O Brother Where Art Thou 2000
I really like the Coen brothers but the reviews of this movie were decidedly mixed when it first came out so I never got around to watching it. Even when the music started winning awards and I got to like the Man of Constant Sorrow song I still didn’t go see it. I finally got around to it and have to agree that this isn’t the Coen brothers at their best.
Centered around three escapees from prison in Mississippi it supposedly is based on Homer’s Odyssey. The hero is named Ulysses (I’m not thinking anyone from the South has ever named their child Ulysses since about 1863) and there are sirens and even a cyclops, but I don’t know how a lot of the other characters fit in.
There are certainly some characters here. Everyone is over the top. It kind of works, but there needs to be a straight man in here somewhere to give the movie a center of gravity. George Clooney’s Ulysses, with his bizarre way of talking that only the Coen brothers can come up with, isn’t it.
The directing from the Coens is always good and they don’t let you down. There are lots of great shots of people from every angle. And the entire movie was given a brown tint to make it look more like the dust bowl depression era depicted. It works. But ultimately the rest of the movie doesn’t work although it probably sounded really good on paper. Maybe because I was familiar with the music, or maybe not, the songs seemed obviously lip synced which was a distraction. The stereotypes of southerners are so incredibly harsh, complete with a KKK halftime show, that you can almost taste the bitterness. You don’t find out what the journey is really about until the movie is nearly over and by that time they have to wrap it up pretty quickly. It’s like they had a whole bunch of ideas and threw them all together and then had to come up with a plot at the end for it to be called a movie.
Still, it’s worth watching, as everything by the Coens is. And even if it doesn’t measure up to Raising Arizona, it does deliver a great cast of characters and the story keeps your interest.
I’ll give it a B-.
Owned on: Blu-ray