The Ballad of Buster Scruggs: Minor-key melodramas

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated R for strong violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.7.18

Anthology films — also known by the far niftier term “portmanteau films,” with interior short subjects usually linked by genre, author, premise or even star — have been mini-fads at various points in cinema history.

Having unwisely left the wagon train in search of her wayward little dog, Alice
Longabaugh (Zoe Kazan) is terrified to discover that she and her sole companion have
been spotted by a band of angry Native American warriors.

They became something of a vogue during the 1940s, starting with 1942’s Tales of Manhattan. That was followed by 1943’s occult-laden Flesh and Fantasy; 1945’s deliciously spooky Dead of Night; 1948’s Quartet, with its four Somerset Maugham stories; 1950’s Trio and 1951’s Encore (Maugham again); and 1952’s O. Henry’s Full House.

Occasional one-offs notwithstanding, portmanteau films didn’t become popular again until 1968’s The Illustrated Man — with its selection of Ray Bradbury tales — led to a series of horror entries: The House that Dripped Blood, Asylum and Tales from the Crypt, ad infinitum to this day.

High-tone entries included 1989’s New York Stories, with segments directed by Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Woody Allen; and 1995’s Four Rooms, with Roald Dahl short stories loosely adapted by directors Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino.

This brings us to Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, which gathers half a dozen short concepts they’ve had kicking around for the past quarter-century. The tales are linked by their setting in the American West, which rarely has looked more vicious; and by a clever framing device that “lifts” each yarn from the pages of a vintage hardcover book, complete with gorgeous color illustrations whose captions — in each case — give a dramatic clue to what we’re about to see.

As always is the case with portmanteau films, the contents vary from excellent to good to not such a much. But since we’re dealing with the Coen brothers, even the lesser entries are worth viewing for tone, acting, cheeky directing, and Bruno Delbonnel’s lush cinematography.

The segments also have a few things in common: a darkly comic, even macabre tone; unexpected bursts of gruesome violence; and — in most cases — an atmosphere of grim despair.

Suburbicon: It's a con, all right

Suburbicon (2017) • View trailer 
One star. Rated R, for violence, profanity and sexuality
By Derrick Bang

Bad movies prompt all manner of conversational snorts and giggles, while heading home and often well into the following day.

Gardner (Matt Damon) and his sister-in-law, Margaret (Julianne Moore), react in stunned
silence to the newest ludicrous indignity inflicted upon their family.

Really bad movies leave us in stunned silence, unable to process the why and how such a travesty could have survived the lengthy vetting process that must be endured by all major studio productions.

This is a really bad movie.

The Coen brothers have hit both extremes during a long and productive career, and of late they’ve been getting sloppier; A Serious Man, Hail, Caesar! and their misguided 2012 remake of Gambit are a far cry from Fargo and No Country for Old Men.

Suburbicon may be their worst stinker yet.

As a satire — and I admit, that’s speculation — this film’s message is too garbled, sloppy and tasteless. But it’s far too weird, random and exaggerated to be taken seriously, with almost every character an overblown burlesque. They may as well be wearing clown suits.

Co-scripters George Clooney (who also directs) and Grant Heslov appear to have been inspired by the post-WWII, postcard-perfect Levittown suburban communities: the sort of cheerful towns characterized in TV shows such as Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver. What’s often lost to history is the fact that Federal House Administration lenders restricted housing rental and sales agreements, in all Levittown developments, to (and I quote) “the Caucasian race.”

That issue came to boil in August 1957, when William and Daisy Myers moved their family into a section of Pennsylvania’s Levittown community, becoming the first African-Americans in the all-white enclave. The nasty results were captured by filmmakers Lee Bobker and Lester Becker in a documentary titled Crisis in Levittown, Pa., which remains jaw-dropping, cringe-worthy viewing (and is readily available online).

So: Part of Cooney’s film, set in the late 1950s in a Norman Rockwellian, Levittown-esque community, depicts — with impressive authenticity to actual events — what occurs during the first few weeks after an African-American family moves into a home that shares a back fence with the house belonging to Gardner Lodge (Matt Damon), his wife Rose (Julianne Moore) and their adolescent son Nicky (Noah Jupe).

