The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen · a film · 2000 · about 106 minutes
Mode
Comic picaresque and musical in one structure; Homer’s Odyssey transposed as a screwball road comedy of three escaped convicts, its songs old-time, gospel, blues and country, most of them sung inside the story
Mythos
The hero named Ulysses who wants home, and the wife with a suitor; a blind seer, a one-eyed giant, sirens; under them the American patterns, the crossroads where a soul is sold, the devil as a sheriff with mirrored glasses and a hound, and the flood that baptises and destroys
Phase
About fourteen episodes on the road, from the chain gang and the escape to the graves, the noose and the flood, with a short coda; a record cut early on the road returns as a hit near its end
Presentation
Feature film in colour, widescreen, about 106 minutes, in English; Roger Deakins’s photography, the whole image graded digitally to dust and amber; music produced by T Bone Burnett, some twenty songs; editing credited to Roderick Jaynes, the brothers’ shared name, with Tricia Cooke; one theatrical cut
Register
From a convict work song under a white sky to a tin of hair pomade; a river baptism held long without a joke, and a Klan drill set to a mountain lament
Scale
Three convicts, a wife and her daughters, a governor’s race, a county, a river valley about to be flooded
Governing Proposition
Three convicts break from a Mississippi chain gang in the 1930s and take to the road for a treasure their leader has promised them, ahead of a dam that will flood the valley, and on the way they become a band by accident, cutting a record for a blind man at a radio station that then travels the state without them. An opening card names Homer’s Odyssey as the source. The wager is that the epic of the journey home can be carried to the Depression South as a comic picaresque and a musical of old songs, and that the South’s faith, politics, race hatred and show business can be shown as one market sold over the radio, its music an inheritance held in common at the moment its politics were most divided.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with a song that was not made for it. Under a white sky a chain gang breaks rock, and on the soundtrack is “Po Lazarus”, a field recording made in 1959 of a prison work gang singing as it worked. The gravity of the image is real, and the comedy that follows never takes it back. Then three men in chains run across a field, and a card announces that what follows is based on Homer’s Odyssey. In its first minute the film has named its two sources, the convict song and the epic, and set them side by side.
The three are Ulysses Everett McGill, played by George Clooney, vain and voluble; Pete, played by John Turturro, aggrieved; and Delmar, played by Tim Blake Nelson, simple. Everett has told them of a treasure, to be dug up before a valley is flooded for a dam. It is a lie, and the film sets it at the start so that it can pay it at the end: there is no treasure, and what Everett wants is to reach his wife, Penny, before she marries another man. The road is a husband’s road home, and the other two do not know it.
The brothers wrote it together; Joel Coen took the directing credit and Ethan Coen the producing one. Roger Deakins photographed it, T Bone Burnett produced the music, and the editing is credited to Roderick Jaynes, the name the brothers share, with Tricia Cooke. Touchstone and Universal released it with Working Title. It was shown in competition at Cannes in May 2000 and opened in the United States that December. The title is borrowed from Sturges: in Sullivan’s Travels (1941) it is the name of the serious film the director means to make.
Movement II
On a railway handcar a blind seer, the first of the film’s Homeric figures, prophesies to the three, and among the things he foretells is a cow on a roof. At Wash Hogwallop’s the barn they shelter in is set on fire. The episodes come one after another like stations of a picaresque, and the film does not pretend their order is argued; the frame licenses them. What holds them is the spine, the lie and the pursuit by Sheriff Cooley, played by Daniel von Bargen, in mirrored glasses with a hound.
Then the baptism. A congregation in white robes walks out of the woods and down into a river while Alison Krauss sings “Down to the River to Pray”, and the film holds the image long and without a joke, its purest elevation. Delmar runs into the water and is saved; Everett holds out. The joke, when it comes, is Delmar’s, and it does not cancel the grace. The film’s law is set here: the sacred is real and also comic, and the song carries both.
At a crossroads they pick up Tommy Johnson, played by Chris Thomas King, a young black guitarist who says he has sold his soul to the devil to play. The crossroads is the oldest American myth in the film, and it carries more than the Homer does; the devil in this telling wears a sheriff’s badge. Chris Thomas King sings “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues”, and Tommy will play guitar for the three white convicts. The film shows the South’s music as a commons that crosses its colour line; it shows less of Tommy than of the comedians, and he remains a sketch.
