My Life at the Movies 3.31.09: 2000 - O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Posted by DC Perry on 03.31.2009
O Muse! Sing in me, and through me tell the story...
This week, we move into yet another decade – in fact, into another century. We managed to survive the decimal destruction of our computer systems, avoiding the apocalypse that would send us careening back to the turn of the last century, technologically-speaking. At the movies, we had some excellent offerings - Gladiator, High Fidelity, Memento, Requiem for a Dream, Almost Famous, Meet the Parents, and Traffic.
Only one movie in 2000 took one of the oldest stories we know and made it sing in a voice we knew, but sometimes forget.
2000 at a Glance
US President: Bill Clinton
Median annual salary: $41,994
Gallon of gas: $1.46
Dozen eggs: $1.14
New house: $206,400
New car: $20,664
Movie ticket: $5.39
Boston Red Sox: 85-77, second place, American League East
Me: Ruining my own lands. Not ruining a gnoll's.
Pater familias Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney) has less than a week to stop his wife's remarriage. Unfortunately for him, he's working on a chain gang with fellow prisoners Pete (John Turturo) and Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson). He spins them a yarn about $1.2 million he stole from an armored car, and that it's theirs for the taking as long as they reach his cabin before the valley is flooded to fuel a new hydroelectric plant. They hitch a ride with an old blind man pushing a handcart along the railroad, and he gives them a few hints on what to expect, Oracle style.
You shall see things, wonderful to tell. You shall see a... a cow... on the roof of a cotton house, ha. And, oh, so many startlements.
Pete offers shelter at his cousin Wash Hogwallop's (Frank Collison) house, assuming they can get past the gun-wielding little doorman (Quinn Gasaway). Wash turns out to be less interested in helping Pete than in collecting the bounty, however, and the three are nearly smoked out of Wash's barn by the unearthly Sheriff Cooley (Daniel Von Bargen). Lucky for them, Little Hogwallop is ready to R-U-N-N-O-F-T, and with the help of the family car and a stack of phone books, they leave Wash behind, with nothing but a stack of hair nets and a gold watch to remember him by.
I like the smell of my hair treatment. The pleasing odor is half the point.
Having sent their driver home to the tune of much cursing and spelling, the three convicts contemplate their next move. Everett proudly produces Wash's gold watch, intending to sell it for money to replace their broken-down car. Pete is enraged that Everett stole from Wash, even though Wash tried to turn them in for the bounty, but Delmar is distracted by singers in the surrounding woods walking down to the water.
It's a fool looks for logic in the chambers of the human heart.
Back on the road, Pete and Delmar are convinced that their recent salvation absolves them spiritually and criminally. At a crossroads in the middle of nowhere, they stop and pick up Tommy Johnson (Chris Thomas King), fresh from selling his soul to the devil for supernatural guitar prowess. On Tommy's advice, they head to TishamingoTishomingo (thanks, Lisa Adams), where a blind radio station owner (Stephen Root) pays people to record songs. They introduce themselves as the Soggy Bottom Boys and collect their money (including $10 for Merton Alouicious, who can't sign as he never learned to write), and disappear, never knowing the state-wide sensation they leave behind them.
I don't mean to be tellin' tales out of school, but there's a feller in there that'll pay you ten dollars if you sing into his can.
The group is soon separated, as Sheriff Cooley, who bears a striking resemblance to the man who bought Tommy's soul, finds their car, causing Tommy to run for his life. Everett, Pete, and Delmar continue on foot, only to be nearly run down by George "Don't Call Him Baby Face" Nelson (Michael Badalucco), happy as can be with the police hot on his trail. He invites them to hop in, and as money flies and livestock fall, he makes his way into town and knocks over his third bank of the day before succumbing to his crippling depression and leaving the three with his share of the loot. The next day, at Pete's near-insane insistence, Everett stops the car, and the three clamber down the riverbank to find three lovely women washing their unmentionables.
I don't know their names. I seen 'em first!
When they come to, Delmar and Everett are horrified to discover Pete's clothes lain out on a rock, full of nothing but a toad. Delmar insists that they seek a wizard, but Everett is more interested in lunch. Delmar's toad-filled shoe box and Everett's fistful of dollars attract the attention of Big Dan Teague (John Goodman), itinerant Bible salesman and limb-swinging Cyclops, who invites them to dine with him picnic style so he can talk about the former and demonstrate the latter. Finding nothing in Delmar's shoe box but a toad, he crushes it and throws it into a nearby tree, devastating Delmar.
