Summary
We see a group of prisoners working on a chain gang in the rural South. They hammer in unison and sing together. Suddenly, we see three prisoners running through a cornfield, escaping the chain gang. The men run down the road, all connected by chains around their ankles. Later, we see them running towards a train and trying to jump aboard, still connected at the ankles. One of the men, Ulysses “Everett” McGill, jumps into the train, where he finds a number of somber-faced men. He starts to ask them a question, but when one of his companions falls down a nearby hill, he is pulled off the train by the ankle.
Everett turns to his companions, Pete and Delmar, and scolds them for the fact that they were pulled off the train. Everett makes himself the leader of the group, which Pete objects to at first. Everett insists that he ought to be the leader because he’s “the one with a capacity for abstract thought.” Pete wants to be the leader also, so he and Everett turn to Delmar to break the tie. Delmar simply looks at each of them and says, “Okay, I’m with you fellas.” Suddenly they hear something in the distance, the sounds of their pursuers. Looking back at the railroad, they see a blind man driving a handcar and climb aboard. “I have no name!” the blind man says, and Everett begins to give him advice about how he might find gainful employment. The blind man interrupts him with a strange prophecy: “You will find fortune, though it will not be the fortune you seek. But first you must travel a long and difficult road, a road fraught with peril. You shall see things wonderful to tell. You shall see a cow on the roof of a cotton house, and oh so many startlements. I cannot tell how long this road shall be, but fear not the obstacles in your path, for fate has vouchsafed your reward.” The men listen intently, riding the car down the tracks.
The scene shifts and we see the trio walking down a road. Delmar is confused about how the handcar driver knew about the treasure they were after, and Everett assures him that the blind are often gifted with a connection to the paranormal and a gift for seeing the future. Everett immediately contradicts himself in the next moment, when Pete complains that the blind man told them they wouldn’t get the treasure they seek. To this Everett says, “What does he know? He’s just an ignorant old man!” Everett insists that he buried the treasure, and that they just need to get to Pete’s cousin Wash's house, so they can disconnect the shackles that are connecting them by the ankles. Everett is interrupted by the blast of a gunshot. A young boy—Wash's son—is standing out front and shooting at them, asking if they’re from the bank; he has instructions from his father to shoot at anyone from the bank, or anyone serving papers. Everett, Delmar, and Pete insist that they don’t have papers, they just want to talk to Wash.
In the back, Wash Hogwallop is whittling a stick. He greets Pete, who introduces him to Everett and Delmar. The scene shifts and we see the men eating dinner with Wash and his son. Pete asks what happened to Cora, Wash’s wife, and he tells him that she ran off. “She must have been lookin’ for answers,” Everett suggests, as Delmar compliments the stew they’re eating. Delmar is less than excited to hear that the stew is made with horse meat. Later, Pete, Delmar, and Everett sit in Wash’s living room, listening to the radio. Everett brushes his hair, and asks Wash if he happens to have any hairnets. Incidentally, Wash does. The men sleep in the barn on some hay, but they are awakened in the middle of the night by the shouts of a lawman yelling that they’ve surrounded the barn. Everett jolts awake, followed by the other men. Wash has evidently told the authorities about them.
Pete is furious, as Wash calls from outside the barn: “I know we’re kin but, they got this Depression on. I got to do for me and mine.” Pete begins yelling at his cousin, but the authorities start shooting and he retreats back into the barn. One of the lawmen begins pouring fluid on the barn so as to light it on fire. Another shows a torch on the barn, as the men scream and a lawman with round sunglasses watches the barn go up in flames. Someone throws a torch up into the loft where the men are, but Pete throws it back angrily, and it lights some straw on the ground below. A trail of fire goes directly towards the police car, and one of the lawmen yells for everyone to get away from the car—“she’s liquid fire!” The machine guns inside the police car begin to go off on their own, as the lawmen run for cover. Suddenly, another car comes driving towards the barn. It’s Wash’s son, and he yells for Everett, Peter, and Delmar to get in. They jump in the car, Delmar carrying a pig, and Little Hogwallop drives through a wall of the barn.
The next day, we see Little Hogwallop standing in the middle of the road yelling at the trio for stealing his car. Pete throws a rock at him and advises him to go back to his father. As he turns back to Delmar and Everett, Pete notices the car is smoking. The scene shifts abruptly to a store clerk, telling the trio that he can get a car part from Bristol, but that it’ll take 2 weeks. He hands Everett some pomade, but it’s not the brand that Everett wants. Everett buys a dozen hairnets and goes back outside to his companions. Delmar is roasting a gopher on an open fire and Pete reminds Everett that they have only 4 days to get to the treasure that they’re after; “after that it’ll be at the bottom of a lake,” due to an impending dam project. Everett has a plan to sell a pocket watch that he stole from Wash. The watch was a gift from Wash’s ex-wife Cora, and upon realizing that Everett stole it, Pete becomes livid. “You stole from my kin!” he snarls, but Everett reminds him that Wash betrayed them. “It’s a fool that looks for logic in the chambers of the human heart,” Everett insists, when Pete is still angry.
