Authors: Mark Browning
Generically, the film might even be classified as some kind of musical, keenly evoking a time when music helped create a sense of a shared culture as well as an increasingly lucrative means to make money. We see the very primitive mechanics of the recording process and the importance of the recording contract, even if Delmar can append only a cross to his. Music has a political purpose too as a way to reach the masses, used by both ends of the political spectrum as we see the Reform campaign use a band playing on the back of a truck and later at a rally, and Pappy discovering at the end the way to gain popularity by association, in sharing a stage with the Soggy Bottom Boys. The Reform campaign especially seems to focus on upbeat numbers (like “Keep on the Sunny Side”) as a way of associating their brand of politics with optimism and hope. The music is part of the overt gimmickry of campaigning, like sharing the stage with a midget and a broom to symbolize standing up for the little man and sweeping the old politics away. Chris Thomas King as Tommy is actually a talented musician and played his own numbers, and Tim Blake Nelson (looking like a slimmed-down Stephen Baldwin) had a good enough voice to perform his song “In the Jailhouse Now.” Clooney himself, whose actual vocals were performed by Dan Tyminski from T-Bone Burnett's original song, gives a sufficiently convincing mime to persuade many viewers that he was actually singing.
The soundtrack stayed stubbornly popular at the top of a number of different charts and acted as something of a catalyst for a resurgence of interest in bluegrass, blues, and country. It even went on to win a number of awards at the 2001 Country Music Awards and was voted Album of the Year at the 2002 Grammies. It also led to the strange situation of a band calling itself The Soggy Bottom Boys performing and touring songs from the film with Dan Tyminski on lead vocals, especially the hit “Man of Constant Sorrow” (which won the Grammy for Best Single). This was made more complicated by the release of D. A. Pennebaker's film
Down from the Mountain
(2001), documenting a charity concert, featuring music from the soundtrack of
O Brother
and introduced by Holly Hunter.
There is a strong element of comic absurdity in the narrative, from our first sight of the three escapees, standing upright in a field, and then suddenly diving back down on a shouted warning. Unlike narratives like Erich von Stroheim's
Greed
(1924), where the protagonists are finally shackled together, underlining the negative brutality latent in human nature, here we see a celebration of joy in the ridiculous. Although initially motivated to find some “treasure” as McGill calls it, this is largely forgotten and ultimately revealed as a ruse anyway. The time deadline (that the valley where the money is supposedly hidden will be flooded as part of a hydroelectric scheme) fades in importance, and when the flood does finally happen, what seems like a deus ex machina act in saving the protagonists is predicted right from the outset.
Ultimately, it is not a pursuit of money that motivates McGill but love and comradeship, and there is a sweet earnestness about the hapless escapees. When asked if he knows his “way around a Walther PPK,” Delmar replies, “Well, that's where we can't help you. I don't believe it's in Mississippi.” The scene of Delmar waking to find Pete's clothes lying on the ground, as if he had been vaporized, is a comic highlight. Delmar concludes “them sirens did this to Pete” and “left his heart” since the shirt appears to be moving. The appearance of a toad does not destroy Delmar's superstitions but only refines them, so that he now believes that Pete has been magically turned into a toad. There is situation comedy in Delmar's subsequent chase after “Pete” and carrying “him” around in a box. McGill remains skeptical that the creature is Pete, to which Delmar calmly replies “Look at him” as if the likeness is obvious.
There is physical comedy, such as the openly false beards that the trio use to get into the rally at the end or the scene where they try and board a train, while still chained together. McGill stands, framed by the open carriage door, and asks his fellow passengers, whose point of view we share, in high-flown language whether any of them are “trained in metalurgical arts.” We hear Delmar fall and see Pete being dragged down, but the humor is in the delay before McGill is slammed first to the ground and then dragged out in wide-eyed incomprehension.