Movement III
At a radio station a blind man, played by Stephen Root, pays the four of them ten dollars apiece to sing into a microphone. They call themselves the Soggy Bottom Boys and record “Man of Constant Sorrow”, with Dan Tyminski’s voice for Clooney’s. They take the money and go. The record goes on without them, onto the air and across the state, and becomes a hit whose singers nobody can find. This is the film’s most exact invention: a story about the life of a recording, told in a film that is itself a recording of recordings.
The road continues. Baby Face Nelson, played by Michael Badalucco, sweeps them into a robbery and is gone; the episode could go with little lost but a joke and a herd of cows. At a river three women washing and singing “Didn’t Leave Nobody but the Baby”, the voices of Emmylou Harris, Krauss and Gillian Welch, draw the men in, erotic and menacing at once, and afterwards Pete seems to have been turned into a toad. The Homer here is allusion played for wit, and the toad is the weakest joke in the film.
Big Dan Teague, played by John Goodman, a one-eyed Bible salesman, is the Cyclops of a picnic by the road. The middle of the film sags here, between the sirens and the rally, and the episodes run on their own momentum. Meanwhile the governor’s race runs over the radio: Pappy O’Daniel, played by Charles Durning, an incumbent who sells flour and campaigns with a string band, against Homer Stokes, played by Wayne Duvall, the reform candidate. Politics in this South is show business, and both campaigns want the singers of the record nobody can find.
Movement IV
In town Everett finds Penny, played by Holly Hunter, with their daughters, about to marry a suitor; she is thinly written, a figure the plot needs more than a person it knows. Pete turns up again, recovered from the work farm. The film knows less about its women and its one black character than about its comedians, and the charge falls on the making as much as on the disclosure.
At night in a field the Klan gathers to hang Tommy. The robed men drill by torchlight in formation, staged as a production number, and Ralph Stanley’s voice sings “O Death” over the drill. Burlesque and terror stand in one figure. The three get Tommy out by farce, and the terror is dissolved by the same comic law that let it in. Deakins lights the scene by torch, and it is the film at its most daring, though the cost of what it shows is never weighed.
At the Stokes campaign dinner the Soggy Bottom Boys, in false beards, take the stage and sing “Man of Constant Sorrow”, and the crowd is taken by the song it already knows from the radio. When Stokes is shown to be the Grand Wizard of the rally, the crowd that loves the song will not have him: the reform candidate unmasked by his own audience’s taste. Pappy O’Daniel claims the band, and the governor pardons them. The record cut for ten dollars has made Everett’s fortune and his freedom, and the market has beaten the Klan by liking a tune.
Movement V
In the valley Cooley is waiting, with graves dug and a noose. Everett prays, and the water comes: the valley is flooded for the dam, the graves go under, and a coffin rises through the flood. The convict saved by grace is saved again by a deluge, and the film keeps its comic grandeur through the drowning of a world.
A cow sits on a roof, and the seer’s prophecy is fulfilled. The flood joins nature, the state and the sacred in one image: a public works scheme that brings electric light drowns the old South’s graves and saves three men from its law. Whether the prayer was answered, or the dam was on schedule, the film does not say. Its gospel and its comedy stay entangled to the end, and how far either is in earnest is the question it leaves open.
The coda returns Everett to his family and to the talk he has used throughout, in which “a tight spot” recurs. The soundtrack album, produced by Burnett, became one of the best-selling records of its decade and is widely credited with a revival of old-time and bluegrass music; the concert film Down from the Mountain came out of it. What has lasted is less the Homer than the songs: a film about a record that travels without its singers, whose own songs have travelled without it.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure and on the screenplay’s economy, and the subtractive test bites on an episodic form. The frame is Homer’s, so the episodes are licensed rather than compelled: nothing the film knows argues the order of the one-eyed giant, the sirens and the Lotus-eaters, and Baby Face Nelson’s robbery could go with little lost but a joke and a herd of cows. What is required is a spine. Everett’s lie, that there is no treasure and that he must stop his wife’s remarriage, is set at the start and paid at the end. The record cut at the radio station saves the three at the rally; the seer’s prophecy, the cow on the roof, the dam and the sheriff’s pursuit are planted and paid. A few strong pegs hold a loose coat, and the figure stands on the line of the cap.