The problem is that this concept has been married — by shotgun — to a shelved Coen brothers script called Suburbicon, populated by the usual Coen misanthropes and overwhelmed “regular folks” with poor judgment, and a proclivity for ill-advised decisions.

It’s not a good fit.

Hail, Caesar! — A block, a stone, a worse than senseless thing

Hail, Caesar! (2016) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated PG-13, and rather harshly, for mildly suggestive content
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 2.5.16

A new Coen brothers film usually is cause for celebration.

Not this time.

Capitol Pictures studio head Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) has just learned that his
water ballet star, DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson), is pregnant. She's also
unmarried: a potentially juicy scandal waiting to be scooped up by hovering
Hollywood gossip columnists.

Hail, Caesar! is a classic study of wretched excess: a labored, overcooked, star-heavy production that isn’t nearly as funny as everybody seems to think.

I’m reminded of Steven Spielberg’s 1941, also a bloated period comedy made at a point when the then-young director thought he could do no wrong. It, too, is an overwrought mess that mostly wastes the talents of a cast that was impressive for its time.

Spielberg’s 1941 attempted to mine humor from a WWII-era storyline that proposed a Japanese submarine invasion off the California coast. Hail, Caesar!, set in Hollywood during the “nifty fifties” — when, terrified by the arrival of television, the motion picture industry’s glorious façade was beginning to show visible cracks — attempts to mine humor from (among other things) a Communist submarine invasion off the California coast.

A moment which, it must be mentioned, climaxes the film’s most protracted and thoroughly inane subplot.

At its core, though, the Coen brothers’ script is a day-in-the-life study of Hollywood studio chief Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), who confronts various crises — large and small — during a typical 24 hours. His soundstages are laden with sets and stars for numerous films in various stages of production, and all are typical of the time period:

• A sophisticated drawing room melodrama, where disgruntled, mildly prissy director Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes) has just been saddled with corn-pone singing cowboy star Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich) as his new young protagonist;

• A sailors-at-sea musical, with song-and-dance superstar Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum) channeling Gene Kelly;

• A waterlogged, Busby Berkeley-style extravaganza, headlined by swimming sensation DeeAnna Moran (Scarlet Johansson); and, most particularly...

• A biblical epic featuring famed studio leading man Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), as a Roman centurion who undergoes a moral conversion after encountering no less than Jesus himself.

Inside Llewyn Davis: Sour notes

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) • View trailer 
Three stars. Rating: R, for profanity and sexual candor
By Derrick Bang 

To borrow shamelessly from a mordant holiday song, the only thing you’ll find inside Llewyn Davis is a heart that’s full of unwashed socks, and a soul that’s full of gunk. His brain is full of spiders; he’s as cuddly as a cactus and as charming as an eel.

He really is a heel.

Llewyn (Oscar Isaac, left) is undeniably talented, as he demonstrates when effortlessly
filling in for a session musician during the recording of a novelty tune in honor of
astronaut John Glenn. The song is penned by Llewyn's friend Jim (Justin
Timberlake, center), with a comic vocal assist from Al (Adam Driver)

None of which is the slightest bit amusing or entertaining, as was the case with the green-skinned Grinch. Llewyn Davis is simply a self-centered jerk: a struggling Greenwich Village folk singer attempting to make it in a business he neither understands nor admires, and who bitterly stomps on the feelings of anybody daft enough to extend a gesture of kindness.

We are, once again, spending nearly two hours in the presence of a thoroughly unlikable boor, and to no purpose. Llewyn doesn’t learn anything; neither does he mature or experience anything close to an epiphany. He has no spiritual side, and family ties are (ahem) mangled up in tangled-up knots.

He simply uses people without gratitude or a thought of compensation; the words “thanks” probably would choke him to death.

And yet all these personality failings aren’t the most irritating part of Inside Llewyn Davis. No, the biggest disappointment comes from the knowledge that this is a Joel and Ethan Coen film, and we wait in vain for any trace of the clever allegory, scathing character analysis or deliciously dark humor that has invigorated previous films such as Fargo and No Country for Old Men.

Solace comes there none. This new film is just a dreary slog.

