Wednesday, January 30, 2019

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018, R)


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

Violence, brief sexual content (including references to sexual violence,) drinking/smoking, racially-obtuse storytelling, and thematic elements.

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