The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) Review!!!

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

My Take – There is no debating of the fact that directors Joel Coen and Ethan Coen who are usually referred together as the Coen brothers, are among the most popular filmmakers who have been actively working for the past three decades. With exceptional films ranging from black comedies like The Big Lebowski to Fargo, and westerns like No Country for Old Men to True Grit, the brothers have divulged into uncommon themes for a long time, all the while being both funny and serious depending on the story line.

However their latest venture, their first collaboration with streaming giant Netflix, may be the most unique film yet, as it collapses the gaps between the two genres and amalgamates into one singular theme. While you could call this film the conclusion of the Coens’ Western trilogy, except it isn’t much like those two films stylistically. It’s a trope-heavy sextet six short films strung together, with nothing obviously connecting them besides a kind of dream logic.

Thematically, though, they’re connected by a sense of how absurd death can be, how unfair and irreverent and sometimes even funny it is. Each short showcases a distinctly different type of Western as well as a different overall sensibility. Some are sweet, some are bleak, another is a musical, though each chapter is a jewel, you may find that one speaks to you more than the others.

The brothers reportedly began writing these stories about 25 years ago, and despite their the initial rumors that they would release on Netflix as a limited series, the Coens always wanted it to be a film, probably a reason why at times the film does feel a little long. However, what unifies the stories is the setting – the Wild West – and a kind of existential ballad that tells a story of a very particular kind: a murder ballad.

It’s not the tale of a single murder — more of a pile of them — but as its pieces accrue meaning, the culprits emerge: chance, human cruelty, and the unfeeling universe. In other words, it’s a Coen brother’s film that is beautifully wrought, excellently acted, and stunningly filmed.

The short films are bound together by a single framing device: They’re chapters in a book of Western folk tales being read by an unidentified person, whose hand we see turning the page between stories. Other than that, though, the six parts share no characters or plot lines. They’re wholly distinct stories that can be watched in any order. The first story follows Buster Scruggs (Tim Blake Nelson), an outlaw nicknamed ‘The Misanthrope; who sings and yee-haws his way through a Western town, leaving laughter, singing, and carnage in his wake. The second story titled ‘Near Aldgones’ follows a cowboy (James Franco), a cowboy who attempts to rob a deserted bank with only a teller (Stephen Root) in charge, who turns out to be handier than he could have imagined.

The third story titled ‘Meal Ticket’ follows a grizzled Impresario (Liam Neeson), who travels the country with a legless and arm less orator (Harry Melling) on his mobile stage every night, getting bewildered when particular chicken begins to take their audience. The fourth story titled ‘All Gold Canyons’ follows a solitary prospector (Tom Waits) who ends discovering gold near the banks of a river. The fifth story titled ‘The Gal Who Got Rattled’ follows Alice Longabaugh (Zoe Kazan), a down on luck loner who finds herself getting attracted to Billy Knapp (Bill Heck), one of the Oregon Trail wagon train’s leaders, despite the obvious disapproval of the other leader, Mr. Arthur (Grainger Hines).

The sixth story titled ‘The Mortal Remains’ follows a group of strangers (Tyne Daly, Brendan Gleeson, Saul Rubinek, Chelcie Ross, and Jonjo O’Neill) who while inside a stagecoach find themselves thrown together in a small-talk conversation about their past lives and shared destination that turns unexpectedly heated.

Thematically they all tell the huge story of the Wild West – the dark & crazy, sometimes sad side of it, Because make no mistake, this is a really brutal film. The Coen brothers have used the Western genre as the basis for some of their finest films, the bleak, broad landscape, in which beauty is often punctuated by intense brutality, is a good fit for their cockeyed storytelling sensibility that so often mixes comedy and despair. Within the conventions of the Western and, sometimes, by subverting them they’ve been able to tell some of their most resonant tales.