The story follows Llewyn (Oscar Isaac) during what we can imagine is a typical few weeks in the winter of 1961/62, as he struggles to hustle up gigs while spending nights on the couches of the few people still willing to tolerate him. He’s a story-song purist: an angry young man determined to succeed on his own terms, and not yet aware that his brand of poetic, soul-baring angst is about to be buried beneath the hook-laden folk of Bob Dylan and the more melodic, listener-friendly music of (for example) Peter, Paul and Mary.

Not to mention the even more pernicious influence of bubble-gum pop songs.

As always is the case with a Coen brothers film, this one boasts a killer soundtrack. All the music is engaging and illuminating, not to mention a perfect depiction of the era. Isaac is persuasively credible behind a microphone, a guitar held in two capable hands; his music emerges from somewhere deep within, and for a brief moment we can imagine that he actually has something important to say.

True Grit: Larger than life

True Grit (2010) • View trailer for True Grit
Four stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for violence and dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.24.10


Despite Hollywood’s current love affair with remaking almost everything under the sun, certain classics remain sacrosanct.

In a precious few cases, neither film buffs nor the general public would tolerate any attempt to improve upon perfection. The Wizard of Oz and Singing in the Rain come to mind, and the list also includes Gone with the Wind, Citizen Kane and Casablanca. (The latter did, however, suffer a TV series remake in 1983, with – no, I’m not making this up – David Soul in the Humphrey Bogart role.)

Having demonstrated her own "true grit" by fording a stream without benefit of
the nearby ferry, Mattie (Hailee Steinfeld) proves that she's not about to be left
behind by LaBoeuf (Matt Damon, center) and Rooster (Jeff Bridges).

True Grit has been viewed the same way, not so much because the 1969 film is that good – actually, it isn’t, and hasn’t aged well at all – but because of John Wayne’s iconic portrayal of Reuben “Rooster” Cogburn, which finally brought the Hollywood legend an Academy Award. Eyebrows lifted then, and have remained raised ever since: Wayne was many things, but the phrase “great actor” never could be applied to his work. Still, it was a nice way to acknowledge an impressive career, and – for better or worse – True Grit became firmly identified with Wayne’s starring performance.

And Charles Portis’ great novel, consequently, went into limbo. (More’s the pity.)

Finally, happily, somebody has seen fit to take another stab at it. And whereas the 1969 film suffered from stunt casting and a family-friendly effort to “sanitize” the storyline, this new version boasts excellent performances, a sharp and much more faithful script, and an atmosphere that does justice to the novel’s whimsical tone.

The latter is crucial. Portis blended rugged Western drama with snarky, comic sensibilities; his book can be hilarious at one moment, deadly serious the next. Needless to say, Joel and Ethan Coen are absolutely perfect for this material, since they have the same macabre and vicious sense of humor. Recall every moment that Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh was on the screen in 2007’s No Country for Old Men: He was simultaneously ludicrous – those clothes, that hairstyle – and terrifying.

This new version of True Grit doesn’t include a villain of such evil magnitude, but the story’s various rustlers, layabouts and bandits behave with oddly dignified gentility, as if following some 19th century bad guy’s manual of refinement. At the same time, they can explode into unexpected violence: an apparent contradiction that imbues even the least significant characters with added weight.

A Serious Man: Seriously odd

A Serious Man  (2009) • View trailer for A Serious Man
Two stars (out of five). Rating: R, for profanity, drug use and fleeting nudity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.23.09
Buy DVD: A Serious Man• Buy Blu-Ray: A Serious Man [Blu-ray]


As a goy, I feel hopelessly ill-equipped to analyze this film.

A Serious Man would be served far better by a synagogue discussion group, and I've no doubt that'll happen a few times, during the next several months.

Mark this man's expression: It's how Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg)
responds to a building series of calamities, while receiving not the slightest bit
of sympathy or assistance from his nearest and dearest. Son Danny (Aaron
Wolff), for example, couldn't care less about his father's happiness; the kid only
wants dad to fix the TV, so he can watch F Troop.

Writer/directors Joel and Ethan Coen have uncorked a baby-boomer riff on the biblical plight of Job: an unrelenting assault on the dignity of a hopelessly overmatched schlimazel with no means of fighting back. And the story itself is as wincingly stiff a parody of the Jewish culture as we've seen in awhile, with a savage streak that probably wouldn't be tolerated if the Coens weren't themselves Jewish.

