The Coens sing a weird ballad

Six short films make for a mixed bag in the Ballad of Buster Scruggs

The Coen brothers (Joel and Ethan) tackle the West in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, a six-part anthology of short films in which breathtaking visual acuity couples with a morbid sense of humor and western mythology gives way to chilly existential horror. The six films -- united because they're presented as part of a book in which they're bound -- suggest crossbreeding between lurid western pulp and tales told around a campfire.

Not all of the episodes are successful and, sorry to say, stretches of the movie are duller than you might expect from the Coens. But this is a Coen brothers film and, as such, demands some attention from those who've been following the Coens since the days of Blood Simple, some 24 years ago.

In the first episode, Tim Blake Nelson plays the title character, a singing cowboy with an aggressively cheerful manner. Nelson's Buster Scruggs is also a killer who guns people down between songs. One of the movie's best episodes, this one also serves as an announcement that the Coens are hell-bent on replacing the Wild, Wild West with the Weird, Weird West.

Other chapters in the Ceon's rueful book include a story about hanging starring James Franco and a bizarre riff on wagon-train movies that focuses on a woman (Zoe Kazan) traveling west to start a new life but meeting with a sorry fate.

Then there's Meal Ticket, the story of a traveling showman (Liam Neeson) who goes from town to town with a legless, armless man called Hamilton, the Wingless Thrush (Harry Melling). Neeson's character sets Hamilton on the stage where he recites Shelley, Shakespeare and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address to increasingly sparse audiences. Hamilton's career soon will be undermined by an unlikely new entertainer.

Tom Waits portrays a lone prospector who strikes gold but must fend off trouble.

The final chapter of this blood-stained book takes place on a stagecoach where Saul Rubinek (as a Frenchman), Tyne Daly (as a rigidly upright woman), Chelcie Ross (as the always-necessary bearded old trapper), and Brendan Gleeson (as a passenger who sings a sad song) take their weird ride toward ... well ... you'll have to see the movie to discover where they all wind up.

The Coens have fun with the movie's language, which is florid and overdone, the formal-sounding speech of characters aspiring to -- but not always attaining -- eloquence.

For all the Coens wit and wiliness, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs sometimes feels caught in the pages of the book that serves as its framing device, a dusty volume that may be a sorrowful lament for a world that has been mortally wounded and has nothing left to do but stagger toward the grave.

Creative as The Ballad of Buster Scruggs can be, I'm looking forward to seeing the Coens turn the page.

Older woman, younger man

Credit Sally Field with keeping Hello, My Name is Doris on track.

Sally Field's new comedy Hello, My Name is Doris begins with a funeral. Field's Doris Miller has just lost her mother. For most of her adult life, Doris cared for her mother in the Staten Island home the two women shared.

Now in her 60s and newly liberated from familial duties, Doris is ready (sort of) to resume her life. It's hardly surprising then, that Doris attempts to pick up where she left off.

Reverting to a long-ago moment in her squandered youth, Doris falls for John (Max Greenfield), a young art director who works in the office where she toils away at the fine art of data entry.

A hoarder and idiosyncratic dresser, Doris connives to become part of John's life. It doesn't take much imagination to know that Doris will read more into this relationship than John. He sees her as a good-hearted and adventurous older woman with a taste for '50s fashion.

John can't believe Doris actually likes his favorite band. In reality, she doesn't. Doris learned about John's musical tastes by faking a youthful identity and becoming one of his Facebook friends. It's not easy for Doris to accept the fact that she's aged out of a young person's dating game.

It would be misleading to tag Hello, My Name is Doris as a comic masterpiece. Director Michael Showalter (The Baxter) sometimes allows the movie's contrivances to show. Moreover, the movie can't always encompass its broad range of tones -- from the overtly comic to the heavily emotional.

But Field holds the movie together through its various turns with Tyne Daly offering able support as one of Doris's long-standing friends and the movie's intermittently expressed voice of common sense.

Greenfield supplies the requisite charm in what has become increasingly rare, a big-screen portrayal of a truly decent guy.

In another plot current, Doris battles her brother (Stephen Root) and his wife (Wendi McLendon-Convey). They want Doris to declutter and move. They also want their share of the proceeds from the home's sale.

To that end, they've introduced Doris to a therapist (Elizabeth Reaser) who's supposed to help with the overwhelming task of deaccession.

But even here, Showalter resists the temptation to over-sharpen conflict. He seems to understand that the movie's beating heart belongs to Field. She's playing a woman who, through the course of the story, learns that her quirky ways needn't lock her in isolation but can be viewed as the defining characteristics of an irrepressible individuality.

It may not be perfect, but by the time it ends, you may be a little sorry to say goodbye to Hello, My Name is Doris.