The musical that directly inspired ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’
While it isn’t strictly a musical, Joel and Ethan Coen’s crime caper O Brother, Where Art Thou? turns its soundtrack into a key component of the film’s construction and execution, even though the story itself is based on Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey.
Before shooting had even gotten underway, composer and music producer T Bone Burnett had been working closely with the Coens to start recording music and choosing songs that would appear throughout the narrative. The strong attention to detail culminated in Grammy wins for ‘Album of the Year’ and ‘Best Compilation Soundtrack Album for Visual Media’, in addition to ‘Best Country Collaboration with Vocals’ for ‘I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow’ and ‘Best Male Country Performance’ for ‘O, Death’.
Along with its mythological inspirations, the film took unexpected cues from one of the most famous musical fantasies of all time, as Joel Coen revealed to IndieWire while remarking that it wasn’t always intended to be a loose adaptation of Homer: “It didn’t start with that idea. It started as a ‘three saps on the run’ kind of movie, and then at a certain point, we looked at each other and said, ‘You know, they’re trying to get home, let’s just say this is The Odyssey,'” he said.
Adding: “We were thinking of it more as The Wizard of Oz. We wanted the tag on the movie to be: ‘There’s No Place Like Home.'”
The influences of The Odyssey might be more prevalent, but much like Homer’s tale, The Wizard of Oz is essentially a quest story that finds a disparate band of characters on a journey through unfamiliar and dangerous territory to achieve their goal.
Take your pick of who best reflects who, but it’s also not that much of a stretch to envision George Clooney’s Ulysses, Tim Blake Nelson’s Delmar, and John Turturro’s Pete as the Lion, Scarecrow, and Tin Man, considering each of the trio shares at least a couple of characteristics with one or the other.
The homage is most pronounced in the scene where the Ku Klux Klan is infiltrated, right down to the rhythmic chanting that mirrors how Dorothy is rescued from the Witch’s castle by her newfound friends in The Wizard of Oz. There are disguises, marching in formation, and even a slapstick element that definitely wasn’t a coincidence in a film that’s rife with nods, winks, and tributes to literally thousands of years worth of music and storytelling.
Of course, O, Brother Where Art Thou? is very much its own thing and entirely a result of the Coens’ creativity and openness to both stretching themselves as filmmakers and working closely with their collaborators on the many facets of their productions, so describing it as a cross between The Odyssey and The Wizard of Oz doesn’t quite come close to doing it justice.