They claim, in the press notes, that this film is "reminiscent of their childhoods."

If so, they have my sympathy.

Films in the Coen brothers' oeuvre come in three flavors, in order of their palatability to the general public: reasonably straight-ahead dramas (Miller's Crossing, No Country for Old Men), serio-comic morality tales (Raising Arizona, Fargo) and purely demented character studies (Barton Fink, The Big Lebowski, The Man Who Wasn't There).

The latter category — lunatic descents down the rabbit hole, which not even Rod Serling's Twilight Zone could have embraced — best characterizes A Serious Man.

I'd call this film unwatchable, except that it's too oddly bizarre to be dismissed entirely.

I'd call it incomprehensible, except that its broad strokes do make sense. Sort of. After a fashion. The dozens of smaller issues don't lend themselves to easy answers, though.

Setting aside the Jewish tropes, the film's core message derives from the two mantras — the Schrodinger's Cat paradox, and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle — that are viewed, by our physicist protagonist, as evidence of God's hand: Nothing in life is reliable, so you may as well anticipate the worst at all times.

And the corollary: It's impossible to anticipate every worst, so quit trying.

Burn After Reading: Combustible!

Burn After Reading (2008) • View trailer for Burn After Reading
Four stars (out of five). Rating: R, for violence, sexual content and relentless profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.12.08
Buy DVD: Burn After Reading • Buy Blu-Ray: Burn After Reading [Blu-ray]

Brad Pitt's Chad Feldheimer is worth the price of admission.

In a wickedly hilarious film laden with clueless characters, his numbskull fitness center employee is to die for: an arrested adolescent and (no doubt) high school drop-out, with a trusting, ingenuous smile, a little-girl giggle and an absolute refusal to allow his lack of wisdom or intelligence to interfere with even the wildest notion that might pop into his head.

Believing they have something of interest to the Russian Embassy, Chad
Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) and Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) dress nicely for
their first meeting with an obviously suspicious intermediary, who can't figure
out whether to take his two guests seriously, or dismiss them as lunatics. The
Russians aren't alone; as this story progresses, nobody knows quite what to
make of the opportunistic meatheads who populate this gleeful farce.

Chad's view of the world obviously is based solely on a youthful diet of movies and TV shows, and his beatific ignorance is a work of thespic art.

Watching this guy "help" fitness center patrons will make even the hardiest soul wince, because it's blindingly obvious that Chad's "expert advice" to unwary exercisers is anything but, and that his efforts to assist a customer while stretching and straining are likely to do actual physical harm.

Pitt is but one of the many delights in Burn After Reading, a welcome return to the exaggerated dark farce that the Coen brothers delivered so well in Fargo.

Burn After Reading doesn't have the core "straight" characters who also made Fargo so engaging; the primary players here are broadly drawn burlesques, with a few well-meaning innocent bystanders thrown in for contrast. The resulting film belongs in the company of Wag the Dog and Dr. Strangelove: pictures that mercilessly skewer the American political and intelligence networks with such gleeful panache that we're gulled into dismissing them as cynical larks ... while secretly hoping that things really aren't that bad.

The chaos begins on an average day at CIA headquarters in Arlington, Va., as mid-level analyst Osborne "Ozzie" Cox (John Malkovich) is ambushed by a demotion. Not one to take such news lightly, he resigns in a fit of profanity-laden pique and returns home to begin what he hopes will be some seriously scandalous memoirs.

Truth be told, his security clearance never was high enough for the CIA to be concerned about such stuff and nonsense, but hey, Ozzie's also not the sharpest pencil in the box. Merely the one with the nastiest temper.

Ozzie's sudden unemployment comes as an unpleasant surprise to his wife, Katie (Tilda Swinton), a pediatrician — and picturing this woman interacting with small children is another scary thought, once we get to know her — well into an affair with Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney), a mildly paranoid U.S. federal marshal married to a popular children's book author.

Harry also is a serial philanderer who gets nervous when Katie seizes on Ozzie's meltdown as the excuse to finally proceed with her long-planned divorce.