Don’t waste your time on this article (sibling comments are correct in their criticism). Instead read the Slate piece that it links to:

https://slate.com/culture/2018/11/ballad-buster-scruggs-coen...

Such a click-bate article. What sort of a lazy half ass article is this? Proclaiming halfway through a piece about the source material that you didn’t read the source material because you consider that action “undergrad-lit-class-y” not in anyway leveling with your readers or being refreshingly honest which I expect the author assumes. It’s just downright lazy and would in an actual undergrad lit class just get you flunked out right.

I stopped reading at that point. If you are going to write some selfindulgent price about what’s you assume the source material might have been, have the common decency to post that up front so people can avoid wasting their time on your prose.

The author of this piece doesn’t know the answer, having apparently decided that skipping reading the source material somehow makes for a truer article. Shame.

this article’s reputability is immediately damaged by the statement that intolerable cruelty is a bad film. just because it is a romantic comedy, a romcom, people immediately dismiss its brilliance. intolerable cruelty is hilarious and very much in the center of what the coen brothers do best. there is some fantastic dialogue and the on screen compatibility between the actors is fantastic.

“freddie...it’s a negotiation.”

reading further, i don’t think this person knows anything about the coens. o brother, where art thou is not really an adaptation of as much as it is inspired by homer. no country for old men is almost a direct copy of cormac mccarthy’s book. irreverent is a strange way to describe that film’s handling of the book’s story. and in talking about “true adaptations”, the author fails to mention true grit, which is even more of a direct translation to film of its source material.

A tangential thought:

Most films I watch are entertaining. I have a good time and then it's over and maybe I'll think about the movie again when there's an Internet meme from it.

But there's films (and some games), Ballad included, where regardless of how much I (dis)liked them critically, they kind of stick with me. They randomly creep into my brain for days, weeks, months later. I've come to crave this kind of experience.

I wonder what this is. If it has a name. If others experience the same thing with the same films or if it's very audience-specific.

I can't take this person seriously. They are conflating a historical piece with something that endorses its mild at worst content.

Apparently trying to tell a story within the context of it's time is "misogynistic" and "racist." I fail to see how either could be the case here. Did the coens somehow fail because they had an intentionally weak female character who is being attacked by native Americans? Did no similar events ever occur in history?

The native Americans have a clear motive for attacking the wagon train as during the period of the film the American army was committing genocide against them.

Additionally, the travelers have reason to feel negatively about them as they are literally trying to murder them.

Is every movie now supposed to have strong, wooden characters who faces no challenges nor tragedies? Is that realistic? Additionally, is a film set in a time period inherently offensive because we disagree with the values of that period?

Can we not tell stories anymore?

When the article says:-

  adapted from a Stewart Edward White story [...]
  This one is a dreadfully misogynistic short story, full
  of equally dreadful stereotypes about indigenous people

That's actually the article's author criticising of the original story which was published in 1901, rather than the film adaption

In other words, the article author is saying "The directors could have hewed more closely to the source material, but I can see why they made the decision they made"

I don’t think she’s criticising the movie, but rather the short story on which that segment is based.

It’s a question of perspective and what exactly you show and write about.

In the “Ballad” Native Americans really are just dangerous and savage boogeyman, a mere threat like a tiger in the jungle. We do not at all get to see their side and motivations. There is no attempt made to create empathy.

I think sometimes that approach is totally fine! A film like “Dunkirk” really doesn’t have to show me the inner life and motivations of the Nazis. They can be the ominous boogeyman beyond the horizon, never clearly shown but always present as a clear threat. There is no need to create empathy, because prejudice against Nazis and those who idolize them is not really a problem at all.

With Native Americans, however, such depictions were (and are?) the norm and that’s really totally unreasonable and not at all understandable. That’s the problem here.

I hope this illustratest sufficiently well that perspective and what exactly you show is important. I make no claim that this is easy to figure out, but you do make it yourself a little to easy, expecially when you invoke things outside the text. I don’t think you can really do this, not to the extent you just did that.

Maybe if we see someone in a film who is clearly identifiable as Jewish in a film killing an SS officer without any further context there is enough foreknowledge there among everyone that you really wouldn’t have to provide any further context within the text to make the motive clear.

With Native Americans I do not at all feel as though we are at that point.