O (Tim Blake Nelson, 2001)

Mekhi Phifer and Josh Hartnett in O

Cast: Mekhi Phifer, Josh Hartnett, Julia Stiles, Martin Sheen, Andrew Keegan, Rain Phoenix, Elden Henson, John Heard. Screenplay: Brad Kaaya, based on a play by William Shakespeare. Cinematography: Russell Lee Fine. Production design: Dina Goldman. Film editing: Kate Sanford. Music: Jeff Danna. 

Tim Blake Nelson's O begins with Desdemona's prayer from Verdi's Otello on the soundtrack, which seems to me like a misstep, reminding anyone who knows either Shakespeare's play or Verdi's operatic adaptation of it that they won't be hearing either the former's verse or the latter's music. That probably doesn't matter to anyone unfamiliar with those masterworks, which includes much of the teenage audience for which the movie seems designed, but it puts a heavy burden on it for those who do know them. Brad Kaaya is quite deft at sticking to the plot and characters of the play, however, and many of the actors are up to its demands. As Hugo, the movie's Iago, Josh Hartnett is a plausible schemer, and Kaaya probably didn't need to supplement the "motiveless malignancy" of the original character with a suggestion of 'roid rage, showing Hugo shooting up a performance enhancer. Julia Stiles's Desi is spunkier than the play's Desdemona, which presents a problem only at the end, when her character doesn't fight back as much as she might be expected to. But the casting to Mekhi Phifer as Odin (a curiously Nordic name) is the major mistake: He doesn't evoke the charisma and power that Othello needs, both in wooing Desi and becoming the tragic subject of Hugo's. Phifer is also a good deal shorter than Hartnett, which unbalances their confrontation. Still, if you're going to rip off Shakespeare, O does a better job of it than might be expected.  

The Grey Zone (Tim Blake Nelson, 2001)

Allan Corduner and Kamelia Grigorova in The Grey Zone

Cast: David Arquette, Michael Stuhlbarg, Daniel Benzali, Allan Corduner, Steve Buscemi, Harvey Keitel, Kamelia Grigorova, Mira Sorvino, Natasha Lyonne, Jessica Hecht, Brian F. O'Byrne. Screenplay: Tim Blake Nelson, based on his play and a book by Miklos Nyiszli. Cinematography: Russell Lee Fine. Production design: Maria Djukovic. Film editing: Michelle Botticelli, Tim Blake Nelson. 

In basing his film (originally a play) on the memoirs of Miklos Nyiszli, a Jewish physician who aided Josef Mengele in his hideous experiments at Auschwitz, Tim Blake Nelson makes one grave mistake. Instead of making Nyiszli the focus of the film, he chooses to scatter the narrative among others imprisoned at the death camp. One of the strengths of Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993) was its use of Oskar Schindler as a pivotal figure, and Son of Saul (László Nemes, 2015), a much better film about the Sonderkommandos, the Jews who did the dirty work for the Nazis at the camps, is centered on the dilemma of one man. The Grey Zone remains a harrowing film, but it's easy to get lost as it shifts from the discovery of a girl found alive in one of the gas chambers to the plotting that results in the destruction of one of the crematoria. 

  

Eye of God (Tim Blake Nelson, 1997)

Nick Stahl in Eye of God

Cast: Martha Plimpton, Kevin Anderson, Nick Stahl, Richard Jenkins, Margo Martindale, Mary Kay Place, Hal Holbrook. Screenplay: Tim Blake Nelson. Cinematography: Russell Lee Fine. Production design: Patrick Geary. Film editing: Kate Sanford. Music: David Van Tieghem. 

