![]() ![]() The opening eponymous story, “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” offers singalongs and showdowns, as a white-clad cowboy, Buster Scruggs himself (Tim Blake Nelson), proves how tough and smiley a movie cowboy can be. And they are all Westerns of a kind, riffing on old ideas, combining to create something new. Yet Buster Scruggs should be a breeze to watch for any mature viewer.Īll of the six stories have their relative strengths. Pause the movie if you must.)Īlready, as you can see, this is a complex work with more creative fodder than any critic can handle at once. (Do not neglect, then, to read the elegant ending paragraphs of each story. The Coens thus merge text and film, allowing you to read the end of each story as each film ends. As each of the short films ends, the text of the book dissolves onto it. On screen, as each short film begins and ends, the Coens feature the book. The short films are held together by a visual conceit: the viewer is, in a sense, reading a faux-book of short stories said to be published in the 1870s. ![]() Released in 2018, it is one of the best films of last year. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, streaming on Netflix, is a Western anthology film composed of six stories or short films. And here, they have used it to create a work of emotionally wide-ranging wonder. For at least a moment, they have resurrected an underused film structure with amazing potential. They have created one of the best anthology films ever made. I have been waiting long, so long, for someone to do it well. Starring: Tim Blake Nelson, James France, Liam Neeson, Tom Waits, Zoe Kazan, Brendan Glesson (and a cast of many more) The settlers are always in danger from Native Americans, who are certainly represented as an alien presence – they don’t get a tale – but the white men and women are mostly venal, pompous, greedy and violent.Written and directed by: Joel and Ethan Coen There is a commitment to the genre, although the sheer eerie starkness of what is shown has an ironising effect: tiny individual figures making their way through gigantic or iconic landscapes, tiny bars or banks marooned in the middle of the prairie, looming up like mirages. This is a handsomely made picture, with a richly plausible musical score by Carter Burwell it is an old-school western in many ways and if there is something comic or self-satirising about it, this doesn’t mean it is pure pastiche. The most heart-rending figure is the unmarried young woman, played by Zoe Kazan, who joins a wagon train, hoping to make a new life for herself in Oregon. And Tyne Daly is a righteous lady on a stagecoach who finds herself confronted with moral turpitude in the form of two bounty hunters seated opposite: the most Tarantinoesque moment in a pretty Tarantinoesque film. Tom Waits plays a Walter Huston-type gold prospector who gets into a terrible scrape. Liam Neeson is a travelling theatrical impresario, a boisterous Ulster Protestant whose star turn is his “wingless thrush”: an unfortunate young man without arms or legs but with a wonderful way of declaiming Shelley and the Gettysburg Address. James Franco plays a bank robber who miraculously avoids justice his remark to a fellow miscreant got the biggest laugh I’ve heard in a cinema this year. Could a sequel or spinoff be in prospect? More text is also shown again at the end of each story: you are given just enough time to read some of it – and one in particular appears to tell us something more, something that happens after the story ends on screen. Remembering and recognising this moment is a stab of audience-interest for each particular episode. A hand turns the pages and we see these stories in print, themselves prefaced by an illustrated plate previewing a dramatic incident from what’s to come. One or two of the stories don’t have a satisfying twist in the tail there is one disconcerting fade-out.Įach tale is prefigured with the sight of an old book, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. There’s barely a forehead that doesn’t get a bullet in it sooner or later. T he Coens have given us a hilarious, beautifully made, very enjoyable and rather disturbing anthology of stories from the old west, once planned for television but satisfyingly repurposed for the cinema: vignettes that switch with stunning force from picturesque sentimentality to grisly violence.
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