Summary
We see Pappy O’Daniel arriving at a campaign dinner for Homer Stokes, with plans to steal Stokes’ campaign manager—who turns out to be none other than Vernon T. Waldrip. Delmar, Pete, Everett, and Tommy watch him arriving from around the corner of the building. Everett plots for them to sneak in to the dinner through the service entrance, but Pete and Delmar don’t think Everett deserves to be the leader. Suddenly, Homer Stokes arrives at the dinner, emerging from a car and complaining to an associate about the fact that the lynching didn’t go well at the Klan meeting. Elsewhere, the Soggy Bottom Boys have cleaned up, donned long fake beards, and acquired instruments. They wander onto the stage at the dinner and Delmar takes the microphone. They perform “In the Jailhouse Now” with Delmar singing.
Meanwhile, Everett sneaks over to where Penny is sitting and whispers to her. She wants nothing to do with him and turns away, but Everett whispers that he has a lot of big plans, that he wants to become a dentist, because he knows someone who will print him a license. Penny is unimpressed. Next to her, Pappy whispers in Vernon’s ear, as Pete takes his place at the microphone and begins yodeling impressively. Pappy wants Vernon to switch over to his campaign, but Vernon notes that such an act would be preposterous and implies that Pappy lacks “moral fiber.” When Penny turns back to Everett, he tells her, “I wanna be what you want me to be, honey.”
Homer Stokes enters and greets Pappy O’Daniel, who he is surprised to see at his campaign dinner. Everett keeps professing his desire to reunite with Penny, when Pete and Delmar begin singing “A Man of Constant Sorrow,” the Soggy Bottom Boys’ big hit. As the crowds cheer, Everett takes his place at the microphone. He is surprised when everyone in the room gives the group a standing ovation, and he sings the crowd favorite. Penny can hardly believe that her ex-husband is the lead singer of the Soggy Bottom Boys, and both Pappy and Stokes are surprised at how much the crowds love the group. Both politicians are particularly surprised at how much the crowd loves a group that is racially integrated.
Homer recognizes Tommy, Pete, Delmar, and Everett from the Klan rally and grabs a microphone to interrupt the song. “These boys is not white!” he yells into the microphone, suggesting that the Soggy Bottom Boys are the product of miscegenation. He then tells the silent crowd that the Soggy Bottom Boys interfered with a lynch mob earlier that evening, explaining that he is a member of the Ku Klux Klan. As Stokes calls for an end to the entertainment, the crowd of Soggy Bottom Boys fans boos. Vernon stands and whispers to Stokes that the members of the band are also criminals, and Stokes snarls, “these boys got to be remanded to the authorities!”
The crowds boo more and more and a man throws food at Stokes. More and more people start to throw food and Stokes is carried out by a group of men. The Soggy Bottom Boys finish the song to much cheering and applause. Seeing an opportunity, Pappy dances onstage. At the end of the song, Pappy approaches the microphone and makes a speech thanking the Soggy Bottom Boys for their performance and calling attention to the fact that Homer Stokes doesn’t like their music and that he wants to lock the Soggy Bottom Boys up. Pappy tells the crowd he is just the opposite, saying, “I’m a forgive and forget Christian, and I say if their rambunctiousness and misdemeanoring is behind them…by the power vested in me, these boys is hereby pardoned.” The crowd cheers wildly, and Pappy tells them that the Soggy Bottom Boys are going to be in his “brain trust,” his committee of advisors, should he be elected. Pappy then tells the Soggy Bottom Boys to play “You Are My Sunshine” and the whole room sings it together.
We see Everett escorting Penny out of the dinner. She smiles up at Everett, and when Delmar asks if she’s still going to get married the next day, she tells him she is, but not to Vernon. “Me and the little lady are going to pick up the pieces and retie the knot mixaphorically speaking,” says Everett. When it comes to the question of the ring, Penny tells Everett that their old wedding ring is at their old cabin. Everett doesn’t want to go and get the old ring, and would rather buy Vernon’s ring off him, but this angers Penny. “It’s just a symbol,” Everett says, trying to reason with her, but this doesn’t do much to convince Penny, who walks away angrily.
Everett realizes that Penny is really angry and decides that he’s going to have to go to the cabin. A crowd is coming towards them on the street. At the front is Babyface Nelson, who was just caught by the authorities. He yells maniacally to the Soggy Bottom Boys, telling them that he’s going to be electrocuted. “I’m gonna go off like a Roman candle!” he yells as he’s dragged away.
The group heads to the cabin in the woods. There, they encounter some lawmen, including the man with the sunglasses. The latter comes out of the cabin and tells his assistants to tie up the Soggy Bottom Boys and prepare them for a hanging. Everett tries to tell the man in the sunglasses that they were pardoned by the governor, but the man doesn’t have a radio and didn’t hear it. A man removes the hats of the Soggy Bottom Boys and Pete, Everett, and Delmar begin to pray. Everett gets on his knees, begging God to let him be reunited with his family once and for all.
