This
Netflix original snuck onto my Oscar-movies list, snagging a Best Adapted
Screenplay nomination (along with two more for Best Costume Design and Best
Original Song.) An anthology of western
vignettes, I found the film to be interesting but, on the whole, less than the
sum of its parts.
Told
across six unrelated stories, the main theme of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is that life in the Old West was
nasty, brutish, and short, albeit set before an incredible backdrop of soaring
vistas. Variously, we follow a cheerful
singing outlaw, a would-be bank robber, a theatrical orator and the man who keeps
him, a determined elderly prospector, a young woman on a wagon train, and a
disparate group of stage coach passengers.
Lots violence, lots of dirty dealings, some beautiful landscapes, and a
blend of matter-of-fact humor and bleak melancholy whose ratios shift from
vignette to vignette.
I didn’t
know much of anything going into this film, except that it was a Netfix
original and a western. The opening
credits got down to business of telling me a lot more, mostly about its
pedigree. The cast is jam-packed,
understandable for a movie with six different self-contained stories. Among the ranks are some big names (Liam
Neeson, James Franco,) some notable Hey It’s That Guys! and character actors
(Clancy Brown, Stephen Root, Tyne Daly, Brendan Gleeson) and some intriguing
out-of-left-field picks (Harry Melling, better known to most as Harry Potter’s cousin
Dudley.) And of course, the masterminds
behind the camera, the Coen Brothers.
I did
like it. There are some neat ideas in
here and some cool sequences. Given that
the whole thing is made by the same filmmaking duo (unlike some anthology
movies that have a different director/screenwriter for each vignette,) it’s
interesting how all the stories use the same visual language but different
storytelling styles and tones, even if there are some aspects that carry over
into various pieces. I like some
vignettes better than others – the one with the orator and the one with the
prospector are probably my favorites – but there’s something to like in pretty
much all of them.
That
being said, I wouldn’t call it a slam dunk, and my gut feels that, if this
weren’t a Coen Brothers movie, it probably wouldn’t have gotten the screenplay
nod. For me, one of the biggest issues
is that it’s too long. Nearly every
vignette overstays its welcome, and so no matter how interesting it starts out,
by the time it ends, I’m mentally hurrying it along and seeing how much of the
film is left. If each vignette were just
a little tighter, I think the whole thing would work a lot better and hold my
attention more.
A few
years ago, I started taking more notice of what I like to call the “look at all
our white people!” brand of Oscar or would-be Oscar movies. High-profile movies with great casts that are
super, super white, often biopics or period pieces that justify the homogeny of
their casts with their subject matter or settings – and, while they’re usually
not wrong in that those particular cast makeups are required for those
particular movies, it still begs the question of why those are the stories that
consistently choose to get told and those are the pictures that earn acclaim
(or at least have the clout behind them to try to.) A few examples from the recent past would
include Dunkirk, The Post, and The Big Short. This movie would definitely quality, and
what’s more, it would fall into the more specific subgroup “look at all our
white guys!”; the only plot-relevant involvement from people of color are a
couple “Indian attack” scenes, and you need to get five vignettes into the six-vignette
movie before you come across a female character who matters. I’m not saying I’ve become immune to the
appeal these movies can have – I still really like The Big Short – but my patience for them has lessened quite a bit,
and in this film, what we get isn’t really enough for me. (Also, given that, historically, more than a
quarter of cowboys were Black or Latino, the “historical accuracy” defense
doesn’t even work here.)
Warnings
No comments:
Post a Comment