Roger Ebert was left cold by this Coen brothers classic: “Uncertain and unsatisfied”
Have you ever walked out of the cinema unsure what to think of a film? It’s easy to love or hate a movie, as those reactions are so strong that they instantly crystallise in your brain. However, if you find yourself admiring certain aspects of a film but disliking others, and you can’t help feeling that it didn’t quite come together as a satisfying whole, that’s a much more complex reaction. In this instance, the movie mightn’t be ‘bad,’ per se, but you’d be hard-pressed to say you liked it, either. Roger Ebert was left feeling like this by one of the Coen brothers’ most beloved movies when he first watched it – and it wasn’t the first time a film by those oddball auteurs foxed him.
Over the years, Ebert was all over the map regarding Joel and Ethan’s works, awarding his full four stars to some of their undisputed classics while completely dismissing others. He infamously hated Raising Arizona, for example, dubbing it “a film shot down by its own forced and mannered style,” and was middling on another couple of the Coens’ quirkier flicks.
However, when Ebert watched the brothers’ surreal 2000 comedy-musical O Brother, Where Art Thou?, he was bemused by what he’d just seen. Ebert knew the film was the Coens’ off-kilter interpretation of Homer’s The Odyssey, as told through the genre-bending tale of three prisoners in 1930s Mississippi who escape from a chain gang and go on a bizarre adventure to find hidden treasure. However, knowing a movie’s inspirations and thinking it works as a film are two very different things.
As Ebert tried to make sense of these three nitwits, who found themselves embroiled in a political conspiracy, became bluegrass music stars overnight, tangled with the Ku Klux Klan, and were lured to their ‘deaths’ by water-dwelling sirens, he struggled. To his credit, he acknowledged that the film likely wasn’t intended to make conventional sense, but he couldn’t help feeling alienated by all the bizarre twists and turns.
“I do not demand that all movies have a story to pull us from beginning to end,” Ebert wrote, “and indeed one of the charms of The Big Lebowski, the Coens’ previous film, is how its stoned hero loses track of the thread of his own life.” Still, Ebert felt that O Brother was even more scatterbrained and less cohesive than Lebowski, with the extra caveat that its meandering series of semi-linked vignettes didn’t resonate with him anywhere as much as The Dude’s quest to deliver ransom money and gain recompense for his soiled rug.
“With O Brother, Where Art Thou? I had the sense of invention set adrift,” Ebert noted in his two and a half star review. “Of a series of bright ideas, wondering why they had all been invited to the same film. All of these scenes are wonderful in their different ways, and yet I left the movie uncertain and unsatisfied.”
In truth, the fact that O Brother, Where Art Thou? left Ebert cold wasn’t shocking, as he has always been a critic who loves a watertight plot. He was also quick to clarify that he didn’t outright dislike the film; he admired some of it, but its lack of cohesion held it back from greatness.
Ultimately, though, Ebert was on an island of his own with this opinion, as the film was received rapturously by most other critics, before being nominated for two Academy Awards. In the years since its release, it has become one of the Coens’ most universally acclaimed films, and it is credited with being an integral element of the rise of a new generation of American folk/bluegrass artists.
