LGM Film Club, Part 562: O Brother, Where Art Thou

I hadn’t seen the Coen Brothers’ 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou in a long time. This film is largely remembered for its soundtrack, which was indeed great. Among other things, it put a lot of money in the pockets of people such as Ralph Stanley, who truly deserved it. Now, I was actually living in Nashville for a couple of months in the summer of 2000 and there was the inaugural concert introducing all this great music, but I didn’t have any money and didn’t go and I really regret that. Can you imagine just being able to say you were there?

But again, this is a film fundamentally, not a soundtrack. And I was surprised at how blah the film is on rewatch. It’s a slightly pleasant trifle. It’s amusing enough. But there’s really nothing to the film that grabs you on a rewatch, which is so rare for a Coen Brothers film. I don’t actually like Barton Fink very much, but it’s a far more ambitious and interesting film. The slapstick stuff is just fine, but is better done on the underrated Intolerable Cruelty. The core cast of George Clooney, John Turturro, and Tim Blake Nelson are good enough of course. The Odyssey sorta theme at least provides us with some good sirens and John Goodman as the Cyclops. But there’s not one laugh out loud moment in the movie and hardly even any chuckles. It just kind of goes along, with good music and some slight smiles, for 100 minutes. There are worse movies for sure and there are worse movies in the Coen catalog (I happen to think The Man Who Wasn’t There should be retitled The Film That Wasn’t There and some of the later ones are pretty forgettable). But it’s more just OK than I remembered it. Even when they break up the KKK rally and use the Confederate flag as a weapon against the Klansmen, which I remembered as a great moment when I first saw it, is just kinda fine.