***1/2 out of ****
Rated R
(for language and strong violence)
Released: November 16, 2018
Runtime: 132 minutes
Directed by: Joel and Ethan Coen
Starring: Tim Blake Nelson, James Franco, Liam Neeson, Harry Melling, Tom Waits, Zoe Kazan, Bill Heck, Grainger Hines, Tyne Daily, Brendan Gleeson, Jonjo O’Neill, Saul Rubineck, Chelcie Ross
My review of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, for The Tulsa Voice. The latest Western from the filmmaking brothers Joel and Ethan Coen is an anthology of short stories. It’s streaming now on Netflix.
The collection of 6 separate tales from the Old West has “a folksy lore worthy of Twain and, at times, even Shakespeare himself,” but “with a darkly comic existentialism tinged with inescapable Providence, it’s the literary voice of Flannery O’Connor that this most powerfully evokes.”
Triggered by “shocking bursts of violence,” there is a “tension between the droll and the dreadful, jarring us with gallows humor and bloody consequences. There’s a violence deep in the human condition as well.”