Score: 7.5 / 10
What the film discloses is an articulated condition, held lightly by its comedy: the South of the 1930s as a place where salvation, politics, race hatred and show business are one market, sold over the radio. The reform candidate is the Grand Wizard; the incumbent sells flour and campaigns with a string band; the Klan rally is staged as a production number. Through music more than speech it shows the old South’s songs as a shared, interracial inheritance, Tommy Johnson playing guitar for three white convicts, at the moment its politics were most segregated, and modernity arriving as a flood and an electric line. That is true and holds. What keeps it here is how lightly it is argued: Tommy is a sketch, the Klan is beaten by farce, and the film prefers the comedy of the condition to its cost.
Score: 7.5 / 10
It rises often, and almost always through song. The opening, a chain gang breaking rock to “Po Lazarus” under a white sky, has a gravity the comedy never withdraws. The baptism, white-robed figures walking out of the woods into the river while Alison Krauss sings, is the film’s purest elevation, held long and without a joke until Delmar’s. The sirens washing and singing in the shallows are erotic and menacing at once. Ralph Stanley’s “O Death” over the Klan’s torchlit drill reaches terror inside burlesque, and the flood, with a coffin rising through it, has a comic grandeur. The comedy lands each elevation, and does so by choice, so the frequency is high and the height is checked.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The myth is built as a frame and evoked within it. The Odyssey, named on an opening card, gives the bones: a hero called Ulysses who wants home, Penny with a suitor, a blind seer, a one-eyed giant, sirens, a man seemingly turned to an animal, and a homecoming that needs the wife won back. These bear load for the plot’s shape. Beneath them the film builds an older American myth more seriously: the crossroads where a man sells his soul to the devil, the devil himself as a sheriff in mirrored glasses with a hound, the flood that baptises and destroys. The particular stays particular, down to a hairnet and a tin of pomade. Held below the gate because much of the Homer is allusion played for wit, the giant a Bible salesman and the transformation a toad; the devil and the flood carry more than Ulysses does.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The inheritance is the American comedy of the road and the folk tale: Preston Sturges, whose Sullivan’s Travels (1941) supplies the title as the name of the serious film its director means to make, and the brothers’ own regional comedies of bungling criminals. The turn is a combination: Homer’s epic carried to the Depression South as a screwball road comedy, and a musical whose songs are archive recordings and old-time performances of a music then out of commerce, the whole image finished by a digital grade then new to the feature. The stake was real: a period comedy built on unfashionable music could have failed with every audience at once. Held where it is because the wager sits largely on its makers’ proven path, and its boldest part, the music, departs further from the American film musical than from the Coens.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. Its knowledge is carried by recorded song: three escaped convicts become a band by accident, their record travels without them, and the voice on the radio is what wins Everett his fortune and his pardon, so the story is the life of a recording and the film a recording of recordings. The picaresque road gives the South as a sequence of performances, revival, rally, campaign and ballyhoo, and the amber grade turns a green summer into a sepia memory of a place that never quite existed, which is the film’s attitude to its history. A straight period drama would have to state that politics is entertainment; this one performs it. Held by the frame: in places the Homer is arbitrary, another epic would serve, and the order of the episodes is not the form’s knowledge.
Score: 7.8 / 10
It rewards return, mostly at the level of texture: the songs, the high-flown diction of the talk, in which “a tight spot” comes back as a refrain, the correspondences of image and of Homer, the caricatured politics of a governor’s race. Twenty-six years have not exhausted it, and how far its gospel and its comedy are in earnest remains an open question. But the depth is more formal than semantic: a second viewing finds more rhymes rather than much more meaning, and criticism has returned to the film more for its music and its colour than for what it thinks. The evidence of sustained re-examination is moderate, and that is what holds the axis a tenth under the Universal Minimum.
