The performance that people will likely remember the most, however, is Tim Blake Nelson in the titular role. Harry Melling, best known for playing Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter series, is highly effective in the role of a limbless artist who recites Shelley, Shakespeare, and Lincoln to largely enthusiastic audiences, as is Liam Neeson as his drunken, self-centred impresario. Zoe Kazan gives a heartbreaking performance as a woman desperately looking for a new life away from her overbearing family. This film features various big-name stars, however, there are certainly some stand-out performances. This is helped by strong performances by the lead cast, including James Franco, the lead of the second story, who after escaping a hanging only to end up in the noose once again, asks the crying fellow prisoner next to him “First time?” The cinematography by Bruno Delbonnel is stunning, truly immersing you into the various landscapes of the wild west.
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The trademark black humour of the Coen Brothers is at its best here, particularly in the opening story which mixed joyful music with over-the-top violence to highly entertaining effect. These tonal shifts are not jarring, however, and I felt that the stories were perfectly ordered, with the particularly bleak third story, Meal Ticket, being followed by the visually gorgeous All Gold Canyon to wash out some of the sorrow I felt. We begin with an absurdist tale of a cheerful, singing, yet deadly cowboy, the titular Buster Scruggs played charismatically by Tim Blake Nelson, and end on an eerie, possibly supernatural story focused on five mysterious characters travelling together in a stagecoach at night. Others invite a specific needle drop: Kazan’s expression of surprise when she receives a marriage proposal her awkward conversations with Bill Heck her utterly natural delivery of the word “apothegm” Waits stealing eggs from an owl’s nest and then putting all but one of them back.Wacky, dark, and profound, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a welcome addition to the canon of its esteemed directors.Ī Netflix original film written and directed by the legendary Coen Brothers, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a Western anthology that tells six unrelated stories, with different characters, themes, and even vastly different tones.
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It works just fine in sequence, but some tracks - the one with James Franco as a dumb bank robber, for instance - only need to be played once. 16 after a week in theaters, can be thought of as a Coen brothers concept album. Not to spoil anything, but “Meal Ticket” is basically “Inside Llewyn Davis” with a talented chicken in the Bob Dylan role.Īnd “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” which will make its way to the Netflix streaming platform on Nov. Hamilton’s fate can be taken as a parable of the vagaries of the cultural marketplace. Which isn’t to say that masterworks of poetry and prose were necessarily held sacred then, any more than they are now. They also seem like plausible staples of the popular literary canon in late-19th-century America.
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The texts he recites - including Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” the story of Cain and Abel, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29, the Gettysburg Address - are perhaps included to deliver some sly commentary on brutality, mutability or the vanity of human ambition. In “Meal Ticket,” the grimmest and cruelest of these yarns, a man without limbs, known as Hamilton, the Wingless Thrush (Harry Melling), is carted around by a grizzled impresario (Liam Neeson) and made to perform feats of elocution amid the mud and dust of remote frontier settlements. Eloquence, in Coen territory, is its own reward, even if it isn’t always appreciated. People tell stories and jokes and engage in mock-learned debates - not to arrive at any solutions but to pass the time between now and the grave.
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A crusty prospector (Tom Waits), digging for an elusive pocket of gold in a pristine mountain valley, sings a wistful ballad, as does a gentlemanly bounty killer (Brendan Gleeson) during a tense stagecoach ride. And so Alice Longabaugh (Zoe Kazan), a young woman on the Oregon Trail whose brother has died and whose own survival prospects are precarious, stops to giggle at the antics of a colony of prairie dogs. Entertainment is poor compensation for the brute fact of mortality, but it’s what we have.