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It was their glibness.
But the cynicism was distancing.
Gradually, though, macabre farce has yielded to tragedy.
(At the time, this annoyed me I wanted the conventional consolations of genre.
I was shortsighted.)
The stories are jarringly different in tone so different that they left early festival audiences puzzled.
The first two are crammed with bloody deaths but giddy and absurdist they give you a high.
The third is a steep drop into icy waters.
The fourth is lighter, though it leaves a bitter taste, and the fifth is simply crushing.
The sixth is on its own weird, cosmic plateau.
Sometimes its good to let things sit and not rush to judgment.
Now I think the Coens were dead right in their approach.
The tales color and deepen one another.
Different on the surface, theyre philosophically all of a piece.
With hindsight, the jolly first story The Ballad of Buster Scruggs lays out the Coens vision.
Tim Blake Nelson is the singing sharpshooter who talks to the audience, frequently praising his own pleasing baritone.
You get delightfully well-staged saloon dance numbers side-by-side with indiscriminate carnage.
(He has no correlative outside the universe of movies.)
(Forgive me for not saying Native Americans these are retro Western-movie warriors, Injuns, really.)
Twice he ends up in a noose, as if Death has chased him to Samarra and beyond.
Then the sudden plunge: The tone of Meal Ticket is wintry and woebegone, the pacing ponderous.
How cruel this story is: You watch Neesons protoP.
All Gold Canyon is almost all Tom Waits as an indefatigable prospector surrounded by omens of death.
Is there balm in Gilead?
Quoth the raven, Er, probably not.
Ill get back to you.
But no nihilists could have made this film, which is less James L. Cain than Samuel Beckett.
Carter Burwells score is perhaps his most achingly beautiful.
For the Coens, its a thrilling new frontier.
