like it just as much as I like The Big Lebowski. More maybe. It has a visual beauty and playful erudition and impudent wit that remind you of the best movies of the ’30s, and a hip social savvy that puts you in mind of the ’70s. And it’s as much damned fun as a 200s movie can give us.
As I partly said in the Tribune (and I‘ll stop quoting myself from now on): “This is the one of the best things the Coens have ever done: saturated with multicultural gags that suggest I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang remade as The Wizard of Oz,” or a Marx Brothers movie scripted by P. Sturges and William Faulkner…It’s a daringly irreverent and unstoppably witty picaresque musical comedy… that uses our movie and literary myths of the Depression South to fashion a great American shaggy-man-bites-dog odyssey.” Hmmm. Yeah!
Extras: “Making Of” Documentary; “Man of Constant Sorrow” music video; Storyboard to screen comparison.
