But in the Coen’s capacious vocabulary, the words “happily ever after” rarely occur in the right order. The longest,and most tonally varied segment (both cruel and tender) is The Gal Who Got Rattled, starring Zoe Kazan as a young woman whose brother has died, leaving her to continue alone and penniless on a wagon train trek to Oregon.īleak prospects give way to potential hope when one of the bashful wagon train leaders ( Bill Heck) makes a marriage proposal. The simple presence of Waits, grumbling and rooting, and the idyllic valley, serves as a pleasant middle interlude, and wraps with a couple of predictable, though satisfying, twists. Most of the speech is in the prospector’s monologues and his singing of his favourite song ( Mother Machree, an Irish-American showtune not written until 1910). The high point is All Gold Canyon, the story of a prospector (musician, Tom Waits, channeling Walter Huston) ripping holes into the pristine mountain valley to find a motherlode of gold. There are lots of literary echoes here (especially of Franz Kafka’s A Hunger Artist) but the bite of the piece comes from the silent moments in the performances as both Melling and Neeson convey terrible things with their stricken stares. Harrison has no arms and legs and is strapped to a chair, where he recites passages from Shelley, the Bible, Shakespeare and Lincoln to increasingly smaller crowds. Then the impresario sees a chance to buy a clever performing chicken. Much more resonant, and crueler, is the story Meal Ticket, starring Liam Neeson as an Irish drunk and impresario of a theatrical travelling show, who serves as the caregiver and manager of a young English actor known as Harrison, The Wingless Thrush ( Harry Melling, Dudley Dursley from the Harry Potter films). Near Algodones features James Franco as a cowboy bank robber who finds himself, repeatedly, at the business end of a noose. The tone grows slightly darker, though no more weighty, in the second story. (I try to resist blaming the Coens for their young male fans, who guffaw way too hard at every symmetrical bullet wound and blood geyser). This is mostly a mixture of moderately clever whimsy and juvenile slapstick. Nelson’s character is a man of several pseudonyms (including The San Saba Songbird and The Misanthrope). And the episode sees him engaging in some over-the-top gun fights while doing a lot of direct-to-camera mugging. And if you want to extract a philosophy out of that, good luck to you. These are markers of artifice, a reminder that the Coens aren’t interested in history They’re about the cornball world of horse opera movies and pulp fiction fatalism.
You might notice the guitar he carries bears the logo of Recording King, a popular mail-order instrument from the 1930s (recently revived as a vintage replica). As he rides into a small-town, he’s playing his guitar and singing The Sons of the Pioneers’ 1940s song, " Cool Water". The opening title story features a white-clad singing-gunslinger ( Tim Blake Nelson) who’s a sort of sociopathic version of Gene Autry or Roy Rogers, combining singing and gun-slinging.
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