Joel and Ethan Coen (2018)
This six-part tales-of-the-Old-West anthology was conceived by Joel and Ethan Coen as a television series but has ended up a 133-minute film on Netflix and theatrical [1]. If the brothers had fun making The Ballad of Buster Scruggs that’s more than they give the audience: in Curzon Richmond at least, the anticipatory sniggers soon dried up. The framing of the narrative is charming. At the start, an animated book opens and each of the six stories is introduced by a captioned illustration in it. As a story ends, the camera cuts to the closing paragraph of text on a page in the book. That’s more or less where the charm of Buster Scruggs ends. Although some of the images of wagon trails and sunlit landscapes have a burnished, nostalgic quality, the ironic purpose of this is to throw into relief the dominant themes of cruelty, absurdity and mortality. All of these are, as usual in the Coens’ cinema, given a distinctly jocose edge.
The six pieces vary in length and the first two are little more than sketches. In the opener, which is also the title story, the cheerfully homicidal Buster Scruggs (Tim Blake Nelson) shoots people dead then sings songs about them – until a black-clad young man (Willie Watson) shoots Buster dead. They perform a philosophical duet as Buster’s spirit rises towards heaven on angel wings. In ‘Near Algodones’ a young cowboy (James Franco) tries to rob a bank, is thwarted by the resourceful resistance of a teller (Stephen Root), avoids the gallows once thanks to a drover-rustler (Ralph Ineson) but ends up getting hanged. The more extended ‘Meal Ticket’ is the tale of an aging travelling showman (Liam Neeson) and his sole artiste, a limbless young man (Harry Melling) who recites the Gettsyburg Address and various poetry (specialty ‘Ozymandias’). Chancing upon a more commercially promising act (a chicken that does arithmetic), the small-time impresario disposes of his human companion.
In ‘All Gold Valley’, a grizzled gold prospector (Tom Waits) digs for days in a deserted meadow. Just as he locates the gold vein, a young man (Sam Dillon) appears from nowhere and puts a bullet through him. After playing dead for a while, the older man takes a lethal revenge. ‘The Gal Who Got Rattled’, the longest piece and somewhat richer than the others, is the story of Alice Longbaugh (Zoe Kazan), a young woman who swaps a sheltered life for the Oregon trail. En route, her foolishly pompous brother Gilbert (Jefferson Mays) dies of cholera and Alice enjoys a gentle romance with one of the wagon-trail leaders (Bill Heck), which is cut short by her extraordinarily unlucky death. This comes about through the well-intentioned advice of the other trail leader (Grainger Hines), who has saved Alice from an injun horde. The other key character is Gilbert’s dog, President Pierce. (Pets named for US commanders-in-chief are in vogue this year: we’ve already had President Roosevelt, David Lynch’s tortoise, in Lucky.) In ‘The Mortal Remains’, a stagecoach carries five passengers (Tyne Daly, Brendan Gleeson, Jonjo O’Neill, Chelcie Ross and Saul Rubinek) on a journey to a Colorado hotel of formidably grim appearance. The passengers chatter and bicker but the fade-to-grey visuals make it clear, well before they reach their destination, that the hotel terminus is death.
There are occasional moments of wit and images that stay with you – James Franco’s commiseration with the terrified man about to be hanged beside him (‘This your first time?’), the pool of blood spreading across the back of Tom Waits’s vest. Zoe Kazan’s hard-working performance is appealing and eventually poignant. Bill Heck (whom I’d not seen before) partners her gracefully. These actors’ contributions aren’t typical, though: arch, theatrical playing (especially in ‘The Mortal Remains’) is more the order of the day. Overt violence occupies a decreasing proportion of the action but this means less than it might because the mayhem is slapstick from the start. There’s no doubt, though, that The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, whether intentionally or not, ends not with a bang but a whimper. The film’s dramatis personae may include pioneers but the men who made it are covering ground that’s too familiar to them. The book the Coens use as a device to frame their stories has a well-used look that turns out to be all too apt.
20 November 2018
[1] Afternote: The Coens, in a Los Angeles Times interview, subsequently corrected and clarified this: ‘“Buster Scruggs” was never envisioned as a television series. The origin of the project was as simple as the brothers writing individual short films over several years and one day realizing they could be packaged together into an anthology film. …’