Consistent with the era in which the action is set, there is a Marx Brothers feel to some of the three-shots of the escapees and the acting style of Turturro especially who gives several wide-eyed stares to the camera (for example, early on at the sound of pursuing dogs). The fight in which McGill challenges Vernon (Ray McKinnon), his wife's new suitor, subverts expectations. Clooney's character is clearly out of his depth, adopting a very strange fighting style with his hands raised ineffectively against Vernon's more professional stance. Even before any blows are
exchanged, McGill moves right up into Vernon's face and sniffs, not as a grand attempt at humiliation but literally because he can smell his favorite pomade, the ultimate indignity. However, swift punches to his nose follow and McGill is literally thrown out of the store. The Coens do not give us the stereotypical western fistfight, cutting away from the action almost as soon as it starts so that we only hear rather than see the blows.
The Ku Klux Klan are portrayed as laughable, and the trio's stealing of uniforms and the ability to infiltrate a rally, despite marching so badly out of step, feels closer to the tone of Abbott and Costello movies. The whole scene seems ridiculous with the Klan members moving in almost Busby Berkeley-style dance moves to uplifting southern music. The reappearance of Big Dan is logical in terms of his character, but the escape of the trio is again nonnaturalistic, first as Dan catches a flagpole, inches from his face, only to then be flattened by a burning cross pushed down on him. The Reform rally acts as a way of drawing narrative threads together as Homer is unmasked as a racist and thrown out, along with his campaign manager, Vernon.
Clooney has a new look here: wild hair (something of a first for him), a defined Clark Gable-like moustache, arched eyebrows, often giving him a wide-eyed, surprised expression, and his mouth often held open (like the close-up of his face as the boy who is rescuing them drives at the wall of the burning barn, or the appearance of Pete, apparently reincarnated as a toad). Eating with an improvised napkin even by a campfire, he is defined by his choice of hair-care product: he is literally a Dapper Dan man, seeking this product out during the course of their journey and asking Walter if he has a hairnet that he can wear as he sleeps. And it even seems to dominate his dreams, waking with the mumbled question, “How's my hair?” He rejects the pomade called Fop, although this describes his character quite well, and he frets that “I don't know how I'm going to keep my coiffeur in order.” Clooney is playing with his own image here as a figure known for his hair and signals a willingness to laugh at the excesses associated with grooming a star image. It is important too, though, as it shows that for the first time that he does not necessarily have to be placed in a narrative as an object of female attention.
It is McGill who assumes the role of chief planner and strategist and does seem the most observant of the three (being the first to notice the sound of singing by the campfire). McGill's verbose and formal language marks him as an educated outsider here. Later, he declines Delmar's offer of food, noting “a third of a gopher would only arouse my appetite,” and declines to argue with Pete as “the personal rancor in that remark, I don't intend to dignify with comment.” The later revelation that he is actually
a disbarred lawyer hardly comes as a surprise. In moments of high pressure, however, his fluency deserts him, declaring repeatedly “We're in a tight spot” when they are surrounded in a barn. He can switch linguistic codes as it suits him, lecturing his peers on the “paranormal psychic powers of the blind” only to dismiss the words of “a nigger and an old man” a few moments later with “what the hell does he know.”
He is not averse to minor acts of immorality, driving off without paying for gas, stealing a pocket watch from Wash, Pete's distant and untrustworthy relative, and later inventing two more players (unnecessarily adding the detail that they are black) in his band to secure more money from Mr. Lund. There is, however, also a core of decency running through McGill, so that he leads the group to rescue Tommy from the Ku Klux Klan (having chosen earlier to pick him up in the car), and although he lies to the group about the existence of “treasure,” he does so in order to win back his wife and enjoy the experience of traveling together en route. Unlike his wife, the suitably named Penny, whom we first see in the five and dime store, he is not driven primarily by money. He has the gift to charm individuals when he needs to but he seems more drawn to values of community and constructs the trio into a surrogate family. He later indignantly declares himself as “the Pater Familia” on discovering the plot to usurp his position.
