Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Movie Quote of the Day (“O Brother Where Art Thou?” on a Bizarre Fate)


Delmar O'Donnell (played by Tim Blake Nelson) to Ulysses Everett McGill (played by George Clooney), watching a reptile emerge from the shirt of their comrade: “Them syreens did this to Pete. They loved him up and turned him into a horny toad.”—O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000), written by Joel and Ethan Coen, directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen (uncredited)

Is O Brother Where Art Thou? really “based on The Odyssey?” as the Coen brothers claim? After all, they created a movie called Fargo which had nothing to do with that city, and that was not, contrary to their opening credits, “based on a true story.”

Okay, look for resemblances between Homer’s crafty returning soldier-voyager Odysseus and the Coens’ McGill, leader of an escaped chain-gang trio; between Odysseus’ wife Penelope and McGill’s impatient spouse Penny; and between the sea creatures who try to lure Odysseus and his men to their doom and the bewitching brunettes by the riverside (in the image accompanying this post) who do the same thing to McGill, Pete and Delmar.

But if you can’t identify all the little points in common between the epic and the film, just remember what a goof the movie is, how truly bent the Coen brothers’ saga is. If McGill leads his group (who, along the way, become singing sensations as the Soggy Bottom Boys) because he’s the one “with the capacity for abstract thought,” as he tells Pete, it’s only by comparison with his two dimwitted colleagues.

Chuckle at McGill’s invariable response to fresh catastrophe, as axiomatic as Laurel and Hardy’s “another fine mess”: “Damn! We’re in a tight spot!” Glory in the oddball idioms (McGill and his wife, he explains, “are gonna pick up the pieces and retie the knot, mixaphorically speaking”). Grin till you’re silly over the inspired cascades of lunacy (e.g., Delmar doing his best to “protect” his metamorphosized friend, even in restaurants, till they can find someone to change him back).

Oh, and the sirens? Though embodied onscreen in the form of Mia Tate, Musetta Vander and Christy Taylor, their beguiling voices belong to Emmy Lou Harris, Allison Krauss and Gillian Welch (who has a walk-on as a Soggy Bottom Boys customer).

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