The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

“The Ballad of Buster Scruggs”, a Western anthology of six short films written and directed by Ethan and Joel Coen, concludes with a passage in which five disparate strangers take a stagecoach to a frontier outpost as the light outside gradually dissolves into darkness, evocative of the movie’s ever-shifting emotional palette. Indeed, even as the characters inhabit archetypes with a comic twinkle, the specter of death hangs over everything, with frequent intrusions of grisly violence. That violence is at once sudden and inevitable, embodying the idea of the American West as a roughhewn place where men and women, cowboys and Indians, all kept moving even as they waited for the other shoe to drop.

The anthology’s jarring shifts in tone are evident straight away as we meet the eponymous Buster Scruggs (Tim Blake Nelson) astride his horse, singing a song, guitar in hand, in some Monument Valley locale where The Coen Brothers have great editing fun, showing Buster up close with the song right in our ears, and then cutting to the singing cowboy from a distance with the song echoing off canyon walls, and even tucking a camera looking inside out from Buster’s six string. When he stops at a saloon and pulls his six shooter instead, that swell spell is quickly broken when he blows the fingers clean off his opposition. Yet Buster’s demeanor never changes, as if Gene Autry is starring in “The Wild Bunch”, never quite letting you get a full handle on your feelings, blending myth and veracity so artfully that you’re never quite sure which is which as it’s going down. And Buster’s concluding ballad is synchronously rosy and a requiem; you don’t laugh to keep from crying so much as just shake your head because you feel like doing both.

The second story embraces laughter too, where one grave decision by a bank robber (James Franco) elicits an extended series of reversals pogoing from western motif to western motif, a hanging to an Indian attack and back again, as Franco goes through all this without hardly batting an eye, evincing that it’s all in a day in the life on the American frontier, uproariously brought home in a climactic punchline. Yet rather than end on this wickedly funny joke, the Brothers Coen pivot again, as everything, in one sudden cut to a point-of-view shot where everything goes black, pointedly rejecting the preceding story’s almost whimsical spirituality.

That spiritual absence links it with the ensuing story, the anthology’s darkest, mostly, Meal Ticket, which is both wordless and full of words in following a grizzly impresario (Liam Neeson) cart a limbless reciter (Harry Melling) from town to town where he orates from the back of a covered wagon, like a prototype nickelodeon. If a few early moments suggest the impresario’s fatherly affection, the title betrays the truth, as does Neeson’s gravelly, incredulous, indelible chuckle at the short’s pivotal moment, a whole new world suddenly appearing before him, in an instant painting Manifest Destiny as the capitalist junk of a huckster.

As a nameless Prospector, Tom Waits, despite his character being left virtually alone for the duration of his short, is not as silent as Neeson. No, the eccentric Waits acutely captures the eccentricity of a man who is his own company, as his virtual privacy out in the open merely underscores the vast emptiness of the American West. Yet that emptiness, a striking demonstration of location work, with a creek that truly appears untouched by all of mankind’s foul habits, evokes its own privacy, which the Prospector invades by digging it up in search for gold, his own footprint the violent turn in this passage as much as the actual violent turn.

That notion of unwanted invasion deliberately bleeds into The Gal Who Got Rattled, the richest in terms of character, not least because it is the longest of the six, which allows us more time in the company of Alice Longsbaugh (Zoe Kazan), bound for Oregon by wagon train to be married off to someone she does not know at the behest of her aggrandizing brother. This storyline illuminates the anthology’s lack of female characters, as her entire existence is at the mercy of men, less a life lived than a series of business transactions where she is the product being bought and sold, which Kazan underscores with an overly humble performance emitting the pained air that she is always in the way. This short allows the most room for Native Americans, though even here they are seen from distance, “savages” of a war party, though their prevalence in this short above all others seems by design, a deliberate linking to The Gal Who Got Rattled herself, a people with too little say over their own fate. The most ferocious bullet in the entire movie is fired here, though we never see it, just the after-effects, which might well speak for the fate of Indigenous Americans too.

