![]() ![]() The film creates a world that’s recognizable as Hollywood’s dream of “the West” but also permits occasional glimpses at a truer and darker historical reality. The exploitative nature of the business arrangement (however willing) between Neeson’s and Melling’s characters exists alongside what seem to be moments of genuine warmth between the two-but in the Coens’ darkly comic and always dangerous world, the promise offered up by such moments is never entirely to be trusted. This young man, identified in the credits only as “the Artist” and by the act’s own advertising circulars as “the Wingless Thrush,” has as his nightly job to recite poetry, Bible verses, Shakespeare soliloquies, and passages from the speeches of Abraham Lincoln, all with exquisite diction and delivery, before an unending succession of rough and largely uncomprehending frontier audiences. ![]() In the chapter after that, we find ourselves on the road with an itinerant entertainment impresario (Liam Neeson) whose sole attraction is a legless, armless man propped in a chair (Harry Melling, a soulful beauty barely recognizable as the dimwitted Dudley Dursley of the Harry Potter movies). There are thematic resonances common to most, if not all, of the six stories.Īfter Buster Scruggs has strutted and fretted his 15 or so minutes upon the stage, there’s a return to the book’s ceremonially turned page as we move on to the story of a would-be bank robber (James Franco) attempting to hold up a remote bank branch staffed by a lone employee (Stephen Root) who’s rigged up his own ramshackle system of self-defense. Secondly, despite what his hat color (also white) signals to students of the genre, Buster Scruggs is no hero-as is established in that opening scene when he stops at a desert watering hole, has a few friendly words with the barkeep, and proceeds to wreak bloody havoc on the saloon’s scraggly clientele. First of all, Buster appears only in the first of this movie’s six separate sections, which are framed as a collection of published short stories by a recurring device in which a hand turns the pages of an old-fashioned illustrated book. The Movie That Just Dethroned Barbie Offers Another Cure for Superhero Fatigueīuster Scruggs (Tim Blake Nelson), the clean-cut, white-clad singing cowboy who ambles into view atop a white horse at the beginning of the Coen brothers’ new Western anthology film, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, may be the movie’s title character, but he’s hardly its protagonist. How’s Your Summer Been, Retired Grandmother of Five Barbara Oppenheimer? 1 Movie Mines a Real Death for Inspirational Drama. The Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to Netflix, Max, Amazon Prime, and Hulu in SeptemberĪmerica’s No. ![]()
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