They are interrupted by the sound of someone singing, “Down in the River to Pray.” They look around them, and there are many people dressed in white—“some kind of congregation,” Delmar suggests—walking through the woods towards the water. The men are transfixed by the singing and the congregation walking around them. Delmar looks particularly taken with the singing, and the men follow them towards the river, as the entire congregation sings together. At the water’s edge, the congregants line up to be baptized by a priest. Everett scoffs at the proceedings, suggesting that “everyone’s looking for answers,” and Pete agrees. Delmar, however, is taken with the proceedings, and begins running into the water towards the priest. The priest baptizes him, and Delmar holds the priest’s shoulders, grateful to have been cleansed. “I been redeemed…Neither God nor man’s got nothing on me now!” Delmar calls to his companions. He invites Everett and Pete to join him and Pete comes running into the water too.
Analysis
From the start, the film has a playful and adventurous tone. The viewer is immediately transported into a sepia-tinted South, a world of golden willows and dusty railroads. The premise is established quickly, that of three bumbling convicts on the run from a chain gang. Everett, Pete, and Delmar are wide-eyed and whacky protagonists, connected at the ankle and running for their lives. From the first minute we see them, running towards the camera and diving into the crops to avoid getting caught, their dynamic is comic and slapstick. Thus, while they are criminals running from the law in a dangerous and divided South, they are comical and endearing in a way that prevents the tone from becoming particularly dark. When Pete and Everett argue over who will be the group leader, they turn to Delmar, hoping that he will vote for the favored leader, but instead he simply says that he agrees with both of them. His stupidity is comic, and this moment signals that the film will be a buddy comedy more than a suspenseful dark crime film.
While the film is comic, it maintains a mythical quality. The story is, after all, based on Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, a Greek myth about a hero’s journey. The Coen Brothers, who created the film, create a fantastical American South, as steeped in magic and mythos as Homer’s Mediterranean. The translation of Greek mythology to Southern mythology proves to be ingenious, as the American South has its very own fabled aura. Instead of gods and monsters, the world of O Brother Where Art Thou is recognizably realistic, but it still maintains a sense of the uncanny and the fantastical. A blind prophet driving a handcar, reciting poeticisms, predicts the men’s fate with a divine authority, telling them that they will go on a long journey and eventually come upon a fortune. His cryptic prophecy is unusually confident, and the men stare at him with wonderment on their faces. The earthy and recognizable aesthetics of the rural South are sprinkled with evidence of the magic or the uncanny, which lends the film an even greater sense of adventure.
The structure of the film is split into different stops along the trio’s journey. First they encounter the blind prophet, then they visit Pete’s cousin, Wash. Wash is a full stereotype of an uneducated hillbilly. His son greets them on the front walkway with a rifle, asking if they are with the bank or serving any kind of papers. Clearly, Wash is in some kind of trouble with the bank (and the government) and his way of dealing with it is setting his precociously violent son on anyone who tries to enforce their authority. While Pete and the others think that they can trust Wash, he proves to be a traitor when he tips off the police that they are sleeping in his barn. It’s unclear why he betrayed them, as he hollers a halfhearted apology to Pete that because it’s the Great Depression, he has to look out for his own. This doesn’t quite make sense, but it’s a good enough reason for Wash.
The next stop on the journey is the congregation of baptists who sing and walk to the river to be baptized. The congregants seem to materialize almost from nowhere, contributing further to the story’s mythic tone. One moment Everett, Pete, and Delmar are arguing about how they might get to the treasure on time, and in the next moment, they are surrounded by streams of people dressed in white, singing and walking through the trees. It is as though the large group is almost part of the landscape, so uniformly and steadily do they march towards the river. Everett, Delmar, and Pete, in their unkemptness and internal conflicts, contrast with the calm uniformity of the group. While our trio is made up of escaped convicts trying to escape institutional judgment and live outside of society, the Baptists are a collective of willing participants, a group of indistinguishable servants of God. The image of the three convicts in the center of a crowd of white-clad repenters is striking.
Indeed, the visual landscape of O Brother Where Art Thou is a specific and compelling one. Everything seems to have a sheen of gold, as if the South of the Great Depression, however impoverished, is lit by a perpetual sunset, a yellowed dreamscape. Indeed, the Coen Brothers used color correction to achieve this effect, and the actual landscape in which the film was shot was far greener. Ethan and Joel Coen enlisted Roger Deakins, their cinematographer, to filter the images with a sepia-toned palette. With this tinting, brighter and more blueish colors contrast starkly with the rest of the palette, making them all the more vivid. Additionally, the tinting gives the film a dated effect, the suggestion of a vintage photograph, which further orients the viewer in the period in which the film takes place.