The concluding passage, The Mortal Remains, with its five characters of varying professions and nationalities, is a summation of the previous five passages. If it begins with an homage to John Ford’s celebrated 1939 film, it gradually morphs into something more akin to the eternally terrifying silent “The Phantom Carriage” (1921), the neat trick of the light fading into a ghoulish green, which you only realize after it’s already begun to happen, like the light of your own life is dimming, receding, which the coach’s inherent claustrophobia clarifies. And when philosophical conversation grows touchy and a cry for the coach to stop is issued, it is not heeded. The driver never stops, it is explained, because that’s the policy, mimicking the passage of our own lives, rushing headlong toward some destination that we cannot know even as it proves identical for all of us, a familiar observation perhaps, but rarely conveyed with such eerie clarity.

Hail, Caesar!

It sounds like the set-up to a joke. A Catholic priest, a Greek Orthodox priest, a Protestant minister, a Rabbi, and a Hollywood producer convene at a conference table. And it is funny, this particular moment in The Coen Brothers’ “Hail, Caesar!” when Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), the producer, summons these religious bigwigs to ensure his movie studio’s portrayal of Christ in their forthcoming prestige picture that gives the film its title is accurate. Each clergyman has his own opinion, of course, because each has a different relationship to the creator, but the fact remains that they are all here for the same reason and that is in service to the movies. And it is the movies – or perhaps I should say, the pictures, to use the parlance of the film’s time – to which “Hail, Caesar!” so extraordinarily and warmly pays homage above all else.

“Warmly?” you might be wondering. Joel and Ethan Coen, writers, directors and producers, those cold, clinical satirists so often determined to unmask the system as rotted within, who just went on record as denouncing the importance of the Academy Awards, are treating the movies – excuse me, the pictures – warmly? Are they not the same Coen Brothers who presented Hollywood in the form of Jack Lipnick, boss of Capitol Pictures in “Barton Fink”, a browbeating philistine who pretended to be on the writer’s side until he wasn’t? Indeed they are and yet “Hail, Caesar!” would suggest the Coens have softened a bit in their stance toward La La Land – or, perhaps to put it more accurately, the Coens have always had a soft spot for the movies, not so much for the business.

“Hail, Caesar!” is set in the early 1950's when the studio system ruled Hollywood, and those studios were rife with issues that had to be kept under wraps, which is where Mannix comes in, Head of Physical Production, though he’s really a “fixer”, as if Michael Clayton had been cultivated in the world of Philip Marlowe. He moves about Capitol’s back lot with gruff ease, untangling his stars from their various imbroglios, keeping the moviemaking wheels in perpetual motion. There is the unplanned pregnancy of DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson), a young western star Hobie Doyle trying with some difficulty to transition to a drawing room romance and then there is Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), star of mighty “Hail, Caesar!” itself, who has just been kidnapped by some mysterious sect calling itself The Future. And all this is under threat of being reported to the masses by Thora and Thessaly Thacker (Tilda Swinton, having a ball), twin news/gossip columnists.

All these various to-dos provide Mannix the perfect excuse to act as our tour guide through production designer Jess Gonchor’s Classical Hollywood wonderland, providing all manner of Golden Age treats, from an Esther Williams-ish aquatic song and dance to a Lubitsch-like ball gown epic delightfully titled “Merrily We Dance.” If there was one made-up picture from “Hail, Caesar!” I wish I could most see it’s the latter, directed by Laurence Lorenz who is played by Ralph Fiennes with a comic fastidiousness so at odds with his star’s aw-shucksness that it leaves you in stitches. (“A mirthless chuckle” is in the clubhouse as the leader for 2016's Out-of-Context Line of the Year.)

You might say these are really only tangentially connected to the story; I’d say these are the story, these silver screen spoils. The Coens have always sought to give life to peripheral moments as much as the pivotal, which is why their concoction of a movie ballad called “Lazy Old Moon” feels like it was stripped straight from a late night showing on Turner Classic Movies and the opening credits of “Merrily We Dance” are enough to make you swoon. And even if these moments, like repeated takes of Baird Whitlock coming face-to-face with Christ, are humorous, they are not insincere, crafted with true affection.

Still, Baird's kidnapping becomes vital in its own way, as eventually The Future is revealed to be a group of screenwriting communist sympathizers, a la The Hollywood Ten. Baird, played by Clooney like a handsome cipher, sees their point, only to quickly be cowed by the studio once Mannix rescues him. Movie studios, after all, were not in tune with the communist ideal of common ownership; there was a clear chain of command from the godlike studio head on down. Which is why the recurring idea of religion throughout “Hail, Caesar!” is not tangential but entirely crucial, essentially arguing that in the Golden Age the studio heads were the gods who assigned mortals to do their bidding and allowed other mortals to become gods, their names illuminated by the marquee.

