O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Film Reviews | Regular Feature O Brother, Where Art Thou? The title of Joel and Ethan Coen's O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) is taken from the 1941 Preston Sturges film Sullivan's Travels. In this picture, the title character, a director offrothy comedies, attempts an about face, setting out to make a movie about the Depression era poor, and, in order to research his subject matter, he descends among them, with but a dime in his pocket. The title ofhis would-be movie is O Brother, Where Art Thou? But John L. Sullivan's vision of the film presented under that title is a far cry from what the Coen brothers have come up with. While the Coens have proven themselves more than capable of producing dark, brooding films, here they opted for decidedly lighter fare. There is some potentially somber material in O Brother, Where Art Thou? - the Depression, racism , a broken marriage, imprisonment - but the Coen brothers present all of this with humor. One might argue that this is not appropriate fare for laughs, but then one might argue that neither is homelessness. Of course Sullivan 's Travels is ultimately a comedy about living among the homeless, with the key scene being that wherein Sullivan watches a movie (a comedy) while confined to a chain gang. In hearing the laughter of his fellow prisoners, he realizes the joy that his comedies have brought to so many who have very few joys elsewhere in their lives. Ultimately , laughter becomes a force against the oppressions of the real world, both in Sullivan 's Travels and in the Coens' O Brother, Where Art Thou? That Joel and Ethan Coen should draw from a classic film for the title (and other elements) of O Brother, Where Art Thou? should come as little surprise to those familiar with their oeuvre. In truth, some of their less kind critics have accused the Coen brothers ofrelying too much on what has gone before, cinematically speaking. Certainly their movies are rich with cinematic allusion, like those offew other filmmakers. But one might also make a valid argument that through their unrestrained intertexuality the Coens have become our most modern American filmmakers. After all, we do live in a media-saturated age, and that youths who grew up bombarded by images from television and film should manifest such an upbringing in their adult work seems not only justifiable, but inevitable. But there is little question that the Coen brothers are rather more aware of this media bombardment than are others. Their treatment of it is almost overly conscious and always has been. In his book about them, Josh Levine reports that one of the first experiments undertaken by the brothers was to simply "film the television screen - a hint, perhaps, oftheir later tendency to make postmodern, self-referential films?" (6, The Coen Brothers. Ontario: ECW, 2000.) Moreover, they also refilmed things they had seen on television or in films, with friends and neighbors as their casts. When they moved on to their first feature film, then, it's quite natural that they should have turned to a tried and true genre: film noir. BloodSimple (1984) departs fromthe noir genre in some significant ways, but in its look and storyline it is about as close as a modern film can get to film noir. For a first feature, the array of cinematic tricks that the Coen brothers use in Blood Simple is truly impressive (if perhaps at times a bit too selfconscious ). Blood Simple is often saturated with shadows, creating almost abstract designs, similar to those in the crime films ofthe 1940s and 1950s. Furthermore, several techniques, like the running of the camera close to the ground, carried on a wooden board, come not from the world of noir, but from that of the B horror film, particularly those of Sam Raimi, with whom the Coens had previously worked. The horror techniques add a creepiness to what is not really horror film. As Joel has stated, "The attraction of a genre is that the audience comes to it with a set of rules and expectations. The fun comes from circumventing the rules and putting a new spin...