Each story has the feeling of a yarn that was based in some reality but has grown and shifted and become more acutely caricatured as people retold it. And every caricature from stories of the old West is here: the cowboys, the pioneers, the meek little lady and the tall handsome stranger, the band of inscrutably yodeling “savages.” Although his name’s in the title, Buster Scruggs isn’t in much of his film. He appears only in the first segment, which turns out to be the broadest, the glibbest, and the most savagely funny. Introduced on horseback, strumming a guitar and crooning a song to the canyons, Buster looks the part of the quintessential singing cowboy, the wholesome kind Hail Caesar’s Hobie Doyle made his fictional Tinsel town career playing.

But beneath the nonthreatening facade, the clean white duds and dandyish manner, flows the cold blood of a merciless desperado. While the first story is very big on comedic relief, the later chapters get really dark, especially the third having a heartbreaking and strangely poetic ending. A whole film in this gory-goofball mode would be exhausting, and probably unsustainable. So the film constantly switches up the tone along with the sub-genre. In another darkly comic vignette, James Franco plays a bank robber who gets in way over his head—an episode that builds to the film’s best punchline, an inspired bit of actual gallows humor.

Reviewers have largely dismissed the second installment as the weakest, but I adored it. Like so much of this film, it’s structured like a classic joke. The saga seems to start off in one direction, only to meander at an unhurried-yet-calculated pace, then culminate abruptly in the perfect, completely unexpected punch line. Things get darker, figuratively and literally, in ‘Meal Ticket’, as the Coens play shrewdly on the audience’s relationship to Neeson’s signature nobility, right up to an ending that belatedly reveals where his priorities truly lie.

The fifth story was probably the most cinematic story, since it told a beautiful little tale that could’ve been easily explored in a regular film, where we see a cutoff traveler finds potential romance with the rugged guide of a covered-wagon expedition. Given some extra room to breathe, the Coen brothers hang mysteries and open questions on the sparse story, from the significance of a stubbornly surviving dog to how the concealed, unspoken feelings of an aging leader may in some way be responsible for the segment’s sobering conclusion. I also thought there was a clear narrative linking each story that became apparent almost immediately, due to what a surprise it was in the first instance, which was that the main character dies in every story.

Now, I admit that that was not quite the case in ‘All Gold Canyon’ and ‘The Mortal Remains’, but in both instances I thought that pretense was put to good use. I felt that it left you hanging deliberately, because any one of the three coach riders could be next. If you puzzle long enough, though, you realize that the theme is the same as the overarching theme of A Serious Man: that bad stuff happens to good people, and when we try to explain it, we’re left just telling more stories about bad stuff happening to good people. The universe does not play favorites, and it rarely makes a lot of sense; the best any of us can do is to just keep plugging along.

But like many people have pointed out everything is not all jolly. While the film looks great, it does also get also monotonous and a bit repellent. It relates to No Country for Old Men in that way, which was also just death after death, a monstrous plowing of screen time. The film features many journeys, but it also feels as if we’re going in circles. Because there’s no one arc through the whole run time, the work of tracking with the piecemeal tale can get mentally exhausting after a while.

With not much plot to speak of, and with so much focus on landscape and mood, the film can be a bit tedious for casual viewers. Some people have also attacked the film for what they see as its mishandling of another key element in the Western tradition – the depiction of Native Americans (as vicious brutes) – and still others for the paucity of female characters in these stories.

The cast puts in a commendable effort. Tom Waits and Liam Neeson, with all their years of experience continue to stand out, while James Franco is spot-on as the unluckiest bank robber in the West. As the teller, Stephen Root creates a crazy visual gag of a character. Tim Blake is a delight as always. Harry Melling, has come a very long way from his debut as Dudley in the Harry Potter films. Zoe Kazan and Tyne Daly leave strong impressions, while the rest of the cast including Brendan Gleeson, Bill Heck, Saul Rubinek, Grainger Hines, Chelcie Ross, Harry Melling, Willie Watson and Jonjo O’Neill leave a mark. On the whole, ‘The Ballad of Buster Scruggs‘ is a six-part romp which despite its shortcomings is thought provoking and fully enjoyable.