A solid drama about a crime in a small Oklahoma town, Tim Blake Nelson's debut as a feature film director, Eye of God, is among other things a piercing look into Bible Belt religiosity. Martha Plimpton plays Ainsley, a waitress in the barely there town of Kingfisher, who has struck up a correspondence with a man in the state prison, Jack Stillings (Kevin Anderson). When he's released he heads for Kingfisher, where he's soon married to Ainsley. While in prison, he got religion, and is bent on making her go to church with him. She doesn't care for it, and before long his insistence on having his way drives them apart: When she gets pregnant he insists that she not leave the house. Then she befriends 14-year-old Tom Spencer (Nick Stahl), a shy loner, and their lives intersect in calamitous fashion. But in the film this narrative line is fragmented into flashbacks from the moment police find Tom, covered in blood, wandering alone on a road at night. The nature of the crime and the identity of the victim are cleverly withheld until all the pieces of the story are assembled. But the real strength of the film lies in the performances, not only of Plimpton, Anderson, and Stahl, but of such estimable character actors as Richard Jenkins, Margo Martindale, and Hal Holbrook, playing people who have their own problems that color their responses to the crime. 

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 2018)

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Tim Blake Nelson in the title segment of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Buster Scruggs: Tim Blake Nelson
The Kid: Willie Watson
Curly Joe: Clancy Brown
Curly Joe's Brother: Danny McCarthy
Frenchman: David Krumholtz

Near Algodones

James Franco in the "Near Algodones" segment of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Cowboy: James Franco
Teller: Stephen Root
Posse Leader: Ralph Ineson
Drover: Jesse Luken

Meal Ticket

Liam Neeson in the "Meal Ticket" segment of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Impresario: Liam Neeson 

Artist: Harry Melling 

Bawd: Jiji Hise 

Chicken Impresario: Paul Rae

All Gold Canyon

Tom Waits in the "All Gold Canyon" segment of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Prospector: Tom Waits
Young Man: Sam Dillon


The Gal Who Got Rattled

Grainger Hines in "The Gal Who Got Rattled" segment of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Billy Knapp: Bill Heck
Alice Longabaugh: Zoe Kazan
Mr. Arthur: Grainger Hines
Gilbert Longabaugh: Jefferson Mays


The Mortal Remains

Jonjo O'Neill and Brendan Gleeson in "The Mortal Remains" segment of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Englishman: Jonjo O'Neill
Irishman: Brendan Gleeson
Frenchman: Saul Rubinek
Lady: Tyne Daly
Trapper: Chelcie Ross

Director: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Screenplay: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
"All Gold Canyon" segment based on a story by Jack London, "The Gal Who Got Rattled" segment based on a story by Stewart Edward White
Cinematography: Bruno Delbonnel
Production design: Jess Gonchor
Film editing: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Music: Carter Burwell

Are the Coen brothers the most "American" of filmmakers? That thought occurred to me once before in commenting on No Country for Old Men (2007) and the way it and others among their major movies seemed to form "an American collage." And the six short films collected into The Ballad of Buster Scruggs only reinforce the idea: Not only are the six set in the central period of the American myth, the Old West, but they also evoke major American writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, and William Faulkner, as well as the two chroniclers of the vanishing American wilderness cited as sources for the segments "All Gold Canyon" and "The Gal Who Got Rattled," Jack London and Stewart Edward White. It's a very "literary" film whose characters often don't just talk, they orate, in florid 19th-century diction. And it's a film based in that very American folk genre, the tall tale. Those who task the Coens with cynicism and coldness will find ammunition in all of these short films for their argument: Every good deed or noble intention in these stories gets thwarted or maimed. There's probably no crueler story on film than the "Meal Ticket" segment. And yet, we treasure Poe and Twain and Faulkner for their frequent heartlessness, praising their ironic vision. Is it that we expect more warmth from our movies than from our literature? As a genre, the anthology film has gone out of favor, largely because so many of them are uneven in quality, and while it's easy to rank the segments of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs -- I would put "The Gal Who Got Rattled" at the top and "Near Algodones" at the bottom -- the Coens have a unifying vision that makes each segment play off of the others, the way short stories in an anthology by Alice Munro or George Saunders set up reverberations among themselves.

