The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Anthology Western | 133 Minutes | 2018 | United States
(4/4)
Directors: Joel Coen and Ethan Coen | Producers: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, Megan Ellison, Sue Naegle, Robert Graf | Screenplay: Joel Coen and Ethan Coen | Based on: ‘All Gold Canyon’ by Jack London, ‘The Girl Who Got Rattled’ by Stewart Edward White | Starring: Tim Blake Nelson, Tyne Daly, James Franco, Brendan Gleeson, Zoe Kazan, Liam Neeson, Harry Melling, Tom Waits | Music: Carter Burwell | Cinematography: Bruno Delbonnel | Editor: Roderick Jaynes
The Coen Brothers’ first foray on Netflix feels curiously well suited to the format: curious because beyond the vagaries of the term ‘anthology’, which on film has sometimes meant multiple directors and is nowadays more often used for television shows whose series are self-contained, straddling the line between more conventional movie making and episodic or serialised television, what The Ballad of Buster Scruggs most resembles is more rugged and wrinkled, a collection of short stories hewing in both setting and temperament to the nineteenth century. Curious too that this slender volume, tightly bound with deckled edges, this copper-distilled home brew, is also the first film by the Coens to be shot digitally, a bold jump for a genre picture full of wide vistas, period costumes, closeups and fading lights as well as cinematic sleights of hand.
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is certainly a good fit for the big screen, with its visual splendor, slow and steady pacing, remarkably dexterous gunslinging, and old Hollywood as well as Old World singsong. But it contains such a multiplicity of homages to the Western genre, packaged in such an unusual way with a combination of naturalness and self-reflexivity, that at the same time it strikes out into new territory, as if a steam train got loose of its tracks and rolled out into the untrammelled plains.
The subtitle could be ‘Half a Dozen Ways to Meet Your Maker’, for the main characters in each of the stories must come face to face with a grisly end. What we really have here are four shorts with two framing narratives: ‘The Ballad of Buster Scruggs’ featuring a jovial but deadly singing cowboy whose playful apotheosis is belied by fate, blood, and conceit, an introduction in broad strokes to the setting and some of the underlying themes of the episodes that follow; ‘The Mortal Remains’ an amusingly glib, elegant yet still somewhat heavy-handed metatext on the nature of life, death, and storytelling which features a rickety stagecoach, a phantasmal hotel, and the endless pursuit of the grim reaper.
Each of the six episodes which make up The Ballad of Buster Scruggs are introduced by way of an actual book and an actual text, a hand physically turning the pages as each story begins. At the heart of the film are four quiet, contemplative tales about toil, hardship, and bargaining processes. In ‘Near Algodones’ a young outlaw by deed or happenstance falls in and out of the noose, the trapdoor opening just as a pretty girl provides a brief epiphany. In ‘Meal Ticket’ a stub, an armless and legless young man with a penchant for recitative, is forced to weigh the breadth of human culture and the limitations of the human form against a counting chicken. ‘All Gold Canyon’ considers the glorious fraying edge, where living off the land bleeds over into leeching. And in ‘The Gal Who Got Rattled’, the longest and most plot-driven of the episodes, a young woman struggles to navigate the practicalities and sentimentalities of the Oregon Trail.
The Coen Brothers wrote these six stories over a period of about twenty years: a knock on the door of his Manhattan apartment saw Tim Blake Nelson handed the script for the eponymous story all the way back in 2002. ‘All Gold Canyon’ is based on the Jack London story of the same name, while ‘The Gal Who Got Rattled’ was inspired – with some role reversal and the addition of a quarrelsome pet dog – by a story by Stewart Edward White. Of the wagon train and the prairie, White writes, ‘There is a great deal to recommend a plains journey at first. Later, there is nothing at all to recommend it’.
All in all the collection is graceful and impressionistic. Running the gamut from the mournful to the macabre to the parodically and paradoxically eulogistic, it features an adroit and exuberant performance from Tim Blake Nelson as Scruggs himself, James Franco as a burgeoning sensitive, Liam Neeson handily cast against type as a grubby, miserly, two-bit impresario, with Harry Melling haunting as his gaunt artist. Tom Waits channels his ageing prospector, Zoe Kazan is cautious and thoughtful, her performance finding the perfect pitch, and Brendan Gleeson sings a fine ‘The Unfortunate Lad’, a most trenchant rendition. Carter Burwell provides the original score, Bruno Delbonnel the warm cinematography.
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