![]() Which isn’t to say that masterworks of poetry and prose were necessarily held sacred then, any more than they are now. They also seem like plausible staples of the popular literary canon in late-19th-century America. The texts he recites - including Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” the story of Cain and Abel, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29, the Gettysburg Address - are perhaps included to deliver some sly commentary on brutality, mutability or the vanity of human ambition. In “Meal Ticket,” the grimmest and cruelest of these yarns, a man without limbs, known as Hamilton, the Wingless Thrush (Harry Melling), is carted around by a grizzled impresario (Liam Neeson) and made to perform feats of elocution amid the mud and dust of remote frontier settlements. Eloquence, in Coen territory, is its own reward, even if it isn’t always appreciated. People tell stories and jokes and engage in mock-learned debates - not to arrive at any solutions but to pass the time between now and the grave. ![]() A crusty prospector (Tom Waits), digging for an elusive pocket of gold in a pristine mountain valley, sings a wistful ballad, as does a gentlemanly bounty killer (Brendan Gleeson) during a tense stagecoach ride. And so Alice Longabaugh (Zoe Kazan), a young woman on the Oregon Trail whose brother has died and whose own survival prospects are precarious, stops to giggle at the antics of a colony of prairie dogs. There must be an afterlife, this cheerful killer surmises, since there are so many songs about it, one of which he sings as he ascends heavenward.Įntertainment is poor compensation for the brute fact of mortality, but it’s what we have. In the first episode - there are six in all, presented as if they were chapters in a handsomely illustrated old clothbound volume - the title character, played by a grinning Tim Blake Nelson, takes the prospect of his own demise in stride, as he does everyone else’s. ![]() Death is a hilarious punch line until it happens to you.Īnd sometimes even then. The hangings, shootings, scalpings and other grim ends awaiting the hapless cowboys, prospectors and wagon-train pioneers in this anthology of western tales are incidents of mortal slapstick. ![]() The jokes that the universe plays on hapless human creatures may be cruel, but they’re also funny, and the Coens are skilled and wily metaphysical pranksters. Ever since “Blood Simple,” the brothers have tended to treat whimsy and fatalism as sides of the same coin. This is a familiar (and hardly unwelcome) paradox for fans of the Coens. It swerves from goofy to ghastly so deftly and so often that you can’t always tell which is which. “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” is one of the darkest movies by Joel and Ethan Coen, and also among the silliest. ![]()
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