Score: 7.4 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 2000s. Intrinsic force: moderate. The film reorganised no basic possibility of narrative cinema; it perfected a comic, allusive manner its makers already owned, and its formal novelties are a use of music and a process of colour. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is wide, and much of it lies outside cinema, where it is credited and discounted; the soundtrack album, produced by Burnett, became one of the best-selling records of its decade and is widely credited with a revival of old-time and bluegrass music and with the Americana that followed, and the concert film Down from the Mountain came out of it. Inside cinema the digital finish it used became within a few years the industry’s standard, the film the occasion more than the cause. Its mark on later film narrative is slight.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across twenty-six years. The form is whole: the film survives in its theatrical cut, and restorations and new transfers are repair. Presence has been continuous and wide, on television, on every home format and in steady revival, and above all through the songs, which have kept the film present to people who have not seen it; that presence is borrowed from the soundtrack’s own life and is credited only as far as wide presence allows. The surface ages little where it is set, since a fable of the 1930s made in 2000 does not date as a contemporary story would. The charge falls on the digital grade, an early instance now legible as a mark of its moment, its saturated amber reading as the look of a process more than of a place. The film meets the bar of the gate, and no more.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight in most departments. The dialogue, a pastiche of Southern oratory, the Bible and dime-novel elevation, is written to the syllable and spoken so: George Clooney’s vain, voluble Everett, Tim Blake Nelson’s simple Delmar, John Turturro’s aggrieved Pete. The music is chosen, performed and placed so that the songs carry scenes rather than decorate them. Deakins composes the open country in wide, symmetrical frames and lights the rally by torch, and the cutting times the comedy, the barn on fire, the cow, with the brothers’ usual exactness. Charles Durning, John Goodman and Holly Hunter are exact in small space. The charges: the middle sags between the sirens and the rally; Penny and Tommy are thinly written; and some broad business, the toad above all, is weaker than the rest.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Take the most distant elements: the convict work song over the opening and the farce of the Klan rally, or the baptism in the river and the coffin floating up in the flood. One law governs them: a fable that treats the sacred, the political and the criminal in one comic register, where grace is real and also a joke, and song is the medium of every turn. The register holds from the first frame to the coda without breaking into straight drama or straight parody, across an attempted lynching, a conversion, a jailbreak, a campaign and a family quarrel, a wide range. What holds the figure is that the law is a manner more than a vision: the film keeps its coherence by letting no element weigh too much, and the rally’s terror is dissolved by the same law that permits it.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Judged on what a comedy of about 106 minutes holds. Many orders are present and several are held: the family, in a husband’s wish to keep his wife and daughters; labour and punishment, in the chain gang and the work farm; the state, in an election, a governor and a pardon; the sacred, in a baptism, the devil at the crossroads and a deluge; race, in the Klan and in Tommy; the natural order, in a river and a flood that ends a world; the market, in pomade, radio and the record business. The music joins the sacred, the political and the commercial in one thread, and the flood joins nature, the state and the sacred in one image. What holds the axis lowest: the people are types, and consciousness, an inner life, is not among the orders the film holds.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.5, then The Made at 8.1 and The Archetypal Deep and Pressure on Tradition at 7.9. A film whole in its theatrical cut and present for twenty-six years, carried further by its songs; a making in which the dialogue is written to the syllable and the songs carry scenes rather than decorate them; an Odyssey frame under which the crossroads, the devil-sheriff and the flood bear real weight; and a reach, wide but oblique, that changed popular music more than film.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.3: family, punishment, the state, the sacred, race, the natural order and the market held through one thread of song, with consciousness absent and the people types. Next, The Bottomless Well at 7.4, a depth more formal than semantic, more rhymes on return than more meaning; then The Inevitable and The Unconcealment at 7.5, a picaresque whose episodes are licensed rather than compelled, and a disclosure of the South as one market that prefers the comedy of the condition to its cost. These, with a Swerve of 7.7 that wagers largely on its makers’ proven path, are what hold the film below Tier IV.
The Necessity Cap is met at 7.5, on its threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 7.8, The Made at 8.1, The Inner Law at 7.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.5 meets the bar of 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 7.9, The Archetypal Deep at 7.9, The Swerve at 7.7 and The Unconcealment at 7.5 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Bottomless Well, 7.4, below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.3. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.8, from a sum of 93.2, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of O Brother, Where Art Thou? as released in 2000, the theatrical cut of about 106 minutes, from the chain gang under “Po Lazarus” to the coda after the flood; it is the version scored, and later restorations and home editions bear on survival only. No print, screenplay or recording was consulted. Homer’s Odyssey, named on the opening card, is the frame and is not judged here. The soundtrack album and the concert film Down from the Mountain are separate works and are not judged; they are counted only as evidence of reach and presence. Songs are cited by title, and the only words quoted are a phrase the film repeats. The setting is given as the 1930s, the year not being fixed. Facts that could not be verified, among them the exact running time, whether any other cut exists, whether the film was the first feature graded wholly by digital intermediate, the album’s awards and their year, and the real politicians on whom the governor’s race is said to draw, are not given.