Communists, in broad terms, dismiss god as opium of the masses, which might be how the Coens themselves view these motion pictures, mere opium for all us slack-jawed idiots in the audience, nothing more than product put out by self-mythologizing studio toughs to take our money. But even if that’s true, boy oh boy, does that opium still taste good.

5 Coen Brothers Movies Performances That Really Tie The Film Together, plus one

As Dianna Sletten writes at SheKnows, “Tying a room together doesn’t mean having to spend a lot of money or buying several new items for the room. In most cases, you can tie a room together successfully with the furniture and accent pieces you already have, by displaying them properly. Or you can add one or two new items that will make the room pop.” She does know. She knows like The Dude knew in The Coen Brothers’ “The Big Lebowski” when he so desperately just wanted his fair-to-middlin' rug back because it really tied the room together. And I like to think The Coen Brothers added this little plot complication because they knew it was simultaneously nothing and everything. Because The Coen Brothers know that what truly ties their often intricate films together are not the star-making performances - like Jeff Bridges as The Dude, like Frances McDormand as the immortal Marge Gunderson, like Oscar Isaac as Llewyn Davis. No, it’s often the support to the supporting performances that ties a Coen Brothers movie together, like the little thought that goes a long way in a bit of fine dining plate presentation.

5 Coen Brothers Movies Performances That Really Tie The Film Together, plus one

Josh Brolin, True Grit

For most of this western opus, a US Marshal, a Texas Ranger and the spunky fourteen year old Mattie Ross try and track down the villainous Tom Chaney, the man responsible for killing Mattie’s father. Innumerable westerns have taught us to assume that Chaney is obligatorily vicious, requisitely unkillable, except when it comes to our heroes. But when we meet him, Brolin does a 180, playing the part like the filing cabinet of his mind is missing a lot of folders. Like, you know how there is speculation that mentally Billy the Kid wasn’t all there? Brolin plays that Billy the Kid.

Tara Reid, The Big Lebowski

Still, and probably forever, Tara Reid's singular silver screen moment, made famous by a single tawdry line that her scratchy voice turns into extraordinary Z-grade art.

Petra Boden, Fargo

She’s in a single scene, manning the cash register at the diner where Jerry Lundegaard, his father-in-law and Stan Grossman (who could appear in a different version of this list) have just held council. Upbeat to the nines, she ignores the distracted vibes emanating from Jerry to merrily ask how everything was. He offers a standard-issue reply followed by a rhetorical wondering of how she is. She doesn’t say anything because she doesn’t have to – she just improbably enlarges her grin like it’s literally her happiest day on Earth, which it probably is, until the next day.

Patrick Cranshaw, The Hudsucker Proxy

Most my age likely remember him as Blue, the ancient fraternity brother in “Old School”, but he’ll always he Ancient Sorter to me, the not-really-at-all apprentice to Norville Barnes’ first-day-on-the-job mail clerk. Every time I’ve dared to daydream about how I’ve got big ideas I’ve heard Cranshaw’s voice disinterestedly responding: “I’m sure you do.”

David Rasche, Burn After Reading

There’s an awful lotta plot happening in the Coens’ noirish screwball comedy, especially when the CIA finds itself involved in a myriad of strange goings-on involving a woman they don’t really know and that doesn’t really know as much as she claims to, and the few times when a Langley boss (J.K. Simmons) needs a briefing on all that what-have-you, it’s Rasche’s CIA officer Palmer who provides it. Really these sequences are un-essential because Rasche, with a laconic, Churchill-martini-dry voice, is merely explaining what has already happened. But then, that’s their innate beauty – the finer points of Central Intelligence bureaucracy rendered in Rasche’s poetical monotone “Ums” and “Uhs.”

Simon Helberg, A Serious Man

“Look at the parking lot, Larry.”

Inside Llewyn Davis

Robert Frost did not hone in his craft at the Gaslight Lounge in Greenwich Village in the early 60’s but, nevertheless, his words kept returning to me in the wake of The Coen Brothers’ latest stylized opus. “Two roads diverge in a yellow wood.” It’s no secret that the Brothers Coen often function less as impartial observers than puppet masters, choosing a protagonist and then putting him/her through their own brilliantly storyboarded version of cinematic Wipeout! Even their sunnier characters are made to face the gauntlet – Marge Gunderson’s relentless optimism is tested, The Dude’s strikes and gutters philosophy is questioned – but I’m not entirely certain they have ever crafted a character whose fate seems determined so much by himself.

