![]() ![]() Tom Waits headlines the next section, “All Gold Canyons,” as a solitary prospector who hits the motherlode, while Zoe Kazan and Bill Heck star in “The Gal Who Got Rattled” as a pair of loners on the Oregon Trail who start to grow fond of each other. In the third story, “Meal Ticket,” Liam Neeson is a grizzled and silent traveling impresario who features a legless, armless orator (Harry Melling) on his mobile stage in frontier towns every night. Then there’s “Near Algodones,” in which James Franco plays an outlaw who robs a bank and gets punished for it in a fashion that gets dragged out so long it becomes comical. ![]() ![]() The series begins with a (literal) bang, with Tim Blake Nelson playing the titular Scruggs, an outlaw nicknamed “The Misanthrope” who sings and yee-haws his way through a Western town, leaving laughter, singing, and carnage in his wake. The six stories are set up as having been collected in one old green hard-covered book, titled the same as the film, with illustrations from the upcoming story appearing between each segment. The uncaring universe, one so capricious you have to laugh, is a long-running theme for the Coens, and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs picks it up again, this time in six shorts centered on various caricatures of the American West. Tom Waits is a prospector hunting for gold in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. The universe does not play favorites, and it rarely makes a lot of sense the best any of us can do is to just keep plugging along. If you puzzle long enough, though, you realize that the theme is the same as the overarching theme of A Serious Man: that bad stuff happens to good people, and when we try to explain it, we’re left just telling more stories about bad stuff happening to good people. The folk tale doesn’t clearly have a point, and that is, well, the point: You’re meant to puzzle over its meaning, and maybe eventually derive your own. It’s only tangentially related to the story that follows, which has obvious connections to the Biblical story of Job. If you’ve seen Joel and Ethan Coens’s 2009 film A Serious Man, you might remember that the main story is preceded by a short film based on a ( completely made up) Yiddish folk tale in which a dybbuk, or evil spirit, visits a Jewish couple living in a 19th-century shtetl. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a six-part, dark-hearted romp through a cartoonish old West In other words, it’s a Coen brothers movie. It’s not the tale of a single murder - more of a pile of them - but as its pieces accrue meaning, the culprits emerge: chance, human cruelty, and the unfeeling universe. So while a ballad usually tells a story, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs most closely resembles a very particular kind: a murder ballad. Vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark ![]()
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