Brady Jandreau in 'The Rider.' |
Tim Blake Nelson in 'The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.' |
The Ballad of Buster
Scruggs
Dir: Joel & Ethan
Coen
Scr: Joel & Ethan
Coen
Phot: Bruno Delbonnel
Premiere: Nov. 9,
2018
133 min.
The Rider
Dir: Chloe Zhao
Scr: Chloe Zhao
Phot: Joshua James
Richards
Premiere: April 13,
2018
104 min.
You can’t keep a good genre down. Just last year, two horror
films, The Shape of Water and Get Out, vied for Best Picture.
(Hollywood is normally allergic to honoring horror films — call them
horror-‘inflected’? Horror-‘infused’?) Two of the most striking films of 2018
are Westerns, and as far apart in approach as you are likely to find.
The Coen Brothers’ The
Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a six-part, rambling series of shaggy-dog
stories in the Style Coen, affected, winking, and baroque. Chloe Zhao’s The Rider is a low-key,
documentary-style fiction, set here and now, using non-actors in a narrative
evoked by their true experiences. One’s amusing, the other’s affecting. Both
will send traditionalists screaming into the streets.
The Ballad of Buster
Scruggs is an aggregation of shorter films ranging about 20 minutes in
length each — pretty close to television-episode length, although the
filmmakers assert that the scripts worked out their times organically.
Now, the most important thing about discussing a Coen
Brothers film is not to think about it too hard. Many critics have jiu-jitsued
themselves into knots trying to analyze, interpret, and otherwise create
conceptual cages for them. It is supposed to be fun, and their fancies first
and foremost do transform the Western into a landscape as unfamiliar as the
subject of an exotic travelogue, giving newcomers and old hands both some
things to think about.
The directors bring an intimate knowledge and love of
filmmaking and film history to every project, and part of the fun of watching
their movies is spotting the homage, getting the inside joke. There is a rich
vein of movie-Western ore to be assayed here. A love of recreating powerful
film sequences in the genre that read like dreams is the film’s greatest strength
and its greatest weakness, for the stories themselves tear apart and dissipate
like clouds on a windy day. At its worst, Buster
Scruggs plays Cowboys and Indians.
Most specifically, the Coens are ghosting through other
styles, inhabiting some of cinema’s and fiction’s approaches to understanding
the American West. (All these styles, ironically or not, are firmly from the
pioneer perspective.) The first sequence crash-lands the singing-cowboy Western
of the 1930s and -40s; the second has the dirty kinesis of a Leone spaghetti
Western. A huge part of the next three tales is their reliance on the stiff, earnest
Victorian dialogue stuffed into the mouths of the characters, in the style of
American adventure writers from James Fenimore Cooper through Bret Harte, Owen
Wister, Max Brand, and the like. A Poe-esque coda concludes.
The only thing all the stories have in common is the
presence of death, presented as a nearly unavoidable commonplace. The dark
stain of that funeral potential lurking in every frame sustains the suspense in
the stories, and colors their humor. Where a well-aimed arrow or a misaimed
cough could put you underground in a matter of hours, life is both more
profound and more provisional.
Zoe Kazan in 'The Gal Who Got Rattled' section of 'Scruggs' -- death as punchline. |
The first sequence, “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” is an
immediate leap into lunacy, as Tim Blake Nelson appears out of nowhere, singing
and talking to the camera as the cheerful and tuneful outlaw Buster Scruggs.
(In his all-white outfit, he resembles both Gene Autry and the hero of Bugs Bunny Rides Again.) His nerdy
sincerity and confidence makes him an object of scorn, but not for long, due to
his six-gun prowess. Incidentally, he’s a preening smartass as well.
His random opponents exist merely to make him look good, and
he can destroy a man and then make fun of him in an impromptu Hollywood song
and dance number. It’s a fun idea, but it kind of runs out of gas quickly. This
is a problem throughout the stories — great standalone ideas play out, but they
fail to sustain or connect. It’s one bravura sequence after another. When he
meets another musical vaquero, the inevitable duet of death acts itself out.
“Near Algodones” is an exercise in style in which yet
another Coen protagonist is the plaything of fate. James Franco as Cowboy
robbing Stephen Root’s Teller and the subsequent absurd permutations of the
Cowboy’s fate is a demolition-derby smash of archetypes, none of them
registering long enough to engage identification. Is this some kind of
Brechtian alienation technique, one that forces us to disengage emotionally in
order to engage intellectually, and deconstruct and analyze the genre’s
assumptions? You see what I mean about overthinking all of this?
