A kind guide, Billy Knapp (Bill Heck), steps in to help. She’s accompanied by her not-so-bright older brother, and she’s traveling far to meet a man who may or may not become her husband. And in “The Gal Who Got Rattled,” Zoe Kazan plays a reserved young woman-her most noticeable feature, after her soulful saucer eyes, is her hair’s prim Emily Dickinson middle part-heading across the prairie as part of a wagon train. This entry just might be a metaphor for the shrinking numbers of people who care about reading and literature, having been drawn away by clickbait and other assorted internet junk you wouldn’t put that past the Coens. The standout segments include “Meal Ticket,” in which Liam Neeson plays the calculating caretaker and “owner” of a legless and armless man (Harry Melling) who recites soulful poetry-everything from Shelley’s “Ozymandias” to the Gettysburg Address-to increasingly dwindling audiences of pioneer townsfolk. Sample lyric: “He was never any fun/Now his grumpy face is run.”įrom there, the Coens tread into increasingly darker territory, in vignettes featuring actors like James Franco, Tom Waits, Saul Rubinek and Tyne Daly just about everyone who shows up is terrific. After he offs one in a saloon-employing a clever physical trick that you don’t see coming, resulting in a gunshot wound to the miscreant’s face-he jumps atop the bar and launches into a toe-tappin’ little number about his victim, a crabby liar and cheater named Surly Joe. He kills only cranky, obnoxious men, guys who are practically begging for it. Scruggs is wanted for murder, but he makes it clear that he’s not a misanthrope. Scruggs is an outlaw dressed in pristine white, including a comically oversized hat that highlights his protruding ears. The most enjoyably ridiculous story is the opener, “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” in which we meet Tim Blake Nelson as the balladeer of the title. But even just glimpsed briefly, as a visual introduction to each of the movie’s stories, they work like gangbusters. Rendered in moody tones of ochre, azure blue and deep tomato red, depicting the cowboys and prospectors and sideshow attractions we’re about to meet, these pictures are so beautiful you might wish you could gaze at them longer. The hand of an unseen person opens this particular book-its chapters have titles like “The Gal Who Got Rattled” and “The Mortal Remains”-and each is illustrated with a glorious illustration in the style of the great early 20th century illustrator N.C. The visual framing device of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is an actual book, inspired by those worn-looking cloth-covered volumes you can still find in used bookstores, the kind with a few line illustrations and buried treasure bound in every twenty pages or so, in the form of a vivid color plate.
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