Teaching The Odyssey
I was an English teacher for nearly a decade, and for freshman English in Indiana, The Odyssey was part of the reading list (i.e. it was in the textbook). I was always looking for an excuse to show movies (only partly because of occasional hangovers) in class, but I always wanted it to be interesting so the kids had something to write about when the movie was over. If an adaptation was too faithful, there just wasn’t much for a bunch of freshmen to write about. Basically, it was better to show them Mean Girls instead of the Marlon Brando Julius Caesar or the Baz Luhrmann Romeo + Juliet or Great Gatsby as opposed to the more standard versions.
For The Odyssey, there was the kind of shitty TV version starring Armand Assante which featured distractingly bad early CG, or there was O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Time will tell if Nolan’s Odyssey becomes a better option, but I don’t teach anymore, so I don’t really care.)
The Coens famously claim to have never read The Odyssey, and I think they’re just fucking with us, but it’s possible they really never read it and only gleaned bits and pieces through the years. Regardless, this means they aren’t concerned with making a faithful adaptation. Yeah, there’s a cyclops and a lot of names and events match up, but a lot of stuff doesn’t fit into a neat box. This made my job so much easier. I was able to tell the less imaginative students to simply write an essay explaining in what ways it was a good adaptation and a bad adaptation.
Because of my use of the film in the classroom, this is probably my most watched Coen film after The Big Lebowski. But since I no longer teach, I had not watched this in years because I was burned out with it. It was nice to revisit it and just enjoy it, as it’s up there with Arizona when it comes to pure enjoyability.
That’s the other reason it’s such a good adaptation: you can parse through it looking for connections or just sit back and enjoy it. It’s not like a homework assignment, which is why most of my students truly enjoyed watching it compared to more stuffy adaptations of other works I tried over the years (and they definitely enjoyed all the cussing).
The Soundtrack Fooled Me
Looking up the box office ($45 million domestic and $71 worldwide) and Academy Award noms (two: Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Cinematography), I was surprised. My memory of this movie is that it was a massive hit and though it didn’t win anything it was at least nominated in every major category. To find out it was a minor hit critically and financially was very confusing. This movie was a big deal, right?
It turns out, I was equating the soundtrack’s success with the film’s success. Those songs were so ubiquitous at the time, I guess I just assumed the film was a cultural phenomenon (I was in high school at the time and wasn’t checking box office returns as religiously as I do these days). Using it as a teaching tool for years may have played a factor, as well. Showing this to a new class of students each year as an example of a great adaptation made me build up the legend of the film even more.
Instead, this is actually an underrated movie in their filmography at this point, but it wasn’t for me, and it probably never will be.
Technically My First Coen Movie in Theaters
I contributed to that $45 million domestic haul for O Brother, but I didn’t actually watch it. (Thinking back, it turns out The Ladykillers is the first Coen film I watched in a theater.) The Malco theater in Owensboro, Kentucky (the closest multiplex in my area of southern Indiana) was strict about selling R-rated tickets to underage movie-goers. In March of 2001, I was 15, but a group of classmates wanted to go check out Blow, starring Johnny Depp.
A few people in the group were old enough to buy tickets, but the rest of us had to buy O Brother tickets and sneak into Blow. For the first forty-five minutes, everything was fine. Then some do-gooder theater employee decided to do a head count during a fucking weekday matinee screening of Blow (we were there for a matinee because we had a half-day of school that day; I wasn’t cool enough to skip school to watch a cocaine movie). So I got kicked out.
I think I walked into the O Brother theater for a minute, but then thought “Fuck this,” and just left. Because of this, I’ve always been a bit harsh when it comes to Blow. And when I finally watched O Brother for real, I wished that had been the movie we went to see all along. I’m glad I at least contributed to it financially. But I did get a memorable moment out of it as it was the only time I had ever been kicked out of a movie theater.
Random Thoughts
Turturro is unhinged in this, and I love it. His line reading of “I’m gonna KILL you!” is an all-timer.
As is, “That don’t make no sense!”
“Well, ain’t this place a geographical oddity? Two weeks from everywhere!”
It’s hard to see Krueger from Seinfeld in a menacing manner. “Cougar! My son tells me your business stinks!”
I’ve seen thousands of digital gunshots inflicted on human beings in movies, and not a single one has yet to disturb me a fraction as much as the cow getting peppered with bullets in this.
I know Everett didn’t order corn on the cob for lunch (all I caught was steak, gratin potatoes, and a couple leaves of cabbage [presumably for toad-Pete]), but cinematically it is the perfect to be eating when getting hit in the face with a large tree branch.