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The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs [trailer]

An anthology film comprised of six stories, each dealing with a different aspect of life in the Old West.

Not unusual for a compilation like this, the result is a bit of a mixed bag.

Pretty much all of them feature many typically funny Coen characters, some great dialogue and beautifully photographed scenery.

I liked the first one best. While violent, it was fast and very, very funny. Despite starring James Franco I also enjoyed the absurdity of the second one a lot.

'Meal Ticket', in addition to being truly cold-hearted, went on for too long. 'All Gold Canyon' was short and satisfying.

The ending of the one starring Zoe Kazan was unexpected. Great conversation in the coach in the final one.

Overall it gets a little repetitive. After a while you start guessing, what is the worst that could happen. Maybe consuming it in small(er) doses - like a TV series as it originally was planned to be - would be a better choice.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

(Joel & Ethan Coen, 2018)

Returning two years on from the fairly underwhelming, and pretty quickly forgotten Hail Caesar, the Coen brothers return with a project whose format has been much talked about. Was it intended to originally be a 6 episode miniseries, or was it always going to be a movie? It doesn’t really matter either way, but having seen it I feel like some of these 6 segments might have been a chore in isolation, and work infinitely better as shorter parts of this larger whole.

Buster Scruggs, unlike their very traditional previous western, True Grit, runs the gamut of Coens styles from the sheer absurdity of stuff like Raising Arizona, and Burn After Reading, to the darker, doom laden, dread and melancholy of No Country For Old Men or Blood Simple, the traditionalist, throwback class of the aforementioned True Grit, or Hudsucker Proxy, or the existential nightmares they conjured up in things like A Serious Man and Inside Llewyn Davis, it’s all here, and unified the Coens have conjured up as fine a deconstruction of the western genre since Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven over a quarter of a century ago.

To work through each section briefly, the titular Ballad of Buster Scruggs allows Tim Blake Nelson to cut loose in his own inimitable, and unforgettable way. It’s one of those pitch perfect marriages of actor and part that should earn damn near iconic status if enough people see it. The story he finds himself in the middle of (shout outs to Clancy Brown and David Krumholtz for playing their parts, however small) starts out outrageously amusing, and grows more and more absurd to the point of almost total idiocy. It’s blackly comic in the most black way, but so over the top it might prove off putting to many. Thankfully they have the good sense to keep it short enough that it never seriously outstays its welcome.

It’s followed by Near Algodones, another black comic work of absurdist madness, though slightly less outrageous than what comes before it (at least once Stephen Root finishes damn near stealing the whole movie), a little gentler in its tone, it’s ultimately no less bleak in its outlook, no less concerned with violence and death, it gives a nice little role to Ralph Ineson, and provides James Franco an opportunity to be as down to earth and natural as he may ever have been on screen.

These first two segments are probably the two that most define what I was talking about when I said that some of these episodes may have been a little much to stomach in isolation, so crazy are they both. Yet with the end of Near Algodones the movie entirely turns itself on its head.

In Meal Ticket, Liam Neeson, and Harry Potter’s now unrecognizable Harry Melling inject absurd amounts of melancholy into the most abstract segment in the movie. Told primarily through a sequence of very short scenes, with minimal use of much dialogue beyond the relatively incidental, the brothers and their two mournful performers craft a story less specific to the old west, more timeless and universal. It’s a mood piece of sorts, built around visuals and actions, asking the viewer to piece together the fragments they see, and infer meaning, and work their own way towards the conclusion, every bit as bleak as the finales of the stories that came before it.

After this comes the closest the movie can provide to respite. The Tom Waits led All Gold Canyon perhaps tonally could have come before Meal Ticket in the movies descent from dream into nightmare, but placed here breaks up the darkness of the movies second half a little bit. It’s another segment reliant more on action, with most of the dialogue proving on the incidental side. At the heart of it Waits is magnificent, it’s always nice to see him back on screen, and aided by the gorgeous photography of Bruno Delbonnel, now in his third collaboration with the brothers, this is maybe the most purely watchable chapter of the film.

It’s followed by another more traditional piece of work, in The Girl Who Got Rattled, with Zoe Kazan leading the way, aided by a terrific couple of performances from Bill Heck, and Grainger Hines. It’s the longest segment of the movie, along with the previous the most straightforward one, and the one with the closest thing to a proper arc, the one that feels the most like it could (again, probably in conjunction with All Gold Canyon) stand as a story in its own right. Heck and Kazan are a winning duo, and just when it starts to threaten to drag compared to what has come before, Hines steps up and elevates the final act at the centre of a sequence that needs someone special to make it work.

Finally comes the comparative chamber piece, The Mortal Remains. Shooting it in a studio where the rest was shot on locations may have been a practical choice rather than a creative one, but it adds to the movies meta qualities significantly, gone are the wide open plains, and in its place something that feels like a cross between the opening act of The Hateful Eight (the amount of talking in this segment would drive QT wild) and something out of Coppola’s Dracula. The oddballs in the carriage, the darkness and fog that surrounds them, the whole thing is unsettlingly off kilter, its another No Country For Old Men trick where the brothers sort of bring their film screeching to a halt at the last to force you to think a little bit more.about what you’re seeing. The quintet of performers, the great Tyne Daly and Brendan Gleeson, Jonjo O’Neill who finds himself gifted with the monologue of a lifetime, (speaking of Unforgiven) Saul Rubinek, and veteran Chelcie Ross, who is another of the movies show stealers, all bounce brilliantly off one another, off set each other, and keep this nightmare grounded to some degree in reality, a long way from the pure artifice in which The Ballad of Buster Scruggs began a couple of hours prior.

For all of its comic absurdity, and the storybook gimmick that strings the whole thing together, Buster Scruggs is a movie in which in spite of dabbling in generally pretty accessible, crowd pleasing or skin crawling storytelling, the Coens are able simply through structure, and their unmatched handle of tone to probe deeper into what they really want to explore. From the varying explorations of violence and preoccupation with death in all its complexities, to the use of songs, and mixture of tones, the Coen brothers latest effort is filled to the brim with all kinds of details that should reward repeated viewings. It’s a magic trick of a movie only the best can pull off, basically very light on its feet as a viewing experience, but enriched by a staggering amount of depth to be explored, and open up your understanding of what they’re going for just as they shrink their world, and box you in.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

(Joel & Ethan Coen, 2018)

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