O Brother, Where Art Thou? - From Greek Classic to American Original

O Brother, Where Art Thou? - From Greek Classic to American Original

In the winter of 2001, American audiences initially paid little attention to Joel and Ethan Coen's Depression era, jail-break, musical "buddy" comedy O Brother, Where Art Thou? The film's reputation lingered, however, and over the next seven months O Brother eventually grossed a significant $45.5 million (imdb.com). Loosely adapted from Homer’s The Odyssey, the film focuses on Ulysses Everett McGill’s (George Clooney’s) journey from the jailhouse back to both his home in Ithaca, Mississippi, and to his wife Penny (Holly Hunter). Along with his two sidekicks, Delmar and Pete (Tim Blake Nelson and John Turturro), Ulysses encounters not only characters from the classic myth including the Sirens and the Cyclops, but also slices of American folk legend. Episodic in its narrative structure, the film unfolds like Homer’s saga with very few, if any, segues between the vignettes. The film deserves an admiring second look for the Coen brothers employ their old-time country music soundtrack in a manner analogous to Homer’s lyre, reconstruct gender roles and heroism for the American twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and create a moving tribute to the American South during the Great Depression.

The title of the film derives from Preston Sturges’s 1941 American film comedy Sullivan’s Travels, in which a movie-director character attempts to prove himself a “serious” artist by deserting comedy and making a dramatic film entitled O Brother, Where Art Thou? The Coen brothers perhaps created their O Brother as a realized vision of their directorial counterpart in Sullivan’s Travels. Simultaneously they reinforce the idea that comedy certainly can be art, and thus...

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Jones, Peter V. Introduction. The Odyssey. By Homer. Trans. E. V. Rieu. London: Penguin, 1991. xi-l.

Lomax, Alan. The Folk Songs of North America. Garden City: Doubleday, 1960.

O Brother, Where Art Thou? Dir. Joel Coen. Screenplay by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen. Perf. George Clooney, John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson, Holly Hunter, John Goodman. Touchstone, 2000.

O Brother, Where Art Thou?—The Official Web Site. 2000. Buena Vista Online Entertainment. 30 Oct. 2001 .

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Oermann, Robert K. “‘Old-Time Music Is Very Much Alive’ But you won’t hear it on ‘country’ radio.” O Brother, Where Art Thou?: Music From a Film by Joel & Ethan Coen. CD. Universal Music, 2000.