The Sound and the Fury (James Franco, 2014)

James Franco gets mocked for overreaching -- writing fiction, directing avant-garde films and multimedia art, taking graduate level courses at a variety of universities simultaneously -- and for what many see as an eccentric persona. So I don't want to come off as a mocker in my criticism of his film version of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. It's a failure for a variety of reasons, not least the extreme difficulty of translating into visual terms a novel that succeeds in the way its author uses language to convey the inner states of his characters. Franco makes the serious mistake of casting himself as the most interior and inarticulate of Faulkner's characters, the mentally handicapped Benjy Compson. Distractingly outfitted with oversize front teeth, Franco struggles to portray Benjy's torment at the loss of his beloved sister Caddy (Ahna O'Reilly), amid the declining fortunes of the Compson family. He can't dim the intelligence in his own eyes enough to suggest the blind struggle of memory and desire and frustration within the character. The screenplay by Matt Rager, who has also adapted Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (2013) and John Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle (2016) for Franco to direct, does a fairly good job of sticking to the narrative line of the novel: Benjy's loss, the suicide of his older brother Quentin (Jacob Loeb), the marriage that Caddy enters into because she is impregnated by Dalton Ames (Logan Marshall-Green), Caddy's sending her daughter, also named Quentin (Joey King), to live with the Compsons, and the rage of the youngest brother, Jason (Scott Haze), when the teenage Quentin runs away from home with the money he has hoarded after stealing it from the funds Caddy has sent for Quentin's support. Rager also draws heavily on the sententious speeches of the Compson children's ineffectual alcoholic father (Tim Blake Nelson), taken directly from the novel. The screenplay skimps on the key role played in the novel by the black servants, particularly that of Dilsey (Loretta Devine). Most of the performances are quite good, with the exception of Janet Jones Gretzky as the mother; she looks far too healthy, and never strikes the note of decayed gentility that the role demands. There are also some unnecessarily distracting cameos by Seth Rogen as a telegraph clerk and Danny McBride as the sheriff, bit parts that didn't need to be cast so prominently. As a whole, the film feels like the work of an amateur filmmaker with exceptional film industry connections, and that, I guess, is the very definition of overreaching.

O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 2000)

On the scale for goofy Coen brothers films, O Brother, Where Art Thou? falls somewhere between Raising Arizona (1987) and The Big Lebowski (1998) from goofiest to least goofy. It is, I think, more over-the-top than is absolutely necessary, especially in the idiot hick accents adopted by John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson in their roles. Or maybe they just seem that way because of the differently over-the-top performance of George Clooney as Ulysses Everett McGill, a man who thinks he talks more intelligently than he does. Still, I like Clooney in this mode, more than I do when he's playing a serious character, and it's to the Coens' credit that they cast him in the role: His performance gives an odd kind of off-balance stability to that of the other two. The chief glory of the movie, however, is its music, chosen by T Bone Burnett, superbly evoking a time and place. As for that time and place, Depression-era Mississippi, the movie pretty much ignores reality in favor of goofing around. It was the era of Bilbo and Vardaman, politicians of deeply cynical evil, and the rival candidates played by Charles Durning and Wayne Duvall don't even approach their horror, even when lampooning it. I laughed when the Ku Klux Klan performed what looked like a marching band half-time routine with a chant that evokes the parading monkey guards in The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), but maybe it's the outcome of the recent presidential election that made me feel a little nauseated at even the notion of a comical Klan. A kind of irresponsibility mars the Coens' approach to the material, brilliantly funny as it often is. That said, the pacing of the movie is lively, and it's filled with ever-watchable performers like Durning, Holly Hunter, and John Goodman at their best. And there's always that music: If I'm inclined to forgive the Coens for their irresponsibility, it's because they introduced a lot of people who went out and bought the soundtrack album to some great music.