O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Joel Coen, USA, UK, 2000o
In the deep south during the 1930s, three escaped convicts search for hidden treasure while a relentless lawman pursues them. On their journey they come across many comical characters and incredible situations. – Allegedly based upon Homer's Odyssey.
Immediately after their popular and critical hits Fargo and The Big Lebowski, the Coen Brothers produced this farce in which three chained convicts in 1930s Mississippi escape from forced labour to find the spoils of a robbery that their leader (George Clooney) has supposedly hidden. The film is teeming with allusions, for example to the Odyssey, but this is merely a licence for high jinks by the metre: On their odysseys, the lumpen trio come across a blind seer on a trolley, arch-reactionary hillbillies and politicians, the historically handed-down bank robber Babyface Nelson and record a country song that becomes a hit, have their heads beaten up by a Bible salesman or turned by three sirens in a dazzling scene ... The true guiding stars of the whole thing are the clichés in our heads about the US South and the Great Depression of those years, the over-the-top, half-escapist, half-realistic screwball comedies about it and the folk and blues music around it, from which singer-songwriter T Bone Burnett has put together a fantastic soundtrack. At the box office, the wild mash-up worked even better than the two previous Coen films, and the critical reaction was divided. Let's put it this way: the Coens have made more memorable films, but hardly any stranger.
Andreas Furler