The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is great.

Just checked it out as I haven’t seen a Coen brothers flick in some time, and it’s damn good.

As is to be expected with any film by them, it’s chalk full of extensive allegories, wonderfully written side characters and some absolutely gorgeous cinematography, but what really makes it special is that each vignette essentially serves as a tribute to just how bizarre people are.

An angle that isn’t often approached in Westerns is just how messed up everybody was. People lived under extremely puritanical social orders, often at the mercy of mother nature, with no formal understanding of illness and with liquor and amphetamines as the only available remedies. The likelihood of a smooth-talking, fast acting cowboy existing in this world is slim, and the one character that is portrayed like this is played for laughs and is ultimately gunned down.

Characters in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs are often sluggish, they talk past each other, they talk over each other, they sometimes don’t even have fully intelligible conversations, they serve as the grimy reflection of the world they inhabit and as disorganized as that might sound, the Coen brothers went to great lengths to write these characters from the ground up as real people with tangible needs and desires with the end result being some of the most believable characters I’ve seen in fiction.

Submitted July 25, 2020 at 08:52PM by jorgery22 https://ift.tt/30OMkgP