Homer’s Odyssey is the self-proclaimed model here, but at least in theme and music, if not plot, this is all New Testament. O Brother, Where Art Thou?—which, as long as we’re playing the reference game, gets its title from Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels—is another genre melange from Joel and Ethan Coen, but it’s one that functions as their first real Jesus tease. Despite all its snarkiness toward religion, the Good News is something of a siren that the movie can’t resist.
George Clooney stars as Ulysses (get it?) Everett McGill, a Depression-era chain-gang prisoner who escapes in the film’s opening moments along with the two other men to whom he’s shackled: Pete Hogwallop (John Turturro) and Delmar O’Donnell (Tim Blake Nelson). Their journey begins with a great sight gag—the three of them intermittently popping up amidst a field, which cinematographer Roger Deakins gives a golden glow—and continues as a series of mishaps, misadventures, and misunderstandings that they barely survive. In short, these are convicted men who miraculously experience grace while on the run from the law.
This is a notion that Clooney’s Everett, who considers faith to be “ridiculous superstition,” would scoff at. After Delmar and Pete impulsively get baptized when they pass by a congregation gathered at a river (a beautifully sincere sequence, set to a choral rendition of “Down to the River to Pray”), Everett tells them: “Even if it did put you square with the Lord, the state of Mississippi is a little more hard-nosed.” What Everett doesn’t realize is that he’s preaching. (Clooney is hysterical, employing physical comedy and verbal dexterity to create a vain, loquacious, loopy leading man who never quite realizes he’s the butt of the movie’s joke.)
In addition to “Down to the River,” O Brother features enough renditions of gospel, blues, and folk traditionals—curated by music supervisor T Bone Burnett—to nearly qualify as a musical. Songs like “I’ll Fly Away” and “In the Highways” have an indomitable, spiritual vitality that deflect any attempt to use them ironically.
The movie does hedge its bets on this front. There are displays of ugly Christianity, including John Goodman’s shady Bible salesman and, um, the Ku Klux Klan (putting Clooney, Turturro, and Nelson in blackface at a Klan rally is O Brother’s major misstep). And although Everett may eventually pray himself, he also takes it back in the final moments, even denying the climactic, miraculous flood that saves him. That doesn’t sound like Odysseus/Ulysses, but it does remind me of someone in another ancient text: the apostle Peter.
