With dwindling finances and a businessman’s brain, Neeson’s character makes a chilling decision at the end that sort of encapsulates the brutal hilarity of the film and acts as a metaphor for the dying genre itself. This is particularly evident in the third chapter, starring Liam Neeson and Harry Melling (Dudley from the Harry Potter series), as a travelling act whose fortunes turn as they venture into remote mountain territory. It’s a terrific example of just how masterfully the Coens can alter the mood of their piece - we can go from garish silliness to morbid horror in the span of minutes, and often in the same segment. Liam Neeson is Impresario in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, a film by Joel and Ethan Coen. And my favourite composer, Carter Burwell, writes music that can be grand one moment, and cheeky the next. The result is a work of such stark beauty, sprinkled with such wonderfully stylised vistas and such composed closeups, that you can’t help but pause the film every two minutes, just to admire the prettiness of it all. My favourite cinematographer in the world, Bruno Delbonnel, filling in for their regular collaborator, the great Roger Deakins, seems to have been left to his own devices. Some stories are dense with their trademark poetic dialogue, and others are near silent. Tom Waits as "Prospector" in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, a film by Joel and Ethan Coen.Īnd like the lens through which they see these different chapters, their filmmaking changes, too. In fact, each of the six chapters is an ode to different kinds of Westerns - the tone switches from loud farce to existential satire, from dramatic thriller to dark comedy. The titular Buster Scruggs appears in just one of the six chapters - the first - and has nothing to do with any of the other segments. And we’re invited to spend time in the Coens’ world, a world where a buffoonish cowboy can sprout angel wings and fly into heaven, and this could be followed almost immediately by the sight of a quadriplegic reciting Ozymandias. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs begins with a book - one of those decadent old ones, the sort that Larry McMurtry writes lavishly illustrated and romantically rustic. Tim Blake Nelson is Buster Scruggs in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, a film by Joel and Ethan Coen. These are stories about gold diggers and impresarios and trailblazers - before these terms began to be abused to satisfy the egos of undeserving men. Several characters in these stories are shot in the back - by man, by nature, and in the case of one poor soul, quite literally. These are six tales from the American Frontier, six tales of violence and vengeance, irony and existence, survival and betrayal. Each story feels unique, yet cut from the same cloth. All but one story - the last one - ends in violent death. There are, of course, threads that weave in and out of the six episodes in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs characters might not recur but themes certainly do. The result is six short films - ranging between 15 and 20 minutes - that feel like both an introduction and a love letter to the genre. As with Tarantino, their legacy is of vital importance to them, and they must feel the need to maintain a level of synchronicity. The only reason I can think of as to why they’d do this is so that they could avoid having the blemish of a television show in their filmography. Originally intended as an anthology series on Netflix, the Coens - very late in the day - decided to edit it down into a feature film. Their latest, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, is perhaps their attempt to articulate this fondness to a crowd that is gradually losing interest in the genre.
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