Down from the Mountain, Pennebaker's O Brother Doc; Lara Croft Treats the Audience Like Suckers
The success of the Coen brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou? is one of the strangest developments in recent movie history. Upon first viewing, even Coen fans thought it was their strangest, most indulgent, least comprehensible film?a blend of slapstick silliness and musical anthropology that looked at the Depression-era American South through the prism of old Hollywood movies (or vice versa). It has all the hallmarks of a standard-issue Coen brothers outing: a brazenly artificial style (sepia-toned Cinemascope); wild, sometimes inappropriate homages (the Wizard of Oz Klan rally, for instance); and You-done-said-a-mouthful dialogue. (George Clooney's dimwit Ulysses defining the devil: "Well, of course, there are all manner of lesser imps and demons, Pete?but the great Satan himself is red and scaly with a bifurcated tale and carries a hay fork.")
Yet the film also has sequences of startling simplicity and beauty?stately setpieces sketched in paper-bag brown by cinematographer Roger Deakins, and backed by vintage bluegrass tunes that were often allowed to play out at length. In these scenes, O Brother manages to suggest, in a typically Coen-esque roundabout way, what it might actually have been like to live in poor, rural Mississippi circa 1930s, before civil rights, before there was a TV in everyone's home, hell, before telephones and electricity in some o' them parts?a time when a penniless wanderer could camp out from dusk to dawn pretty much any place that wasn't a town or a city and not hear a thing but the whirring of the crickets and the snap of burning wood. Or so the movies told us.
Against all commercial logic, O Brother went on to earn more money than any of their other films, including 1996's Oscar-nominated Fargo. Based on conversations with fellow moviegoers, I suspect part of O Brother's box office haul came from repeat viewers?folks who stumbled into the movie for whatever reason, fell in love with it and kept going back. But the lion's share of the gross came from people who simply loved the music, and loved the fact that the film loved it, too.
The soundtrack sold more than a million copies and inspired a Carnegie Hall recital and a touring show?not bad for a sampler of time-tested bluegrass and blues. Except for country-western ringer Emmylou Harris, who sang with Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch on "Didn't Leave Nobody But the Baby," the album avoided established pop stars or earnest, scholarly, public-radio types and put the spotlight on honest-to-God folk musicians?young and old practitioners with a direct geographical and emotional connection to the music. T Bone Burnett made sure the soundtrack had a crisp, clean, produced sound, but he didn't go too far. Rather than reinterpreting or "updating" the music, he simply presented it with gratitude and respect.
The music permeated and altered the movie. O Brother had a meditative quality, an eerie reflective stillness uncharacteristic of the Coens?uncharacteristic of most American filmmakers, period; it felt new and old, and in its own exceedingly odd way, revelatory. Without making a big deal of it?without even meaning to do it, as far as I know?the Coens put their finger on an irrefutable truth about period movies. Namely: Movies set prior to the living memories of the average moviegoer can never really be about that time and place; they can only be about viewers' collective impressions of that time, as perceived through photographic images and recorded music. (Ulysses offers his description of the devil like it was gospel?but deep down, don't you just know he got it from cartoons?)
With Down from the Mountain, a tie-in film about the soundtrack musicians by cinema verite pioneer D.A. Pennebaker (Don't Look Back, The War Room) and co-directors Chris Hegedus and Nick Doob, the O Brother phenomenon will probably snowball. The documentary premiered last week at the Screening Room, and a same-titled live album is due in stores July 24. Fans of Pennebaker and Hegedus who go in looking for the directors' usual crisp editing and penetrating sense of characterization will likely be disappointed; ditto those seeking a thumbnail history of bluegrass and blues. Down from the Mountain is a videotaped record of a performance?the May 24, 2000, benefit concert by the soundtrack musicians at Ryman Auditorium in Nashville?preceded by a solid 40 minutes of rehearsals and atmospheric footage. Few songs in the first half are permitted to run straight through to the end?a serious attention-span problem?and visually, it's pretty ragged. But once the concert gets going, the music eclipses questions of nonfiction craft, just as the music eclipsed the Coens' obsessive postmodern noodling; music this simple, good and American is damn near irresistible.
The Fairfield Four perform an a cappella version of "Po' Lazarus." Chris Thomas King, who costarred in O Brother as Tommy, the blues guitarist who sold his soul to Satan, shows himself to be a musical double-threat (blues guitar, boogie-woogie piano). Seventy-four-year-old bluegrass icon Ralph Stanley sings "O Death" in that clogged, reedy voice of his, and the unsentimental hardness of his tone can raise the hair on the back of your neck. (Stanley is the only featured musician who gets an introductory title from the filmmakers; it might as well have read, "Behold, the standard bearer.")
Despite the documentary's too-casual approach, it activates some of the same fascinating tensions as O Brother. Viewers whose musical tastes begin and end with urban pop will feel briefly connected to a time when most American art was regional and rural. Then those same viewers will likely consider the fact that even the elderly musicians in Pennebaker's movie aren't really old enough to have vivid memories of the Depression. From there, it's a short hop to melancholy, as one realizes that this documentary (like the Coens' film, and its soundtrack) aims to honor a geographically specific culture that can barely be remembered firsthand these days, much less recreated in popular art. The components of the O Brother phenomenon are chapters in an ongoing national story?an attempt to understand how pop culture enlarges and distorts our past.