Movie Review For O Brother Where Art Thou
Submitted by dragonchild3 on 06/30/2008 05:21 PM
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Movie Review For O Brother Where Art Thou
One must certainly give credit to the Coen Brothers for writing O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a quirky crime-drama and musical comedy loosely based on Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey. Like most of their films, it is an exploration of the human condition--mainly the dumb things that people do and the fixes they get themselves into. The movie, directed by Joel Coen, is rated PG-13 for some violence and language.
The movie begins with the words from the Odyssey: “Oh Muse!/Sing in me, and through me tell the story/Of that man skilled in all the ways of contending/A wanderer, harried for years on end… This is followed by a scene of prisoners singing as they work. One has already gotten a feel for the movie: a retelling of the ancient Greek epic as a story of a prison escape in Mississippi at the height of the Great Depression .
Three convicts of varying ineptitude, Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney), Pete (John Turturro), and Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson), are chained together and are making their escape. Ulysses, the leader of the trio, is articulate and well-groomed but not bright; Pete and Delmar are just plain stupid. The Coen Brothers described the movie as a kind of “The Three Stooges meet Homer’s Odyssey.” Though silly, the three petty criminals are likeable, and their reactions to the dilemmas they get into are a primary source of humor.
The three men escape because Ulysses told them about 1.2 million in treasure from a robbery that he had hidden in a cabin about to be flooded for a hydroelectric dam. They embark on a series of near surreal misadventures, encountering many colorful characters on the way, including Babyface Nelson (Michael Badaluceo), a manic robber; Tommy Johnson (Chris Thomas King), an African-American they pick up who plays guitar and has sold his soul to the Devil for this talent; one-eyed Big Dan (John Goodman), a violent bible salesmen who is the Creon Brothers’ version of Homer’s Cyclops; a mysterious...
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