The most testing of the stories, ‘Meal Ticket’, despite its 19 th century setting, scrutinizes contemporary entertainment, offering more depth than ‘Algodones’ Melling’s performer, who recites Shelley, Shakespeare, and Abraham Lincoln, eventually loses his custom to a counting chicken. Besides lacking in musicality, perhaps the main difference between it and the preceding ‘Buster Scruggs’, in which the violence is funny as well as shocking, is that here the violence has lost most of its hilarity the bloodshed isn’t comical and death makes more of an impression on the viewer.Īs such, the bleak and cheerless ‘Meal Ticket’, the account of an impresario (Liam Neeson) and his armless, legless performer (Harry Melling), strikes less of a contrast as it would have done immediately following ‘Buster Scruggs’. The landscape, if it’s possible, looks even more glorious. This one features a bank robber (James Franco) who winds up strung from a tree by the neck whilst sat upon his grazing horse, with no one else around for miles. ‘Buster Scruggs’ makes a perfect companion to ‘Near Algodones’, the second story in the anthology, another humorous outing but with a darker edge. Add to that some typical Coen brothers ingenuity and the topography is captured from the inside of a guitar, looking out of the sound hole. The most light-hearted of the six stories, ‘The Ballad of Buster Scruggs’ also introduces Bruno Delbonnel’s exquisite cinematography though Scruggs considers ‘the scenery monotonous’, Delbonnel renders the rocky hills and arid plains of Nebraska and New Mexico nothing short of majestic. It’s an hilarious mini-musical, not unlike the musical interludes of the Coen’s Hail, Casar!. The titular ‘The Ballad of Buster Scruggs’ is first, the tale of an easy-going gunslinger (Tim Blake Nelson), partial to a song and a shootout. A table of contents lists the six stories about to be told, each with its own distinct narrative, tone, and characters, all of them linked by their captioned colour-plates, frontier setting, and manifestations of death. Though it might appear artifactually dignified, the book’s dedication to one Gaylord Gilpin, ‘who shared with us these stories…’til approach of morn stained the sky and our esteem for him stained our trousers’, informs us that we’re deep in Coen country. Watching this anthology of frontier tales is much like opening a coffee table retrospective on everything that characterises the Coen brothers’ work.Īnd that’s how The Ballad of Buster Scruggs begins, with the opening of a book. Themes explored in the pair’s previous works are revisited, tonal landscapes are retrodden, and genre is ribbed and razzed like a childhood friend. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs might be the most Coenesque Coen brothers film Joel and Ethan Coen have ever made it’s silly and sombre, musical and melancholy, delightfully oddball and unabashedly eccentric.
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