Wednesday, November 28, 2018

Living Room Bijou: Dogs and Scruggs





Along with so much else, the 2018 holidays have taken a strange turn. Even the climate of holiday movies has shifted. For as long as we can remember, starting at Thanksgiving, Hollywood has rolled out its big pictures for the year: If it’s not Star Wars, it’s James Bond; if not Bond, then Peter Jackson or Michael Bay might lumber out with another Hobbits Meet the Transformers epic, or something equally overweight or overwrought.

This blighted season, however, there seems to be no must-see for-everyone movie, nothing to get us out of the house during those afternoon dead spots when the turkey is cooling down. The closest candidate seems to be the katrillionth version of Robin Hood, which, early reviews indicate, is yet another go round that leaves Errol Flynn and Michael Curtiz securely laughing on their heavenly thrones. (Think about it: eighty years and no onehas bettered Mr. Flynn as Robin Hood. On that score, Hollywood should bury the Robin Hood story in a tomb and just re-release the 1939 version forever. Take it from me and a million others: stay home with Errol Flynn.)

In fact, you might as well stay home in front of a warm TV. And, if not for its ferociously mature content, I’d partially recommend The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the latest offering from the remarkable, always interesting, Joel and Ethan Coen, now available on Netflix.

Buster Scruggs combines two movies we see little of nowadays: 1) a Western and (2) a portmanteau movie. Anthology movies are most always a mixed bag and this one is more mixed than most, a weave and jumble of old styles and contemporary attitudes as seen through the Coens’ amused and bleak gaze.

The film frames its six stories by use of a facsimile of a western anthology of the type written in the 1900s by Stuart Edward White, illustrated in the manner of N.C. Wyeth. It’s a pleasing nod to an old Hollywood style of storytelling.

First comes the title story, featuring Tim Blake Nelson as Buster Scruggs, an immaculately white-clad cowpoke, strumming his guitar, singing a song, riding along through John Ford’s Monument Valley and right into bullet-packed trouble. As we learn at slapstick speed, his sugary exterior is a mere shell laid over a hair-trigger pistol-spinning psychopath.

The joke is a bit obvious (or maybe I’m a bit old) and B-movie cowboys, such as Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, are fat targets for parody. But thanks to Nelson’s indomitable cheer, along with the Coens’ visual imagination and slapstick flair, the sequence is very funny, involving a swell gag involving a poker table, followed by droll visions of angels.

From there, slapstick turns to farce with “Near Algodones.” James Franco plays a luckless bandit whose brief career runs through one necktie party after another. (We picked up on hints of Hang ‘Em Highamong other references.) There’s a clever line near the end, but the jokes go flat here.

“Meal Ticket” is memorable almost solely for its conceit: Liam Neeson plays a traveling freakshow impresario whose sole attraction is “The Wingless Thrush.” The Thrush is an armless, legless actor (well played by Harry Melling, a Harry Potter alumnus) who recites Coenesque mashups of Shelley’s “Ozymandias”, the Bible, Shakespeare and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, to audiences of bored, lonely miners trapped in wintry mountain camps. 

The sequence is mostly a series of dissolves with the camera fixed on Melling’s face as he recites his way through the classics of nineteenth century literature, smoothly edited together to remind us of the Coens’ manner of blending tropes and genres. To the Impresario, the Thrush is but a fancy windup clock. Outside issues of bodily functions—one of them provoking a brief bark of sick laughter— the two men never interact.

The freak show is a success at first as it wanders from camp to camp, but as it goes on—and it does go on—the takings start to dwindle (along with, I admit, my interest). Finally, weary of having to wait um hand and foot on his charge, Neeson resorts to desperate measures to turn his fortunes after an encounter with a calculating chicken. 

For a minute, as my ever-clever wife remarked, it looks as though the sequence would climb the sublime heights of “One Froggy Evening.”  I have little doubt the same idea crossed the Coens’ devilish minds--it sure would mine--but they seemed content to leave it as an anecdotal campfire tale.

The same may be said of the following sequence, “All Gold Valley,” adapted from a Jack London story. Tom Waits channels Gabby Hayes as a gold prospector who lays waste to a pristine mountain paradise. In fact, it’s Tom Waits all by his lonesome until the very end. The underlying environmental message, however, sparks little interest, putting this sequence near the bottom of the pile. But even with the worst westerns, there’s always the scenery to look at. That applies here, too.

