The 1844 novel the Coen brothers wanted to adapt so they could “make up whatever we want”
Given that sibling rivalry is an occurrence in almost every family, and that brothers will happily squabble over everything from who gets the biggest bit of pizza to who reaches the top of a flight of stairs first, it’s amazing that so many pairs of them have managed to make such an important contribution to film.
Even in the last few years, we’ve seen some memorable work from the Russo brothers, who will take charge of Avengers: Doomsday, and the Safdie brothers with crackers like Uncut Gems, but if there’s one set of siblings who have written their names into Hollywood history since the 1980s, it has to be the Coen brothers.
Almost everything they have touched has been critically fawned over, decade after decade, since their first effort, Blood Simple, in 1984, and while it’s difficult to imagine they could have topped the kind of feedback Christopher Nolan is getting for The Odyssey at the moment, the brothers also did their own, very different, take on Homer’s epic poem back at the start of the century.
2000’s O Brother, Where Art Thou? was inspired by the ancient work, and very loosely based on it too, with George Clooney playing a character called Ulysses (the Roman name for Odysseus) as one of three escaped convicts searching for treasure in 1930s Mississippi. Incorporating comedy, drama and music, the movie was heavily folk-influenced, and the soundtrack album would go on to win a Grammy. It was also a success at the box office, making $70million against a budget of $20m, and it won the Coens an Oscar nomination for ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’.
But the Coens didn’t actually bother to read the poem before making the film, with Joel admitting at the time, “We didn’t start with the premise of updating the Odyssey. The setting came first. The situation, these three fugitives in the chain gang, given the Clooney character is trying to get back home; it just suggested The Odyssey to us.”
And that way of working suggested to them there might be other great works of literature, including one from the mid-1800s, with Ethan adding, “[It’s] much easier that way. It’s very freeing, man. We’re thinking of doing an adaptation of Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit. We figure nobody knows the original, and we don’t have to read that. We can make up whatever we want.”
As of yet, they haven’t made good on their promise, but O Brother certainly wasn’t the only time the brothers have put their own spin on classic books, or even existing films, doing the same to very successful effect with their take on Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men in 2007, which earned them the Oscars for ‘Best Picture’, ‘Best Director’ and ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’.
Then three years later, there was True Grit, their update of the classic 1969 John Wayne western about a young girl hiring a veteran sheriff to hunt down the man who killed her father, with the Coens’ version starring Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon, which was arguably even more successful than the first, winning ten Academy Award nominations and making a $200m profit at the box office.
The brothers haven’t made a film together for some time now, not since 2018’s The Ballad of Buster Scraggs for Netflix, but last year Ethan made the neo-noir Honey Don’t! with Margaret Qualley, and Joel is working on a mystery set in Scotland called Jack of Spades, likely to be released next year.
