The Beauty of "Buster Scruggs"

I love a good Coen brothers comedy, and "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs" offers some pleasures that only the Coens can provide.  Their newest film is an anthology of six Western shorts, charmingly presented with the framing device of a book titled The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and Other Tales of the American Frontier.  A hand turns pages between each story, and color plate illustrations with brief captions serve as previews of what's in store for the viewer.  

The six shorts vary widely in content and length, but all depict a highly stylized vision of the Old West, contain darkly humorous elements, and examine the characters' attitudes about death.  "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs" features a singing cowboy and gunfighter, Buster Scruggs (Tim Blake Nelson). "Near Algodones" involves a bank robber (James Franco) with peculiar luck. "Meal Ticket" follows an impresario (Liam Neeson) and a limbless orator (Harry Melling) struggling through hard times.  "All Gold Canyon" pits a prospector (Tom Waits) against the elements. "The Gal Who Got Rattled" is a love story about two members of a wagon train, Alice Longabaugh (Zoe Kazan) and Billy Knapp (Bill Heck). Finally, "The Mortal Remains" looks in on a collection of characters about a stagecoach, discussing the hereafter.

What struck me immediately about "Buster Scruggs" was how unexpectedly violent it was, despite being shot and styled like one of the sunny old singing cowboy pictures of the 1930s, with Scruggs laying on the folksy patois awfully thick.  My second thought was that at least three of the six shorts were over far too quickly. Barely fifteen minutes after we are introduced to Scruggs and his guitar, they are gone. "Near Algodones" and "The Mortal Remains" feel like brief fragments of longer tales that weren't fully developed.  The two most substantial installments, "All Gold Canyon" and"The Gal Who Got Rattled," are based on existing stories written by Jack London and Stewart Edward White respectively, and are easily the highlights of the film.

Most of the shorts are morality tales to some extent, ruminating on cruel fate and even crueler human nature.  The violence here is not the violence of a Quentin Tarantino picture, to be enjoyed for its own sake, but a means to dig into deeper questions about our relationship to death.  Though the characters and situations of each short are different, they're tonally similar. None really end happily, even when the protagonists triumph. Instead, all the stories evoke an existential melancholy, very much in same vein as other Coens projects like "No Country For Old Men" and their "True Grit" remake.  The Wild West is beautiful, but also merciless. Death in the form of Comanche raids, feckless bandits, or simple starvation wait around every corner.

As the Coens are wont to do, the film is full of little tributes and allusions to other western genre media, some cinematic and some literary.  We see all the old staples, from saloons and gunfighters to prospectors and pioneers on the prairies. Some shorts offer commentary on common tropes, most notably Buster Scruggs himself, a pristine Hollywood cowboy in a graphically violent world.  Cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel does fantastic work, painting picture-perfect views of the Old West and its inhabitants. "All Gold Canyon" benefits the most from this, with its Eden-like setting and largely dialogue-free storytelling. What dialogue there is, is polished and poetic, full of little witticisms, and Carter Burwell's score is similarly old fashioned and bucolic.  

Among the performances, the actors who are onscreen longer, like Tom Waits, tend to be more memorable.  Zoe Kazan and Tim Blake Nelson were my other favorites, playing personalities at totally opposite ends of the spectrum from each other.  Many of the other roles are so brief, they amount to little more than cameos. Bigger stars like Liam Neeson are often nearly unrecognizable.  However, keep an eye out for Stephen Root, Tyne Daly, and Brendan Gleeson. Root has the best bit of physical comedy in the whole picture.

If I had my way, "Buster Scruggs" and the other stories would have each had a full movie to play out over, but there's a nice ephemerality to the film's anthology format that's very much in keeping with its themes and the wistfulness of any kind of examination of the western genre being made in 2018.  It's a strange film, and uneven in places, but I'm very glad that the Coens got to make it.

     

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