McGill is the only one of the three who does not race forward to be baptized, marking him as more skeptical. As Delmar subsequently describes him, he is the only one left “unaffiliated.” After picking up Tommy, who claims to have sold his soul to the devil, McGill dismisses their conversion (“You two are as dumb as a bag of hammers”). However, although McGill notes that in times of economic hardship “everybody's looking for answers” and religion appears to offer some, the film is not as scathing in its criticism of religion per se as it is of those who pervert it for their own ends (like Bible salesman Big Dan Teague). The offer of forgiveness, redemption, and everlasting life is clearly attractive to Pete and especially Delmar, whose subsequent behavior is marked by a desire to lead a different life now that they are “saved.” Although McGill is the natural leader of the three, we do not know exactly how he was caught in the first place, and he is singularly stupid in placing vanity above the risk of leaving clues, his Dapper Dan tins, that are clearly identifiable (and distinctively fragrant). McGill seems to recognize an alter ego in Big Dan, someone else “endowed with the gift of the gab,” but his naïve politeness blinds him to the superficial charms of others. He is taken completely unaware during the picnic as Dan breaks off a branch from the tree under which they are sitting and proceeds to bludgeon him before making off with their money.
He is seen as protective toward his children, who are revealed at the Reform rally, as well as naturally affectionate (they instinctively run forward and hug him too). His problem is one of social standing: in the eyes of his wife, he is not “bona fide.” For the entirety of the film, he is humbly dressed in the blue cap and overalls of the working man, contrasting with the new love rival who has a more impressive ring to offer. He has been disavowed by his wife, the children now taking their mother's maiden name, and he has been placed in a new narrative that he was “hit by a train.” This family element to McGill's character is primarily a plot contrivance to bring the political and romantic subplots together, focused on his former home about to be flooded and where his ring is now housed. The retrieval of this item (the real treasure of the narrative) now becomes the focus of McGill's motivation, determined to show he is more than “some no-account drifter” as she calls him, and allows the dramatic intervention of the biblical-style flood (as predicted by the old man at the beginning).
Although McGill's observation that the store is “a geographical oddity: two weeks from everywhere” is intended more sarcastically at the length of time it will take to order either a car part or his favorite hair product, it also reflects the existential setting of the film as a whole. A little like
Forrest Gump
(Robert Zemeckis, 1994), the plot careers from one iconic image (especially from the American South) to another, including chain gangs, Ku Klux Klan rallies, bank-robbing gangsters, and itinerant workers. However, allusions to a wider social and political world are delivered with a light or comedic touch. The overweight entourage that waddle around Daddy O'Daniel, including his sons, reflect the manipulative nature of local politicians, but the Ku Klux Klan scene and the unmasking of Reform candidate Homer Stokes is mostly played for laughs with the three protagonists rescuing Tommy by means of some slapstick violence. The rows of faces that meet the escapees as they try to board the train are a silent reminder of the millions of itinerant laborers at the time. However, poverty is used more as a comedic backdrop. A friend of the trio, who gives them a meal, apologizes while they eat: “I slaughtered this horse last Tuesday. I'm afraid she's starting to turn.”
The pursuit of the trio, which might have ended in lynching, turns more toward cartoonish violence as the barn in which they are sleeping is raked with machine-gun fire, without causing any injuries. The inversion of a barn burning into the hurling back of a torch, and the subsequent explosion of a police van and the rescue by Walter's son driving a getaway vehicle are more like the escapist fantasy of adventure films. The betrayal of friends by Walter to the authorities could seem dark, were
it not for Pete's angry insults that he hurls down, standing in plain sight of the police guns; and the pile of books on which Walter's son sits both at the table and in the truck is a visual gag about his diminutive size but also reflects the positive consequences of being educated and being able to think for oneself. The shadowy figure, whom we may subsequently identify as Sheriff Cooley (Daniel von Bargen), pursuing the trio is not given much dramatic life beyond the wearing of dark glasses in which we see the reflection of fire on a couple of occasions and Tommy's description of the devil as “white as you folks, with mirrors for eyes.”
Crime is touched on lightly, by implication one optional lifestyle in a time of economic hardship. The presentation of George Nelson (Michael Badalucco) is cartoonish from the outset, driving a car with notes fluttering all around it, politely stopping to ask directions before hurtling off with them on board, commanding McGill to hold the wheel as he hangs out to shoot at pursuing police. Strangely, the potential brutality and danger implicit in the situation are transferred onto animals. George, who has the attention span of a small child, is distracted by some cows, which he irrationally shoots at, hitting some. A few are scared into the road and one is hit by his pursuers. Similarly, later Big Dan's brutality is signaled by his gratuitous crushing of Pete-as-a-toad, which sends Delmar into a rage.