![]() ![]() And Clooney plays Everett with the self-conscious charm of a star from another era-in other words, he is an actor playing an actor playing a role. Even the film itself is falsified, right down to its lovely fake sepia tint (achieved with the then-novel use of digital color correction). Some-like the implication that the KKK was a small band of incompetent bullies despised by the majority of white Southerners-paper over some very ugly truths. There are stock Southern characters, from the wise old black man to the uneducated yokel. There are dishonest, dangerous women and men. There are disguises, including white hoods. There are politicians spinning campaign lies (though their old-fashioned bluntness may seem touchingly naïve to a modern audience). They meet the semi-mythic historical figures Robert Johnson and Babyface Nelson. Styling themselves “adventurers,” the three men and their guitarist, Tommy, amble through tall tales about that most self-mythologizing place, the American South. O Brother is a paean to the wild, reckless joy of self-invention, and the sustaining power of myth to bring us closer to our best selves. (A lawyer instead of a con man a husband instead of a cad.) But where other films might warn against the dangers of self-delusion, O Brother celebrates the courage and creativity it takes to change your identity. The Coen Brothers’ film is about people wanting to be a better version of themselves, something a little lighter and brighter than the truth. ![]() The journey is a lie from the start-there never was any money or any armored car Everett went to jail for practicing law without a license, and escaped in order to keep his wife from marrying another man, quite literally dragging Peter and Delmar along with him. Everett claims he robbed an armored car and hid the loot in a remote cabin, and now the three of them have to find it before the whole valley is flooded as part of a dam-building project. O Brother, Where Art Thou? opens on Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney) fleeing through a field, shackled to Pete Hogwallop (John Turturro) and Delmar O’Donnell (Tim Blake Nelson). While the other men perform a song, their leader leans over, pulls the beard down from his chin, and whispers to his ex-wife, “I want to be what you want me to be, honey.”Īnd in that moment, he seems to believe it. Golden Globes ‘01: Actor-Mus./Comedy (Clooney).Three escaped convicts and a young man who claims to have sold his soul to the Devil arrive at a political campaign dinner disguised in very obviously fake beards. Applegate, Frank Collison, Lee Weaver, Stephen (Steve) Root, Musetta Vander, Chris Thomas King, Mia Tyler, Christy Taylor D: Joel Coen W: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen C: Roger Deakins M: T-Bone Burnett, Chris Thomas King, Carter Burwell. George Clooney, Tim Blake Nelson, John Turturro, Holly Hunter, John Goodman, Charles Durning, Del Pentacost, Michael Badalucco, Brian Reddy, Wayne Duvall, Ed Gale, Ray McKinnon, Daniel von Bargen, Royce D. Fine performances by Clooney, Nelson, and Coen regulars Goodman and Turturro. They fit well enough to comprise a pretty enjoyable film, though. What the trio encounter along the way are a number of Coenesque situations and characters that, when all is said and done, seem like just that-individual situations that never really add up to a cohesive whole. O Brother Where Art Thou? ★★½ 2000 (PG-13)Ĭlooney stars as chain gang escapee Ulysses Everett McGill, who, along with fellow escapees Pete and Delmar (Turturro and Nelson), sets out on an “Odyssey”-like journey through Depressionera Mississippi bound for home, where waits McGill's wife, Penny (Hunter). ![]()
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