The most unpleasant story in the bunch, “Meal Ticket,”
describes the existence of a performer with emotional accuracy — by way of Tod
Browning’s Freaks. A limbless orator dubbed
The Artist (Harry Melling) recites classic poetry and speech for the unwashed
masses on the frontier, towed around in a ramshackle wagon by Liam Neeson, aka
The Impresario. Get it? Spoiler alert: When sold on the superior profitability
of owning a performing mathematical chicken, The Artist finds himself
superfluous.
Who doesn’t want to see Tom Waits as Gabby Hayes? In “All
Gold Canyon,” he gets to play a colorful ol’ prospector who finally strikes it
rich. The real glory of this story is pristine setting of the high mountain
valley it takes place in; it is not CGI’d. I’ve been there. And no, I’m not
going to tell you where it is. Here the most important tension is that borne by
every pioneer — between the obvious love for the glorious beauty of the unspoiled
wilderness and the desire to dig treasure out of its guts, ruining it forever.
Tom Waits in the 'All Gold Canyon' section of 'Scruggs.' |
In the last two stories, “The Gal Who Got Rattled” and “The
Mortal Remains,” we are again thrown into the maw of death and uncertainty, to
the point that when a sweeping, breathtaking panoramic shot of a wagon train,
15 of them hand-built for the movie by production designer Jess Gonchor and
staff, all I wondered was how many smaller movies might be funded with that
shot’s accrued costs.
In all these stories, death runs rampant, and the stories’
protagonists turn out to be those who are alive at the end. This is a recurrent
Coen theme — short-circuiting the audience’s sympathies and pulling the rug out
from under characters for any reason or no reason at all. Behind all the
craftsmanship and style is the grim humor of chaos and death. It’s a nihilism
that the Coens share with Tarentino, another stylist who plays with genre and
makes choices for effect that don’t support the narrative. This is top-down,
by-the-storyboard filmmaking, and after a while, despite the beautiful
pictures, it all gets too precious and contrived, bloody but bloodless, the
West as curio under glass.
The Rider is a
great film, hands down, and it speaks more to the myths and tragedies of the
West than any film I can remember. Its genesis was the interaction of filmmaker
Zhao and Brady Jandreu, a Lakota Sioux cowboy and bronc rider she consulted
during the making of her first feature film, Songs My Brothers Taught Me. A head injury in the arena took
Jandreu out of competition, and the challenge to his way of thinking and way of
life fuel the resulting fictionalization.
The actors are non-actors, but this is not a lifeless
re-creation of some documentary event. Somehow, giving imaginative wiggle room
allows the story to reach a searing emotional level. In the film, Brady
struggles with the injury’s assault on his abilities, learning that he has to
give up riding or die. On his South Dakota reservation, there’s not much to do
outside of ranching. Brady finds himself stocking shelves in a drug store. He
never voices his humiliation, but it’s palpable. His loyal visits to a friend
permanently disabled by just the same injury gives him a graphic picture of
what his life might be like. This subtle lead performance is mirrored
stylistically in Nathen Halpern’s gentle, hypnotic score.
Brady’s callous father battles him, and his autistic sister
bucks him up. If there is a romantic relationship in the film, it’s Brady’s
with horses. A long sequence in a corral highlights Brady’s way of gentling a
wild horse; it’s a revelation about a deeply feeling, empathic, and nurturing
capacity that, frankly, I’ve never seen a man demonstrate on film before. It
made me cry. The camera loves the barren, tawny, rolling Dakota hills as much
as Brady does, and it instills the viewer with the same unsentimental, raw love
of the land for its own sake that grounds real Westerns.
Frustrated beyond belief, Brady contemplates competing in
the rodeo again. As in Aronofsky’s The
Wrestler, the protagonist has to choose between evolving and dying, and
there are echoes of Nicholas Ray’s The
Lusty Men as well. Poor wombless men! We are possessed of the strange
compulsion to test ourselves again and again, usually by hurting ourselves and
others. What happens to a male when he can longer fight the fight he wants to
fight? If he is forced to settle for less, is he less? Or he is more? Can he
submit to the wayward and unknowable will of God?
These are great questions that need to be asked. The Western
is a masculine genre, a lens through which we sort out our identities. The
Western movie still lives, because we are still sorting it out. Scruggs runs roughshod but Rider gets farther using a steady
canter.
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