O Brother Where Art Thou Viewing Guide Answer Key
The opening titles inform the states that the Coen Brothers' "O Blood brother, Where Art Thou?" is based on Homer's The Odyssey . The Coens claimed their "Fargo" was based on a truthful story, but afterward confided information technology wasn't; this fourth dimension they confess they haven't actually read The Odyssey . Withal, they've absorbed the spirit. Like its inspiration, this movie is one darn thing later another.
The film is a Homeric journey through Mississippi during the Low--or rather, through all of the images of that time and place that have been trickling downwards through popular civilization always since. There are even walk-ons for characters inspired by Babyface Nelson and the dejection vocalizer Robert Johnson, who speaks of a crossroads soul-selling rendezvous with the devil.
Bluegrass music is at the heart of the film, as it was of "Bonnie and Clyde," and in that location are images of chain gangs, sharecropper cottages, cotton fields, populist politicians, river baptisms, hobos on freight trains, patent medicines, 25-watt radio stations and Klan rallies. The movie's title is lifted from Preston Sturges' 1941 one-act "Sullivan's Travels" (it was the uplifting motion picture the hero wanted to make to redeem himself), and from Homer we get a Cyclops, sirens bathing on rocks, a hero named Ulysses, and his wife Penny, which is no doubtfulness short for Penelope.
If these elements don't exactly add up, maybe they're not intended to. Homer'southward epic grew out of the tales of many storytellers who went before; their episodes were timed and intended for a dark'due south recitation. Quite possibly no 1 before Homer saw the developing work equally a whole. In the same spirit, "O Brother" contains sequences that are wonderful in themselves--lovely short films--only the movie never really shapes itself into a whole.
The opening shot shows three prisoners escaping from a concatenation gang. They are Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney), Pete (John Turturro) and Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson). From their peculiar conviction that they are invisible as they duck and run beyond an open field, we know the motion picture's soul is in farce and satire, although it touches other notes, too--information technology's an anthology of moods. McGill (played by Clooney as if Clark Gable were a patent medicine salesman) doesn't much want company on his escape, but since he is chained to the other two, he has no choice. He enlists them in his crusade by telling them of hidden treasure.
What was The Odyssey, afterward all, but a road movie? "O Brother" follows its three heroes on an odyssey during which they intersect with a political entrada, become radio stars by blow, stumble upon a Klan coming together and deal with McGill's wife, Penny (Holly Hunter), who is about to pack upwardly with their vii daughters and ally a human who won't always be getting himself thrown into jail.
Hunter and Turturro are veterans of earlier Coen movies, and so is John Goodman, who plays a slick-talking Bible salesman. Charles Durning appears equally a gubernatorial candidate with the populist jollity of Huey Long, and the story strands meet and separate equally if the motion-picture show is happening generally past chance and good luck--a nice feeling sometimes, although not i that inspires confidence that the narrative train has an engine.
The nearly constructive sequence in the movie is the Klan rally (consummate with a Klansman whose eye patch means he needs just one hole in his canvas). The choreography of the ceremony seems poised somewhere between Busby Berkeley and "Triumph of the Will," and the Coens succeed in making it look ominous and ridiculous at the same fourth dimension.
Another sequence near stops the show, it's and then haunting in its self-contained mode. It occurs when the escapees run across 3 women doing their laundry in a river. The Sirens, plainly. They sing "Didn't Leave Nobody merely the Baby" while moving in a slightly slowed move, and the event is--well, what information technology's supposed to be, mesmerizing.
I also similar the sequence of events beginning when the lads perform on the radio every bit the Soggy Mount Boys. By at present they have recruited a black partner, Tommy Johnson (Chris Thomas Male monarch), and later when the song becomes a hit, they're chosen on to perform before an audience that is hostile to blacks in detail and escaped convicts in full general. They wear false beards. Actually faux beards.
All of these scenes are wonderful in their unlike ways, and yet I left the moving picture uncertain and unsatisfied. I saw it a 2nd fourth dimension, admired the aforementioned parts, left with the same feeling. I do not demand that all movies have a story to pull us from beginning to end, and indeed one of the charms of "The Big Lebowski," the Coens' previous film, is how its stoned hero loses track of the thread of his own life. Just with "O Brother, Where Are 1000?" I had the sense of invention set afloat; of a series of bright ideas wondering why they had all been invited to the same flick.
Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.
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O Brother, Where Art G? (2000)
103 minutes
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Source: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/o-brother-where-art-thou-2000
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