Bleak landscapes and the morbid story lines are nothing new to the Coen Brothers. I remember the night I watched 'Fargo' exactly for the same reason. Cooped up in a downtown apartment in Omaha with a few feet of snow making it impossible to go out, the movie pretty much summed up the mood of that night in 1999.
It is exactly for the same reason that I love the Coen brothers as well. They can show a ray of sunshine now and then like they did in 'O Brother, Where art thou?' but then it is when telling sordid tales coupled with desolate landscapes that they actually shine.
So it was with that expectation that I started watching 'The Ballad of Buster Scruggs' which I have to say is probably the grimmest of the tales told by the Coens and the most frivolous as well. There are no happy endings but just a reminder of how most of the tales end in real life.
The film is structured as an anthology of six different stories happening in the American west of the yore and is told as chapters of a book. All six stories handle different parts of the hard life in the west the wagon trains, the saloon fights, the coach travels, the gold rush but all are held together by dark humor and dark drama.
The film opens with a cheery note nevertheless with the story of the quick draw Buster Scruggs a.k.a San Saba Songbird , making light work of the outlaws in a bar and a saloon before unwittingly killed by another young gun. As Buster in his whites with a angels wings and a lyre bursts into a duet with his killer admitting that he cannot be the top gun forever - the whimsical notion of death and the life in the west itself comes to the fore.
However, to me the best of the six stores have to be the one called 'The girl who got rattled' which combined a bit of everything and threaded a story which just have to end in tragedy. Zoe Kazan, as the sweet Ms. Alice Longabaugh who loses her brother while on the Oregon trail and was looking forward to a marriage with the trail hand before everything ends in a misjudged fight with the Indians. The reaction of Zoe when marriage was proposed is a delight to watch and the life they start imagining in Oregon before everything crashes down is a reminder of how lives are lived.
The final story of the anthology is also the one which tries to make sense of all the other tales by some philosophical discussion and it is interesting to follow the discussion which goes from being silly at the start to a discussion about love into the inevitable death as they stage coach riders reach their destination. As Rene, one of the riders, tries to explain the dichotomy of the life away and define the way love is perceived by different people, the conversation ends with the inevitable dichotomy of those living and dead.
The exceptional beauty of the landscape is contrasted with the lives of the people who try to make it there. The loving thing about any movie by the Coen brothers is the witty wordplay combined with sleek edits to tell the stories. The whole thing is attenuated by the beautiful Prairie landscape and the never ending lands of the west.
In the 'Meal ticket' this beauty of the land and the brutality of life itself is brought out through the repeated talk on the Ozymandias and the story of Kane and Abel. There is no moral scale here but only a question of surviving the rugged life.
The movie eventually take one look at the life and the morbid ending awaiting everyone and laughs at the whole charade of living it.
It is exactly for the same reason that I love the Coen brothers as well. They can show a ray of sunshine now and then like they did in 'O Brother, Where art thou?' but then it is when telling sordid tales coupled with desolate landscapes that they actually shine.
So it was with that expectation that I started watching 'The Ballad of Buster Scruggs' which I have to say is probably the grimmest of the tales told by the Coens and the most frivolous as well. There are no happy endings but just a reminder of how most of the tales end in real life.
The film is structured as an anthology of six different stories happening in the American west of the yore and is told as chapters of a book. All six stories handle different parts of the hard life in the west the wagon trains, the saloon fights, the coach travels, the gold rush but all are held together by dark humor and dark drama.
The film opens with a cheery note nevertheless with the story of the quick draw Buster Scruggs a.k.a San Saba Songbird , making light work of the outlaws in a bar and a saloon before unwittingly killed by another young gun. As Buster in his whites with a angels wings and a lyre bursts into a duet with his killer admitting that he cannot be the top gun forever - the whimsical notion of death and the life in the west itself comes to the fore.
However, to me the best of the six stores have to be the one called 'The girl who got rattled' which combined a bit of everything and threaded a story which just have to end in tragedy. Zoe Kazan, as the sweet Ms. Alice Longabaugh who loses her brother while on the Oregon trail and was looking forward to a marriage with the trail hand before everything ends in a misjudged fight with the Indians. The reaction of Zoe when marriage was proposed is a delight to watch and the life they start imagining in Oregon before everything crashes down is a reminder of how lives are lived.
The final story of the anthology is also the one which tries to make sense of all the other tales by some philosophical discussion and it is interesting to follow the discussion which goes from being silly at the start to a discussion about love into the inevitable death as they stage coach riders reach their destination. As Rene, one of the riders, tries to explain the dichotomy of the life away and define the way love is perceived by different people, the conversation ends with the inevitable dichotomy of those living and dead.
The exceptional beauty of the landscape is contrasted with the lives of the people who try to make it there. The loving thing about any movie by the Coen brothers is the witty wordplay combined with sleek edits to tell the stories. The whole thing is attenuated by the beautiful Prairie landscape and the never ending lands of the west.
In the 'Meal ticket' this beauty of the land and the brutality of life itself is brought out through the repeated talk on the Ozymandias and the story of Kane and Abel. There is no moral scale here but only a question of surviving the rugged life.
The movie eventually take one look at the life and the morbid ending awaiting everyone and laughs at the whole charade of living it.
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