Over and over two roads diverge in a metaphorical yellow wood and the title character, Llwellyn Davis (Oscar Isaac), a failing, fading folk musician, a chronic couch surfer, in the dead of winter with no winter coat, is made to choose which road to take. Yes, yes, you could argue that Joel and Ethan Coen are crafting the interlocking freeway system that keeps leading Llewyn to these varying forks, but I could counter that as writers they do a keen job creating a character whose prior life before the film’s kickoff clearly would have led him to this specific point. His choices have resulted in the need to make these decisions. And while Llewyn is another character – there have been several at the movies this year – resistant to easy empathy, Isaac still imbues him with a sort of humanity, albeit a standoffish, self-destructive humanity.

And anyway, Llewyn is an artist. Trust the art, not the artist, right? Then again, I’m not entirely sure Llewyn trusts his own art, let alone himself. Several times, including the requisite story bookends, the movie looks on as he simply sits down and strums his guitar and sings. It’s clear he possesses talent, even if it might not be otherworldly (like the croaker with the poofy hair going by the name Dylan who shows up in silhouette near movie’s end), but a particular scene in which he lashes out and demeans his folk singing as a mere “job” changes our perspective. These are not joyful tunes in sync with the harmony of life nor defiant odes to life’s banality nor material that seems interested in sparking change or leading protest, these are grief-stricken yodels of defeat. We are not watching a star being born, we are watching a star that never quite was crushed by the weight of gravity.

One of the film’s most striking scenes involves Llewyn’s spur of the moment audition for a gruff record producer (F. Murray Abraham, perfect in a single scene cameo). In a different film this might have gone in another direction, but Abraham is both blunt and courteous. He actually presents Llewyn with an opportunity, though it’s an opportunity of compromise and so Llewyn declines. Why exactly? Hubris? Artistic integrity? Some mixture of the two? I can’t say I know for certain, I can’t say for certain that Llewyn knows either. Like Alvy Singer ripping up the ticket right in front of the traffic cop, Llewyn just can’t help himself. Any semblance of sun peeking through clouds is ignored until it recedes.

There is virtually no sunshine in the film. It forgoes the black and white of Alexander Payne’s “Nebraska” and, yet, the visual palette of “Inside Llewyn Davis” somehow feels even more cruel. All the color has been drained from Davis’s face, eliciting a vibe of the walking dead as he trudges from place to place in the desperate hope that someone will put him up for the night. The person he calls on more than any other is Jean (Carey Mulligan), his former flame who is now dating a different chirpy folk singer (Justin Timberlake). Mulligan, so well-known for her graceful countenance, plays against type here as a woman worn-down and impatient with Llewyn’s aimlessness and bad attitude. She essentially does not complete a sentence without including a swear word directed at Llewyn. After all, she’s just found out she’s carrying his child.

This, we swiftly ascertain, is a common refrain for our title character. There is another woman referenced whom he impregnated and helped get an abortion. That situation takes a predictable curve initially, but rather than become the focus it merely lingers. Until eventually, suddenly, Llewyn is made to face it in a particular way. That happens regularly throughout the film, opportunities for him to go in a different direction, all laid out for him like a shiny new second chance, and each time he willfully shoots it down. Even when he seems set, whether by choice or no choice, to dedicate himself to his on-again, off-again occupation as a merchant marine, it goes awry. And it goes awry all on account of his own lazy dismissiveness. No one has ever repeatedly pushed that symbolic boulder up the hill with such bitter indifference. Sisyphus and a cat named Ulysses (that isn’t Llewyn’s but that he dutifully carries around like a Ginger Tom penance). Yeah, it’s the Coens all right.

As with any Coen film, a sense of the surreal pulses throughout, from a cross-country journey that comes across like a hunger-pang hallucination to a nighttime alley encounter that serves as the denouement. Suddenly we realize the film has come full circle, the end was the beginning, we are where we started, so fitting because it underscores the lack (the want) of any progress. If we are the sum of our choices then perhaps the place Llewyn ends up is where he was always meant to be.