Brother Act

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

dir.: Joel Coen

PG-13, 106 min.

Opening Dec. 29 at area theaters

In O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a likably excessive tall tale set in a Deep South of enchantment and wonders, Joel and Ethan Coen work in a bumptious yet burnished style; for lack of a better phrase, it might be termed yokel pastoral. The movie’s not as funny or as frantic as their Raising Arizona, but as a whole it feels looser, like less of a contraption. In this Depression-era update of The Odyssey, for which Homer gets a writing credit, George Clooney, John Turturro, and Tim Blake Nelson play fugitives from a Mississippi chain gang who embark on a series of treacherous adventures en route to the impending nuptials of Clooney’s Penelope, Holly Hunter.

The title comes from Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels—it was the name of the socially conscious allegory that comedy director Joel McCrea wanted to make—but the rambunctious tone comes more from Sturges’ The Great McGinty. The movie’s most engaging at its least realistic: in Clooney’s highfalutin speech, in the knockabout slapstick of the convicts’ run, and in the surprising adaptability of the mythic elements. There’s even a beautiful sequence that may be the first spark of unforced lyricism in the Coens’ canon: a riverside baptism, set to a soaring Alison Krauss hymn, at which the congregation materializes in white robes amidst the sunlit glow of a glade. In these moments, the mix of folktale Americana and Capra-corny sentiment brings out a sunny fondness in the Coens, underlined by the golden hues of Roger Deakins’ glorious cinematography.

But whenever the Coens try to introduce elements of social commentary, or even simply to acknowledge the harsh truths of living in rural Mississippi in the 1930s, they look like pandering wiseasses. The nadir is a Klan rally staged as a Busby Berkeley routine, replete with the comically bungled lynching of the movie’s most significant black character. It’s funny only if, like the Coens, you can set aside the thousands of successful lynchings and the history of suffering and intimidation behind them. Here they give full vent to the least generous side of their wit, which basically consists of pointing at funny-looking people and laughing. Nor are they above having cows machine-gunned and run over for laughs that don’t come.

At the same time, the movie burbles along to the strains of a stunning soundtrack of old-time country and gospel that’s in many ways its most distinguished feature. (The songs were recorded last year in Nashville with Krauss, Ralph Stanley, Emmylou Harris, and Gillian Welch, who turns up in the movie as a record buyer; members of the Fairfield Four also show up as gravediggers, and the Cox Family play on a flatbed.) The heavenly music not only contributes to the otherworldly mood, it anchors the Coens’ dreamy movie-fed past in genuine emotion and experience. O Brother, Where Art Thou? may not be the Coens’ best work, but its best moments are heartfelt and oddly personal, a celebration of hyperbole as our national heritage.

—Jim Ridley

Sade's sweetest taboo

It’s easy to shape and frame arguments about the necessity for free speech when the speech in question would offend only a prude or a censor. So test your liberal pieties on this, excerpted from the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom: An aged, wealthy libertine demands that a tradesman’s daughter, a 12-year-old virgin, be brought to his quarters for his amusement. After inquiring indelicately about her maidenhood, he orders the terrified, humiliated girl to act as his chamber pot. He defecates upon her vagina and then mashes the fecal matter inside her with force sufficient to break her hymen.

A reader is certainly permitted to express outrage at this filth: Outrage is its intent. Yet within the cruelty and the vilification are some provocative political ideas. One is that in sex—as in politics—money, self-interest, and social position dictate who is on top and who’s on the bottom, and who derives pleasure accordingly. Another is that morality is up to the discretion of the powerful, and power breeds nothing but the satisfaction that comes from dominance and defilement. But even if you see worth in these ideas, what worth does a free society get from allowing them to be expressed in such vile fashion?

Anyone who has access to the Internet, where the text of The 120 Days of Sodom is freely available, deals with that question all the time. The opening scene of Quills promises a similar confrontation with Sade’s chilling but undeniably fascinating work. As an unseen narrator describes a tableau of ritualized humiliation, the camera finds the curved throat and exposed flesh of an 18th-century noblewoman, who trembles at the touch of a hooded inquisitor. What sounds and looks sexual, however, is instantly brought into the realm of the political—and intimate cruelty is revealed as state-sanctioned brutality, removing the distinction between the two.