The Coens do finally strike real gold with the fourth tale, “The Girl Who Got Rattled.” Adapted from a story by Stuart Edward White, it’s much the best by a prairie mile.

We meet a young woman (Zoe Kazan) and her bull-stubborn, incompetent brother on a wagon train to Oregon. After her brother dies, she’s drawn into a poignant encounter with the train’s wagon masters, played by Bill Heck and Grainger Hines. 

For once the Coens drop their trademark snigger and chilly post-modern detachment to tell a sad, but thrilling yarn in eloquent but plain style and with heart—something we don’t often see from them. For once, they stop looking down on their characters and try to engage them eye to eye. With simple but excellent compositions by cameraman Bruno Delbonnel and sets and lighting by God, it’s a golden pleasure to watch.

It brings back memories of many a good western of old, including those directed by Budd Boetticher and Anthony Mann. Zoe Kazan is excellent, but someone should cast both Bill Heck and Grainger Hines in another western as soon as possible. Both actors bring saddle-weary truth to their roles, proving that Randolph Scott still rides.

Unfortunately, the movie loses a shoe and goes lame at the end with “Mortal Remains.” The pyrite of the lot, it’s a Stagecoach Meets Twilight Zone affair whose ending we saw comin’ ‘round the mountain long before its gabby characters did, in a tale more static than claustrophobic. Death is rarely a surprise in a Coen Brothers film and it’s sure no surprise here.

Grumbling aside, it’s pleasing to see filmmakers like the Coens once again tackle the western, as they did so well in True Grit. At its best, Buster Scruggs is an expression of both deep love for and ambivalence toward this most American of film genres. Even so, it runs hot only once and lukewarm-to-cold for the rest. It’s no holiday movie, but one for late night, after children and more sensitive souls have long gone to bed and into dreams of angels and sunny prairies.






We saw Buster Scruggs before Thanksgiving was even on us. During Thanksgiving, the TV sat like a plain black rectangle as we preferred the state of hypnosis induced by a jigsaw puzzle. It wasn’t until Friday, with almost everyone else gone, that we noticed the TV in the room—not for a jumbled epic, not for some antic thriller, but for a Netflix documentary about . . . dogs.

Dogs (an on-the-wet-nose title to be sure), is a six-part documentary series about the roles that dogs play in the lives of the neediest among us. We’ve only seen two chapters so far and have been enchanted and moved.

The first episode, “The Kid with a Dog,” deals with Corinne, a severely epileptic teenage girl who’s so in the grip of her condition that she can never ever be left alone, not even in sleep. Her family is committed and loving, but even they are cracking under the strain by the situation. Finally, they turn for help to a “labradoodle” named Rory who’s been trained to detect seizures and raise the alarm when they arrive.

“Bravo Zeus,” the second episode, follows Ayham, a refugee from the Syrian Civil War who now lives in lonely exile in Berlin, Germany. With the help of an NGO, Animals Syria, he arranges to smuggle his beloved (and very charming) husky, Zeus, from the horrors of war-torn Damascus. Next to this real-life story, most fictional thrillers look a little pale.

The series theme song is the worst sort of treacle, but feel free to plug your ears. Once we got past that, we found both stories deeply moving and hair-raising in their own fashion (even for this cat lover). While portraying the emotional bonds between people and their pets, it also, without making too much of itself, hints at some of the wider complications lurking about.

Rory’s work, while greatly easing the strain, only goes so far in helping Corinne’s family, as her mother must still sleep in the same room with her. Their future still looks bleak. Dogs can do a lot but they can’t do everything.

As for Ayham and Zeus, a utilitarian ideologue (among other moralists) will reject Ayham’s priorities and ask whether any resources should be spent at all on “mere pets” in the midst of so much human suffering.

It might be better though to save our fury for the war from which man and dog fled. When Zeus comes bounding into the airport and into Ayham’s arms, objections fall away and Love remains standing.

Thomas Burchfield’s Butchertown,a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up  novel is now out! His contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark won the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book Festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers, The Uglies, Now Speaks the Devil and Dracula: Endless Night (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, all are available at Amazon,Barnes and Noble, Powell's Books, and other retailers. His reviews have appeared in Bright Lights Film Journal and The Strand and he recently published a two-part look at the life and career of the great film villain (and spaghetti western star) Lee Van Cleef in Filmfax. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.


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