The Coen Brothers’ Depression-Era Odyssey Endures Because of Its Music, Not Its Plot

The tagline promises a plan and no clue. What O Brother, Where Art Thou? actually delivers is three escaped convicts, a relentless lawman, and a soundtrack that outlived the movie it was built for. Joel Coen directed. Ethan Coen and Joel Coen wrote it. It runs 107 minutes, and it is an adventure, a comedy, and a crime picture at once.

Trailer, via clooneyfiles.

Three Convicts in 1930s Mississippi

The film is set in Mississippi during the Great Depression. Everett, Pete Hogwallop, and Delmar O’Donnell break out of a chain gang and go looking for hidden treasure. George Clooney plays Everett. John Turturro plays Pete. Tim Blake Nelson plays Delmar. A lawman chases them the whole way, and the tagline — “They have a plan, but not a clue” — is the joke the movie keeps telling.

That is the engine. Three men on the run, one prize somewhere ahead of them, one pursuer somewhere behind. The Coens wrote it, Joel Coen directed it, and the runtime stays at 107 minutes. It does not sprawl.

George Clooney, John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson

The cast is the reason the chase holds. Clooney plays Everett as the man with the plan, which is the running gag. Turturro and Nelson fill out the trio as the two who follow it. John Goodman shows up as Big Dan Teague. Holly Hunter plays Penny. Chris Thomas King plays Tommy Johnson. Charles Durning plays Pappy O’Daniel, and Del Pentecost plays Junior O’Daniel.

Michael Badalucco plays George Nelson. Wayne Duvall plays Homer Stokes. J.R. Horne and Brian Reddy both play Pappy’s Staff. The film included original cast members’ singing voices, which matters more than it sounds.

A Soundtrack Produced by T-Bone Burnett

The soundtrack is not a side product. It is the spine of the film. Produced by T-Bone Burnett, it pulls bluegrass, country, gospel, blues, and Southern American folk music into one record, with a sound contemporaneous to the Depression-era setting. Most of the tracks are modern recordings. A few are vintage, including Harry McClintock’s 1928 single “Big Rock Candy Mountain.”

That mix is the whole trick. The music sounds like the period without being trapped in it. On February 27, 2002, the album won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year at the 44th Grammy Awards. A soundtrack from a Coen brothers comedy beat the year’s pop records for the industry’s top album prize. That is not a small thing.

The 2011 Reissue and 14 New Tracks

The album came back on August 23, 2011, with 14 new tracks that were not on the original release. That set included, per the reissue, “12 previously unreleased cuts from music producer T-Bone Burnett’s O Brother sessions.” In Europe the album carried a longer title: O Brother, Where Art Thou?: Music from the Motion Picture.

So the record has had two lives. The first one ended with a Grammy. The second one arrived eleven years later with more material from the same sessions. Few film soundtracks get either.

Where the Movie Sits Against the Music

Here is the problem. The film is good. The soundtrack is better, and it is better in a way that has shaped how people remember the film at all. Ask someone about O Brother and they are as likely to hum something as to describe a scene. The music did the cultural work. The movie supplied the frame.

That is not a knock on the Coens. The casting is sharp, the premise is clean, and the 107 minutes move. But the record is the artifact that keeps regenerating — a Grammy in 2002, a 14-track reissue in 2011, and a reputation that has only grown. The film stayed a film. The album became a gateway.

A Running Order for the Escape

The structure is a chase, so it helps to lay the pieces out in order. What follows is the shape of the film as the source describes it — the setup, the cast, and the record that came out of it.

Read that table and the shape is obvious. The movie is a chase. The album is the thing that outran it.

What the Grammy Actually Says

A Grammy for Album of the Year is not a genre award. It is the general-field prize, and in 2002 it went to a collection of bluegrass, country, gospel, blues, and folk built around a Coen brothers movie set in Depression-era Mississippi. The album won on February 27, 2002, at the 44th Grammy Awards. That result tells you the record escaped the film entirely.

It also tells you something about Burnett’s production. He did not treat the assignment as a period piece to be reconstructed with care and then filed away. He built a record that stood on its own, with modern recordings carrying most of the weight and a few vintage sides — McClintock’s 1928 “Big Rock Candy Mountain” among them — anchoring the sound to its era. The reissue proved the point. Fourteen more tracks, twelve of them unreleased, were still worth hearing in 2011.

The Case for 6.9

So where does the film land? At 6.9 out of 10, matching the published critical score. That number is fair, and it is fair for a specific reason: the movie is a strong vehicle for something that turned out to be stronger than the movie.

Clooney, Turturro, and Nelson are the plan and the clue, and the tagline sells them honestly. Goodman, Hunter, King, Durning, Pentecost, Badalucco, Duvall, Horne, and Reddy fill out a deep bench. The 107 minutes do not waste time. But the film’s biggest contribution to culture is a soundtrack that won Album of the Year and then got a second release with 14 new tracks. When the supporting record outperforms the main event, the main event settles below the top tier.

The film is worth the 107 minutes. The album is worth more than that, and it has had more chances to prove it.

Coen brothers · George Clooney · movie review · O Brother Where Art Thou · soundtrack · T-Bone Burnett