In recent years, there have always been people who say that Westerns are long dead, but in recent years, there have always been filmmakers who have used their works to prove that Westerns do not die at all.
Today I'll give you a Western that I really like, the Coen brothers shot with six short stories —
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
But if you expect this film to be as warm and healing as the brothers' previous film, Drunken Folk, it's a big mistake; it's more like an early film of the brothers, full of weird and crazy unlucky characters, and absurd and black violent scenes.
A smiling cowboy singer (Tim Blake Nelson) suddenly goes on a killing spree in a bar.
A bank robber (James Franco) who wants to ascend to the sky in one step is actually knocked down by the emaciated and dry bank boss, and has since embarked on a race against death.
A taciturn theater manager (Liam Neeson) pairs up with a speaker who has no limbs but can speak and travels around.
A gold digger (Tom Witz) discovers a large gold mine, but finds a praying mantis catching cicadas and yellow finches in the background.
A cowboy who is determined to protect his beloved girl (Zoe Kazan) encounters an accident on their journey through the desert.
Several strangers are trapped in a cramped carriage, completely unaware of the fate they await...
The above six short stories of the West that took place in the 1870s together make up the Ballad of Buster Scruggers.
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is arguably the Coen Brothers' latest innovation in their personal style, an organic mosaic-style jigsaw puzzle that embodies their ability to navigate different genres, but more importantly, they regain the lightness and uninhibited feel of their earlier films.
This is also due to Netflix's new distribution model, which is different from the traditional theater, with a medium budget and no pressure to recover funds, which makes them more able to free themselves and try ideas that they have wanted before but have never implemented.
Seemingly scattered but soul-packed, The Ballad of Buster Scruggers fully develops this strength, stringing together six stories that seem unrelated but all point to the same theme, and the fifth story in the film, William and Iris, say in their lines around the campfire: "Uncertainty is the right way of everything in the world." ”
The six stories in "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs" do not point to life and death, but to "the impermanence of fate", a proposition that the Coen brothers have been tirelessly expressing since their debut. Death is only the most obvious epitome of this proposition, because nothing is more dramatic and transformative than the previous moment, and death the next moment.
Since "Blood Labyrinth", the Coen brothers have been carefully designing the death pattern, and all kinds of bizarre and brain-opening deaths have always been their favorite ingredients.
The chemical effects, black humor and even the comical farce that occur between people in the fight against death and the struggle to survive are the main dishes, which is where the uniqueness of Cohen's aesthetic lies. Laughter and anger are contained in absurdity, but they feel the bitterness of life, and in the Coen brothers, you can't really sit on the edge or talk about it.
Understanding this, it is easy to understand why many people spray "The Ballad of Buster Scrugs" on the Internet as "not like a Western" and "no soul of a Western", because the duel of the gun drawn at the first word, the feud between Indians and whites, the train robbery and the extrajudicial, these are not the interests that the Coen brothers want to show the audience.
What they want to show the audience is that the bridges in the previous Westerns are all illusions of life, all legends, and we want to show you a completely different Western, and what we reflect in the film is the real events that happened in the West at that time.
There are no heroes here, no pride, just a bunch of poor people trying to survive, fighting against the environment, and opening thorns in their daily lives, just for better hope.
The Coen brothers made Westerns that were anti-genre traditions, and that was what their purpose was, and Westerns only borrowed a form, just as they used to borrow shells from film noir, such as "Blood Labyrinth"; the shells of gangster movies, such as "Miller's Crossroads"; the shells of crime movies, such as "Ice Storm" and "Old Nobody", and so on.
But no matter what kind of genre film routine they borrow, the final result must be unconventional, and their interest in anti-genre films is far higher than the form they borrow, because they are convinced that if they want to innovate, they must first destroy.
That's why, in the first story introduction to The Ballad of Buster Scruggers, the Coen brothers told it in a parody and fantasy mode, first telling the audience that the usual Western routines such as pulling a gun to survive quickly and being able to dominate are ridiculous.
Just as the character of Buster Scruggers is full of smiles and very vicious, "what you see is an illusion", the Coen brothers also deliberately use forms and elements such as song and dance films and romance films to create a cheerful and happy atmosphere, these fantasies and atmospheres that ordinary audiences like to hear, but at the end of each story, they are poked one by one in different ways, and finally achieve the purpose of irony.
My personal favorite third story is Harry Milling (can you tell you that this is the fat guy who plays Dudley's cousin in Harry Potter?). Playing the ranger "Wingless Thrush", Liam Neeson plays its boss.
This story powerfully exposes the cruel essence of the "great development of the American West" - the weak are abandoned, the useless are killed, which is the fate of most pioneers.
The Coen brothers also tried a rare way of combining pantomime and one-man show in this story, which is also the key to my favorite film, purely using the language of the film to express the theme -
In the shot, the boss's courtesy to the "wingless thrush" to the departure and reduction of the audience again and again, to the trepidation and cold loss on the face of the "wingless thrush", and finally the absence of the empty seat of the "thrush" in the vast snowfield, the combination of audiovisual language repeatedly polishes the audience's heart like a knife.
Relatively speaking, the second story and the fourth story are general, and can only reflect the bad taste of the Coen brothers, but the line that James Franco asked the frightened crying man next to him before he was executed can be described as a stroke of genius, "The first time?" The amusing level of this place can almost be compared to the Tang monk in "Journey to the West" who asked the little demon next to him: "Your mother's name?" "That's a par.
The last story is a philosophical summary of the whole film, the grim reaper incarnated as a bounty hunter, facing the quarrel of the representatives of the three classes about how people should be classified, and sarcastically said: "When people (death) go to another world, trying to figure out everything in the world is in vain", the Coen brothers also completed their own advice -
"Things are uncertain, and we can only smile bitterly to meet our fate."