As the men look skyward for a sign from God, they notice water pooling around them on the ground. Suddenly a giant wave comes crashing through the forest towards them, completely crushing the cabin and crashing onto the men. We see Everett swimming through the water, with pomade containers floating around him. Everett gasps for breath as he comes up out of the water, now surrounded by an expansive ocean. Delmar emerges next, then Pete, then a coffin pops out. The men swim over and grab ahold of the coffin as it floats. Delmar celebrates that they were saved by a divine miracle, but Everett reminds his companions that the state was planning to flood the region all along. He explains that the South is introducing electricity—hence the flooding—which will bring an “age of Reason.” Tommy is floating on a desk nearby, the desk in which Penny said the wedding ring was kept.
The scene shifts and we see Penny and Everett walking down the street, reunited. “My adventuring days have come to an end,” he tells her, and pulls out the ring that he retrieved from the desk. When he shows it to Penny, however, she tells him that it’s not her ring. “That’s one of Aunt Hellene’s!” she says, disappointed. The wrong ring won’t do, and Penny insists that Everett go back to the lake and find the right one. Everett and Penny’s daughters follow them, singing “Angel Band.”
Analysis
The Soggy Bottom Boys escape the Ku Klux Klan and successfully rescue Tommy from certain lynching, but they are still on the run from the law, and Everett’s wife doesn’t want him back. They are hardly in the clear, and so must find a way to infiltrate a campaign dinner for Homer Stokes. They do so through music. Everett, Peter, Delmar, and Tommy’s musical gifts are of a very high caliber and yet they approach music in a contrastingly casual and straightforward way. The fact that a group of ragtag criminals is so musically gifted creates a comic juxtaposition, and they perform at the campaign dinner as if they regularly rehearse, not as if they have been on the run from the cops for days. Their musical talents bring them much adoration and gleeful fandom from the crowd, who cheer wildly when they play their hit—a song they don’t even know is famous—“Man of Constant Sorrow.”
Indeed, the popularity of the Soggy Bottom Boys as a musical act seems to solve almost all of their problems, and the problems of a few other characters as well. When the starkly racist Homer Stokes sees the band playing, he becomes infuriated, not only because they are playing with a black man, but because he wrongly thinks that they are multiracial themselves. He goes on an angry tirade against the Soggy Bottom Boys, but because the crowds so love the musical act, they do not take to his admonishments. Instead, they boo Stokes and drag him out. As a result, his competition, Pappy, sees an opportunity to align himself with the Soggy Bottom Boys, which promises to win him the election. He pardons the criminals on the grounds that they have redeemed themselves, thus solving the issue of whether they will have to go back to jail. Additionally, Penny sees how popular her husband is as a musician, and the ways that her fiancé Vernon is humiliated by virtue of his alignment with Stokes. The Soggy Bottom Boys, an unlikely musical outfit, ends up saving the day politically, and redeeming themselves personally.
An irony of the film is the fact that it is not Stokes’ bald-faced racism and alignment with the Ku Klux Klan that loses him his political followers. Rather, it is the fact that he speaks out against one of the most beloved musical acts in the state, the mysterious Soggy Bottom Boys. He interrupts one of the most popular songs on the radio to call out the members of the group and order that they be locked up. The dinner attendees boo him for having interrupted some good entertainment. The irony is that one would expect voters to disapprove more of a candidate’s outward bigotry, but find his vitriol offensive because it’s directed at people whose music they like. In this way, the film wryly implies that a group of voters is more inclined to identify with and vote along the lines of celebrity than of ethics.
Indeed, this is confirmed when all Pappy O’Daniel has to do to win Homer Stokes’ most loyal voting base is dance onto the stage, align himself with the Soggy Bottom Boys, and pardon their jail sentence. The way that the crowd is so easily swayed, their alliances so quickly switched, illuminates the film’s perspective on the ridiculousness of politics. The attendees at the dinner care less about values and political issues than they do politics in the shallowest sense of the word. Stokes’ almost immediate expulsion and Pappy’s opportunistic ascension reveal the ways that politics are a game of persuasion, a rhetorical and strategic game. In portraying political allegiance as mercurial and tied to identification with celebrity, the film takes a cynical view and suggests that voters can be convinced of anything, if it’s said to a tune they like.
The end of the film features some of its most fantastical and mythic moments. Not only does everything fall into place in an exceedingly coincidental way at the campaign dinner, but in the final moments, when it seems that Everett and his companions might actually be hanged for their crimes—even though Pappy pardoned them—a miracle of mythical and Biblical proportions saves them in the form of a flood. As the men emerge from the water that surrounds them, Delmar celebrates the fact that they were visited by “a miracle.” The joke, of course, is that Everett told them all along that the state planned to flood the area that day no matter what; “There’s a perfectly scientific explanation for what just happened,” he tells them, before explaining that they’re flooding the region so as to introduce science to the South. Pete is quick to point out, however, that Everett seemed to have a more religious outlook in the moments before the flood, that he was surrendering to divine judgment “back there at the gallows.” Thus is the strange juxtaposition in the film between the rational and the mythic, the commonplace and the divine. The myths of O Brother Where Art Thou can always be explained, but fate has a strange way of looking out for the Soggy Bottom Boys.
