Sunday, February 22, 2015
Oh brother, There you are!
I really liked the movie Oh Brother, Where art thou? It was really funny and something I looked forward to that week. When we went over some of the connections in class I realized that there were actually a ton of them that I didn't originally notice. Like how Big Don was the equivalent of Polyphemus or those girls in the woods were the same as the Sirens. But there were also some things that my classmates pointed out that I didn't notice like how Everett's crew messed up with the train just like how Odysseus's crew messed up with the bag of wind which ended up making both of their journey's a lot longer than they needed to be. The movie made a lot of subtle connections that would have gone by if I hadn't read the book so I decided to show my brothers the movie to see if they liked it even tho they never read The Odyssey. Turns out they liked it a lot even though they didn't really get all the hidden connections, because without them they were still able to enjoy the comedy and the soundtrack. I know there are people out there who hate movies based on books because they mess up and don't capture the book just right but I want to know if you guys thought Oh Brother, Where art thou did a good job or was there something that it really needed to change?
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Having already seen the movie before we watched it in class, I can definitely relate to enjoying it without understanding the hidden references. I looked up the exact definition of adaptation, which was "the act of changing to suit new conditions," and I think that using that definition, they did a great job. Moving from ancient Greece to the southern Depression era definitely entails some major changes, and I feel like they transitioned pretty well, especially since they weren't aiming for a true book-to-movie transition.
ReplyDeleteI'd put this film in a different category from the typical movie-based-on-book, where the viewer brings specific expectations about characters and settings and the plot, and where movies are often judged according to how well they match the original novel. The definition of "adaptation" cited by Lydia is apt: _The Odyssey_ forms a kind of underlying structure that the film plays fast and loose with. It's totally possible to just enjoy the movie without even thinking of Homer (and remember, the Coen brothers claimed not to even have read _The Odyssey_!), but the parallels make it interesting on a whole other level. A more traditional movie based on the epic poem would be set in ancient Greece, with period-appropriate costumes and ships and weapons, which might be a cool movie, but wouldn't be fun in the way _O Brother_ is.
ReplyDeleteAnd James Joyce's "adaptation" in _Ulysses_ (1922) is weirder still!
I think that "Oh Brother, Where are Thou" did a good job of being entertaining, but could have done a better job at following _The Odyssey_. There wasn't any equivalent to Athena (as far as I can tell), and there weren't counterparts to the scene on Circe's island or their passage by the whirlpool and Scylla. Although the movie was funny independent of _The Odyssey_, I think that including those scenes would make a lot more interesting.
ReplyDeleteI think that it can't really be said that O Brother is based on the Odyssey. To me, it seemed like it was telling its own story, and included some nods to elements of the Odyssey throughout. Though the basic main plot arc of a homecoming is the same, that's not a very specific similarity, and most of the details of the plot are completely different. Lots of important factors in the story of the Odyssey were completely left out of O Brother, and vice versa. Most of the references that were there were smaller things, and not all that important to the plot. If I had watched outside of the context we did in class I probably would have just seen it as referencing the Odyssey, not retelling it.
ReplyDeleteI'd say that O Brother is very loosely based on the Odyssey, so I'm not sure if that counts as a movie version of a book. I liked O Brother, though. I thought it was very funny and once I started to notice the parallels between the movie and the poem, I enjoyed O Brother even more.
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