Instead, the mood is created by the ambient colors that the movie chooses to paint its many pieces with. The style of the film doesn’t necessarily come from the episodic way it’s been told, because for the most part each bullish section is restrained by tonal lines and time limits.
Like a lesson in basic arithmetic, everything adds up to the proper sum. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs operates as one kinetic display of endless karma, yet each piece functions within its own existential limits. While it’s as cold and stiff as a cadaver, blistered by strong winds and scant ticket sales, the story explores the value of entertainment, particularly how people are drawn to cheap filler over carefully composed art, and I’d guess that this segment resonates most with the Coen’s ambitions as popular filmmakers determined to subvert expectations while still appealing to the masses. As Impresario, Liam Neeson stars in the third chapter alongside the quadriplegic Thespian ( Harry Melling). It’s the most barren of the bunch, serving more as a tonal guidepost for the remainder of this campfire tale. Next we encounter James Franco as a thieving cowboy who meets his maker like a man who’s late for a second date. If the opening act preaches and sermons through song, showing the rise and fall of a white-dressed god on the Western Frontier, then the rest of the film is meant to introduce the slow collapse of individual ideals. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs’ first song catches our attention through simple melodies and dynamic theatrics, and it’s undeniably the Coens working at their most eccentric (that shot from inside the guitar looking out? Nobody else could conceive such an image, let alone film it). It’s an invitation and an attempt for us to join the Coen Brothers in removing ourselves from the subjective perspective of the story, which only further entrenches us in a place where we feel things even more openly and fluidly. In this chapter, Buster Scruggs breaks the fourth wall and talks to us directly, and he serves as the filmmakers’ direct link to each person glued to the screen. He says words like appelations and congolems and sobriquet and Archimedean. He’s a friendly face with a fast trigger finger, and in the hands of the Coen Brothers, just as violent as he is verbose. Joel and Ethan Coen open with the title character Buster Scruggs ( Tim Blake Nelson), a wordsmith outlaw who’s as quick with his gun as he is with his wit. This one rears its nasty head, sinks its poisonous fangs in deep, and the results are so good they’re almost welcomingly deadly. It’s the most classical Western I’ve seen since 2014’s The Homesman, and yet it’s elevated by the Coen Brother’s caustic, surly sensibilities. Each segment is a stanza and each portion of this anthology set is a vital organ giving life to a picture that sings folk songs into existence, gracefully passing its kidney stone of a story as an unbridled vehicle of pain saddled by a woebegone sense of hope. It’s a ballad in the purest definition of the word. “The nervous system extends through the body.”įaith, futility, and fatalism all converge in the wanton Western that is The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the latest masterwork from the Coen Brothers and perhaps one of the best films of their conjoined careers (and of 2018, for that matter).
0 kommentar(er)