I'm a man of large appetite, and even with lunch under my belt, I was feelin' a mite peckish.
Everett is more than able to move on, and when they arrive in his hometown and he finds his daughters singing at a rally for gubernatorial candidate Homer Stokes (Wayne Duvall) under his wife's maiden name, he storms off to the Woolworth's for some answers. There, he finds his wife Penny (Holly Hunter) and her fiancée and advisor to Mr. Stokes' campaign, Vernon T. Waldrip (Ray McKinnon). After a one-sided embarrassment of a fist fight, expulsion from Woolworth's (possibly the entire chain), and the revelation that his daughters believe that he, like lots of respectable folks, was hit by a train. He and Delmar head for the local movie house, where Everett holds forth on the dangers of women, until the lights dim and a chain gang, including the not-at-all-dead Pete, is marched in for the show. Pete, momentarily taking over for the blind handcart rider in our Odyssey parallels, warns them not to seek the treasure. Delmar and Everett bust Pete out of jail, and he pleads forgiveness for spilling his guts to Cooley. Everett admits that the treasure doesn't exist, and his only goal was to prevent Polly's marriage to Vernon. Pete is enraged, and attacks Everett right into a nearby Klan rally, where Tommy is about to be lynched.
I belong to a certain secret society – I don't believe I gotta mention its name.
Everett, Delmar, and Pete pose as the color guard to get close to Tommy, but Big Dan Teague yanks off their hoods, exposing their dirt-smeared faces and sending the Klansmen into hysterics. Teague avoids being impaled by a flying Stars and Bars, but meets his fate at the bottom of a toppled flaming cross, and Everett and crew escape, with Stokes in pursuit on the way to his own campaign dinner. Everett hopes to win Penny back, and the four pose as musicians to get close to Waldrip's table. When they play "Man of Constant Sorrow," the crowd goes wild, and Stokes severely underestimates the value of celebrity when he tries to turn the crowd on them. Incumbent windbag governor Pappy O'Daniel (Charles Durning) turns the situation to his advantage, pardoning the Soggy Bottom Boys and getting Stokes run out of town on a rail.
Is you is or is you ain't my constituency?
All's well that ends well, but Penny still isn't convinced. She wants her wedding ring, which she left in the roll-top desk in their cabin, where Cooley will no doubt be waiting for them. Everett counts on the safety of O'Daniel's pardon, but Cooley isn't interested in human laws, and prepares to hang all four of them. Before he can, the valley is flooded, sending men, dogs, cans of Dapper Dan pomade, and a roll-top desk to the surface of the new lake (and stranding a cow on top of a cotton house).
Come on in, boys, the water's fine.
America doesn't have an epic myth. That's what happens when the dominant culture is made up of immigrants. Our culture has barely 300 years of stories to tell, and the earliest of that is confined to a very small piece of the continent. So our attempts to make myth ends up being recycled European ones, like the Headless Horseman, the Ghost Train, and Reaganomics. What we lack in legendary places, however, we make up in legendary characters. And there are few richer veins of fascinating characters than the Depression era. Grafting characters like Tommy Johnson and George "Babyface" Nelson onto the oldest epic myth in western culture is an inspired juxtaposition.
The 1930s is the ideal era for this kind of myth creation. The tone of the movie perfectly evokes the Depression era, with its desperate religion, overblown politics, and heavily-armed defense of family. Klansman Stokes' reform candidacy, complete with broom and midget, butts into O'Daniel's entitled, entrenched, white-suit-wearing, mint-julep-drinking boss-style politics, and it's clear no one's looking out for the little guy. In some other place or time, this might give rise to Robin Hood – not in America, though.
We got this Depression on. I got to do for me and mine.
Most inspired of all is the use of blues and folk music to set the mood and place. If America has a mythology of its own, it's the creation and evolution of its music. Excel at the mythology of sound. Blues is ours, and if anything endures from our culture to be grafted onto another some day, it will be our music. O Brother, Where Art Thou? elevates that music into myth, and reminds us at the turn of one century where we were shortly after the turn of the last.
